VCUarts | Lecture Series: Hala Auji

Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art and Associate Professor Hala Auji, Ph.D. discuss her work, “Facing Pages: Exploring Mass Portraiture in Arabic Print,” at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond, VA on March 12, 2024
“Facing Pages: Exploring Mass Portraiture in Arabic Print,” explores nineteenth-century mass portraiture in Beirut and Cairo, featured in Arabic books, periodicals and everyday materials. These images, circulating across private homes and storefronts, played a crucial role in shaping the public image of local Arabic-speaking scholars. Using posthumously printed portraits of Syrian intellectuals, Auji will illustrate how this imagery negotiated views on authorship, representation and vision. She will also discuss the study of these portraits, which were published alongside text and other engravings, and considerations of their mediums and formats while addressing the challenges posed by today’s methods and technologies.