Program Details
2:00-2:30 pm Lucien Samaha in conversation with Shehab Awad
2:45-3:15 pm Umber Mageed as Mantiq of the Mantis
3:30-4:30 pm Mirene Arasanios with a contributor from Makhzin’s latest issue
4:30-5:00 pm Open Q&A

There will be a 15-minute break between each session.

Lucien Samaha was born in Beirut in 1958. He has been photographing his life and adventures since he took one of the first photography courses ever offered in an art curriculum in high school in the US in 1975. Photography has been Samaha’s companion throughout his many careers, which include a flight attendant for TWA, a marketing manager for Eastman Kodak Company, where he had the distinction of being the first digital photographer ever, and a world-famous DJ on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. In addition to photography, Samaha also makes videos, and two-dimensional visual art derived from other photography, videos, publications, and found objects. His work has been shown at the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt Germany and at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland Oregon. Samaha was a Nam Jun Paik Award finalist in 2004 in Dortmund, Germany. To date, he has self-published over seventy photography books.

Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist based between New York, USA and Lahore, Pakistan. Her writing, performance, and animation work engages with familial archives to explore the specifics of the Pakistani state and urban infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed has shown in venues across Pakistan, North America, and Europe. Recent group exhibitions include: welcome to what we took from is the state, Queens Museum, New York (2016), and Promises to Keep, apexart, New York (2017), and Witness- Karachi Biennale, Karachi, Pakistan (2017). Her work has been acquired by several private collections including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. On Friday nights you can find her at the Poetry Project where she coordinates the Friday Night reading series with Rachel Valinsky.

Mantiq of the Mantis is a multi-faceted, experimental publishing house based in Lahore, Pakistan offering a variety of programs including Mantiq Under the Willow Tree: weekly conversations on creative expression and creativity amongst member Mantes, which culminate in a series of journals; Duurbeen: Moving Images, presenting local obscure non-mainstream, experimental cinema and video art; Goonj: Echoing Mantis, exploring sound as an ongoing research platform; The Strange Library and Communal Critique: sessions with artists, writers and filmmakers. Mantiq of the Mantis is a retreat for dreamers, thinkers, writers, poets, artists, and book lovers – an experiment for realizing weird fiction, obscure art and elusive impressions of the strange and insatiably curious.

Makhzin is a bi-lingual (English/Arabic) magazine for innovative writing, which launched in 2014. Makhzin publishes fiction, prose, poetry, essays, and occasional translations based on an annual open call and on commissions. As part of each issue, and running throughout the year, Makhzin publishes long-form interviews between writers, filmmakers, theorists, translators, and others. Yearly issues are also available in print.