Rim J. Irscheid (King's College London)
Reactivating the Archive: Conceptions of Arab Modernity in Contemporary Sound and Mixed Media Art

This lecture discusses how contemporary sound and mixed-media artists from the SWANA region engage with, disrupt, and reimagine Arab modernity through critical archival practices. Focusing on artists based in Beirut, Berlin, and London, it examines how cultural production is shaped by structural and economic pressures, particularly for migrantised musicians navigating European arts institutions and funding bodies that often reproduce binaries of tradition and modernity, along with neo-Orientalist narratives that fetishise war and protest.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lebanon and Germany (2020–2023), the lecture reflects on how cultural policy defines what kinds of music and memory are considered fundable, and how this impacts artists who are seen as either "too modern" or "not modern enough." It highlights the affective, social, and intellectual labour involved in cultural work, and the kinship networks formed among musicians, researchers, and arts administrators experimenting with archives and memory through alternative curatorial frameworks.

Some artists revisit ideas of tradition in the diaspora, while others reject these categories entirely, turning instead to sensory and speculative practices grounded in critical fabulation (Hartman 2008; Hochberg 2021). Engaging with the work of Claire Bishop (2024) and Hanan Toukan (2019), the lecture considers how artists challenge dominant regimes of spectatorship and the white gaze. Ultimately, it asks: what forms of memory emerge when the archive is not only reactivated, but sometimes refused altogether?

Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London, working on experimental music and archival interventions across Middle Eastern contemporary sound and visual arts. Combining ethnographic research and curatorial practice, her practice-based research is looking at artist-led institution building, emotional aspects of creative labour, and interpretations of care and solidarity in curatorial activism. In 2021, she won a British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) Fieldwork Grant Award. She holds a PhD from King's College London, a Masters in Musicology from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg.