We are delighted to join hands with the AA Visiting School Bahrain cohort and Suha Hasan, head of the AA VS Climate Cartographies programme for an afternoon of film screenings and reflections on the intersection of climate change, heritage, archaeology, and cartography as a way of uncovering new relations lay hidden in our environment.

Last year, AA Visiting School Bahrain invited practitioners and students of architecture to study the UNESCO World Heritage Site Qal'at al-Bahrain, and respond to the challenges posed by climate change using the medium of film. Join us for a special screening of the three short films and a chance to meet the cohort on Saturday, 4 May 2024. The session will conclude with a critical roundtable discussion led by researcher Sabih Ahmed about the future of our port cities, while re-imagining pedagogies of architecture in light of environmental urgencies.

Date: Saturday, 4 May 2024
Time: 4-7PM
Location: WH51, Common Room, Alserkal Arts Foundation

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Encompassing myriad forms and agendas, Architectural Association's Visiting School courses, competitions and workshops are built around agenda driven project briefs that are pursued and shaped by participants working intensively in small groups, and are led by tutors from Architectural Association UK tutors and other international experts. Central to each is the idea that experimental, new and provocative forms of architecture are best learned by doing. The school promotes, tests and challenges contemporary global interests and issues in architectural learning and exchange by embedding a diverse group of creative participants and tutors in an array of unique rural, urban, international and online contexts.

The AA VS Bahrain is part of the AA Visiting School Climate Cartography that explores the intersection of climate change and heritage whilst reflecting on new modes of representation through different mediums.

Suha Hasan is an architect and founder of ASH, an architecture practice based in Stockholm, Sweden, which provides design and consultation services for heritage and cultural management. She has lectured and taught in universities in Bahrain, Egypt, Singapore, Slovakia, Sweden, Sudan, and the UK. She trained as a journalist while studying architecture. Suha founded Mawane, a platform for urban research based in Bahrain and is a founding member of the MSc [Modern Sudan collective]. Both platforms enable researching and sharing the outcomes through public art exhibitions, talks, and workshops. She is the head of the Architectural Association UK's Visiting School Climate Cartographies, which explores the intersection of architecture history and the environment through different mediums. Suha served as a consultant for UNDP, Sharjah Architecture Triennale, and the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. She is concluding a Curators and Cultural Managers residency in Trnava, Slovakia.

Sabih Ahmed is the Director of the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai. His curatorial work and research move between exhibitions, archives, pedagogy and theorisation. Prior to Ishara, Ahmed was a Senior Researcher and Projects Manager at the Asia Art Archive, a visiting faculty at the Ambedkar University Delhi, and involved in several curations. He has led projects around the digitisation of artist archives, creation of multi-lingual bibliographies, and has organised colloquia and seminars around educational resources. He is the co-author of ‘Mass Traffic’ with Lantian Xie, published by Kunsthalle Bern and Mousse Publishing, 2023.