Since 2006, Power Talks has partnered with Art Toronto to present influential art-world figures who discuss their projects, preoccupations and ideas in the context of the city’s largest art fair. Participants range from leading collectors, advisors and dealers to internationally renowned museum directors, curators, critics, scholars, and artists.

Fawz Kabra is a curator and writer based in New York. In this talk, Fawz will address the conditions of contemporary art production in the Middle East and its diasporas. With shared histories of colonialism, the rise and fall of Pan-Arab solidarity and efforts of decolonization and social justice; to recent invasions, civil wars, and neoliberal capitalism running alongside proliferating city expansions, erasures, and revitalizations; what does the artist tell us about the limits of representation, the production of histories, and the transformation of landscapes? Fawz was recently Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Abu Dhabi Project, New York (2014-2016). She curated The Way Things Can Go for the Armory Show Focus: MENAM Symposium, New York (2015), co-curated the BRIC Biennial: Volume I, Downtown Edition at BRIC Arts and Media, Brooklyn (2014), the ArteEast video program at Arts and Culture in Transformative Times, New York (2013), and was curatorial assistant for WS: Paul McCarthy at the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2013). In the United Arab Emirates Fawz was curator of projects at Art Dubai (2014). She co-curated the special project Brief Histories: Winter/Spring 2011 at a pop-up space in Sharjah and Satellite in Dubai (2011), and was curator of public programs at the Cultural Department, TDIC, Abu Dhabi (2008–2011). Fawz earned a MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2013) and BFA at Concordia University, Montreal (2004). Since 2012 she has been an editorial correspondent at Ibraaz, the online journal on contemporary visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East.