The Livestream link for this Berkeley Book Chat will be available here.

Presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

In her study of Arab modernism, Anneka Lenssen (History of Art) explores how artists in Syria developed strikingly new kinds of painting as a means to agitate against the imposed identities and intersubjective relations that accompanied the making of Syria as a contested territory. Employing the mutability of form, painters attempted to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020) reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders.