Imaginations of Land

We explore how cultural practices, environmental contexts, and critical narratives intersect to shape contemporary identities. With insights from experts in heritage building, archaeology, and education, we examine narratives around land that challenge colonial borders and homogenised histories, paying close attention to how embodied spaces and lived experience foster storytelling and meaningful social connections.

Date: Sunday 27 April, 2025
Time: 5PM - 8PM
Venue: WH50, Project Space

Click here to RSVP.

Speakers

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an anthropological archaeologist. She received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. She specializes in the archaeology of the first cities, while teaching anthropology, ancient urbanism, new materialisms, critical heritage studies, decolonization/the postcolonial critique, and social practice. Rizvi’s own work intentionally interweaves archaeology with cultural criticism, philosophy, critical theory, art, and design. With nearly two decades of work on decolonizing methodologies, intersectional and feminist strategies, and transdisciplinary approaches, her work has intentionally pushed disciplinary limits, and demanded ethical decolonial praxis at all levels of engagement, from teaching to research. Rizvi is the Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (LIAVH.org), an intentionally interdisciplinary, feminist, anticolonial, and antiracist space bringing together archaeological research with data management, visualization, and heritage practice. She is currently working with her team at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of MohenjoDaro, Pakistan.

Rawan Alfuraih روان الفريح is an anthropologist, folklorist, and oral historian. She is currently a doctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Oxford, exploring how the environmental rupture of early twentieth-century Saudi Arabian urbanisation reshaped bodylore—the deep connection between daily bodily movement, folkloric performances, and the environment’s cosmological significance. Focusing on Najd, the central region, she traces shifts in bodylore amidst the ecological transformation of migration from Najdi mud villages to Riyadh. Rawan’s PhD fieldwork expands on an independent archival oral history project she began in 2018. With a background in information systems, she designs an archiving methodology that integrates archival processes into every stage of her research lifecycle, ensuring future reproducibility in alignment with open science while situating ethical conduct within local customs in Saudi Arabia.

Salila Kulshreshtha is a Visiting Associate Professor of History and Art and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi. Trained as a historian of South Asia, Salila teaches courses in the history and the art history program and in the Core curriculum. She received her PhD in History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Salila has been a Shivdasani Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies (OCHS), University of Oxford (2018). Salila’s research is interdisciplinary, making connections between history, archaeology, art history and heritage studies. She is the author of the book, From Temple to Museum: Colonial Collection and Uma Mahesvara Icon in Middle Ganga Valley (Routledge: 2018). She has also co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples (Routledge: 2023). Salila's research interests include religious iconography and temple spaces in South Asia, colonial archeology, history of museums, material culture, history of the Indian Ocean and heritage studies. She currently serves as the “Co-Head Chef” of the Heritage, Memory and Mobility Research Kitchen at NYUAD.

About AAVS Dubai

The AA VS Climate Cartographies is committed to exploring the longue durée of climate change at heritage sites by deploying cartographic thinking to create new maps that capture unexplored relations in our environment.

A glitch, often perceived as an error or disruption, serves as an unanticipated opportunity for insight and growth. Supported by Alserkal Arts Foundation, the AA Visiting School programme in Dubai explores the undefined or the in-between through situated spatial sonic practices that encompass listening, translation, and transcription.

The School’s agenda in Dubai examines the intersection of climate change and heritage, while considering innovative ways of representing these themes in and through the medium of sound. Along with a cohort of 20 architects, designers, cultural practitioners and artists, we will engage with research and artistic practices to examine the region’s complex history, paying close attention to our experience of sound and our relationship with the land.

Apart from our closed workshops with the AAVS cohort, the programme includes a series of public sessions where we invite you to join the conversation with experts from the fields of archaeology, museology, heritage studies, and contemporary art.