Research Expertise and Interest

global modern art, the Middle East, theories of decolonization, visual culture, contemporary art

Research Description

Anneka Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, and Third World humanism.

Lenssen is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with colleagues Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers, of a volume of art writing from the Arab world in translation: Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Her article “Abstraction of the Many? Finding Plenitude in Arab Painting,” for Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab world, 1950s-1980s (2020), won the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation Prize for a Critical Essay on Contemporary Art.

Current projects include two books: 1) A monograph, tentatively titled Modern Art in the Breach: Baghdad, 1941-1945, examining the peculiar friendships enacted through the late colonial reoccupation of the Arab countries during the Second World War. 2) A co-edited volume, Chronicle of the 1980s: Representational Pressures, Departures, and Beginnings in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Comprised of more than sixty essays by more than forty scholars, each focused on a specific object or event, the book aims to detail how the departures and beginnings undertaken by Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists—situated in the region’s military mobilizations, economic “openings” (and closures), religious reconfigurations, and diasporic trajectories, among other events—are central to understanding both the emergence of contemporary art practices and the stakes of the category “contemporary art” itself. 

Before coming to Berkeley, Lenssen taught at The American University in Cairo, where she directed the Visual Cultures Program (2013-2014). She earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.