Job title:
Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis
Bio/CV:
Tarek Elhaik's work is based on participant observation in several domains of practice related to contemporary art and experimental media worlds, with a special interest in the different modes of curatorial practice that animate those worlds. The aim of his fieldwork-based inquiries is both to problematize the mediatory role and increasing influence of curatorial practice in contemporary life and to evaluate the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of curation for imagining other ways of living and being human. Elhaik's inquiry consists in "anthropo-curation" or "curating anthropos". His first book, The Incurable Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film & Media Arts(Edinburgh University Press, 2016), was based on intensive fieldwork in Mexico City. It took place during an effervescent moment acclaimed anthropologist and public intellectual Roger Bartra provocatively called the “post-Mexicanist condition”. During two years he engaged curatorial collectives whose critical practice and exhibition strategies signaled a breakdown of Mexicanist aesthetics and modernist cultural forms inherited from the Mexican historical avant-garde, including historical figurations of the New Man in Mexico (eg. Mestizaje, Mexicanidad, cosmopolitan-nationalist modes of existence). In Aesthetics and Anthropology: Cogitations (Routledge 2022), Elhaik took a different direction. Multi-sited rather than single sited, the book is a philosophico-anthropological journey across an ecology of venues and media: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from large frescoes in late medieval churches to photographic interventions in natural history museums, and more. Moreover, the book approaches artistic practice as an anthropological problem of thinking.
Elhaik has collaborated on various public programs, symposia, research clusters, and editorial projects that examine what I call the "zone of mutual intrusion" between anthropology, art, and philosophy. He also directs AIL: the Anthropology of the Image Lab, a venue and online platform that explores the challenges posed by curatorial practice to fieldwork design and anthropological thinking.