Dina A. Ramadan

Dina A. Ramadan is a writer and critic based in New York. She teaches at Bard College and the Center for Curatorial Studies. She is a 2023 recipient of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the short-form writing category.

September 2025ArtSeen

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me

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Through his interdisciplinary practice, Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal has been exploring for the past two decades what he refers to as “cultural cannibalism.”

Wafaa Bilal, Lamassu (In a Grain of Wheat), 2025. High-resolution 3D print and bioengineered wheat grains containing a 3D scan of a Lamassu within its DNA, 84 × 84 × 30 inches. © Wafaa Bilal. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

February 2025ArtSeen

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now

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By including artists across generations and media such as Robert Colescott, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Lauren Halsey, Flight into Egypt certainly succeeds in demonstrating the almost ubiquitous—although at times inflated—presence of ancient Egypt in African American art and in doing so, presents something of a survey of its history.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Flight Into Egypt, 1923. Oil on canvas, 29 x 26 inches. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

July/August 2024ArtSeen

Arab Presences: Modern Art and Decolonisation Paris, 1908-1988

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Like many exhibitions of this scale, Arab Presences is simultaneously over and underwhelming. With over two-hundred works by 130 artists, the exhibition is extensive, the artwork accompanied by a range of archival material. However, despite its expansive nature, it fails to present any compelling or innovative proposition regarding this wealth of material.
Mahmoud Saïd, The woman with golden Locks (La femme aux boucles d'or), 1933. Oil on canvas, 32 x 23 3/5 inches. Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. © Mahmoud Saïd Estate. Courtesy Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

February 2024ArtSeen

Suneil Sanzgiri: Here the Earth Grows Gold

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Through sculpture and film, Brooklyn-based artist, researcher, and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri’s first solo museum show explores histories of struggle and belonging, of identities formed between continents and unconfined by nation states. The UOVO Prize winner’s exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold, is comprised of three new works that posit history as fluid and in a constant state of (re)formation. Poetry emerges as a form of truth or a means of accessing memories that challenges the hegemony of official historical narratives.
Suneil Sanzgiri, My Memory Is Again in the Way of Your History (After Agha Shahid Ali), 2023. 16 mm film (color, silent): 1 minute, looped. Courtesy the artist.

November 2022ArtSeen

Kamrooz Aram: Elusive Ornament

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Through painting, and more recently, sculpture and collage, Kamrooz Aram’s practice explores the classification and hierarchies of art history. Grounded in eurocentrism and informed by colonial conquest, understandings of Islamic art—itself a European discipline—have been formulated through contradistinction.
Kamrooz Aram, Scrutinuity, 2022. Oil, oil crayon and pencil on linen, 48 x 46 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Photo: Sebastian Bach.

July/August 2022ArtSeen

Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili

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Much of Lydia Ourahmane’s work has been an exploration of the multiple connotations of barzakh, the barrier or threshold that separates two things that must be kept distinct. In Islamic philosophy, this is the liminal place which the soul inhabits after death, while awaiting the Day of Judgment. For the multi-disciplinary artist based between Algiers and Barcelona, this space of limbo between life and death has generative potential.
Installation view: Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili, SculptureCenter, New York, 2022. 4K video, 16mm transferred to video, digital animation, sound, 46:12 minutes. Commissioned and produced by SculptureCenter, New York; rhizome, Algiers; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis; Mercer Union, Toronto; and Nottingham Contemporary. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Charles Benton.

June 2022ArtSeen

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth

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Throughout its various iterations, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth insists on mourning and memory as collective practices that transcend boundaries and refuse the geographic and social fragmentation fundamental to colonial violence, through ongoing acts of everyday defiance and resistance.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, 2020–ongoing. Courtesy the artists.

March 2022ArtSeen

Sahra Motalebi: This Phenomenal Overlay

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This Phenomenal Overlay is a sonorous exhibition which, layered with sensory texture, is expansive in its epistemological explorations, a meditation on materiality, material culture, the intersection between poetics and technology.
Sahra Motalebi, Resonator #1 (404), 2022. Copper, satin, speaker, spray paint, steel, led bulbs, lights and stands, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Brief Histories, New York.

November 2021ArtSeen

Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure

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Light’s New Measure borrows its title from a poem in the 2012 collection Sea and Fog, gesturing to the dialogue between Adnan’s artwork and her poetry. Indeed, it would be impossible to think about her art practice as separate from her literary pursuits, especially since a persistent struggle with language(s) frames her experience of both the literary and visual.
Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2010. Oil on canvas, 7 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches. Collection of Karen E. Wagner and David L. Caplan, New York. © Etel Adnan.

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