Morad Montazami

Morad Montazami (France, 1981) is an art historian, publisher and curator. After working at the Tate Modern (London) between 2014 and 2019 as a curator for the Middle East and North Africa, he developed the editorial and curatorial platform Zamân Books & Curating, which explores and enhances Arab, African and Asian modernities. He has written numerous essays on artists such as Zineb Sedira, Walid Raad, Latif Al Ani, Faouzi Laatiris, Michael Rakowitz, Mehdi Moutashar, and Behjat Sadr, and exhibitions including Baghdad Mon Amour, Institut des cultures d’Islam, Paris, 2018; New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School, The Mosaic Rooms, London & MACCAL, Marrakech & Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai, 2019-2020; Douglas Abdell: Reconstructed Traphouse, Cromwell Space, London, 2021; Monaco-Alexandrie: Le Grand détour. Villes-mondes et surréalisme cosmopolite, New National Museum of Monaco, 2021-2022.

Morad Montazami’s project at French Academy in Rome aims to finalise two books and an exhibition project. The first work, conceived as a personal essay, Modernités cosmogoniques ou Pétro-modernités: pour une écriture alternative du modernisme, is a panorama of figures (painters, sculptors, filmmakers, poets of the 20th century, from Baghdad to Algiers, via Cairo, Rome and Paris), for whom oil becomes a cosmogonic matrix, linked as much to the earth as a natural deposit as to politics via coups d’état and other revolutions. The second work, conceived as a collective book/exhibition catalogue, Routes cosmogoniques: une histoire visuelle post-pétrole, is a panorama of (contemporary) photographers, videographers and digital practitioners concerned with the energy transition, the survival of ecosystems, resistance to wild urbanism or military-industrial colonisation.

 

Photo portrait © Daniele Molajoli
Video portrait © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis