Anneka Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, and Third World humanism.
She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with colleagues Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers, of a volume of art writing from the Arab world in translation: Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Her article “Abstraction of the Many? Finding Plenitude in Arab Painting,” for Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab world, 1950s-1980s (2020), won the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation Prize for a Critical Essay on Contemporary Art.
Current projects include two books: 1) A monograph, tentatively titled Modern Art in the Breach: Baghdad, 1941-1945, examining the peculiar friendships enacted through the late colonial reoccupation of the Arab countries during the Second World War. Working across Iraqi, Polish, British, and Egyptian archival documents and works of art, the book explores how a short-lived consortium of Iraqi artists, foreign soldiers, and colonial agents collaborated (briefly) on reworking the trajectory of modern art, endeavoring to keep alive a universalized version of “pure painting” on behalf of occupied Paris while challenging models of progressive art history. 2) A co-edited volume, Chronicle of the 1980s: Representational Pressures, Departures, and Beginnings in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Comprised of more than sixty essays by more than forty scholars, each focused on a specific object or event, the book aims to detail how the departures and beginnings undertaken by Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists—situated in the region’s military mobilizations, economic “openings” (and closures), religious reconfigurations, and diasporic trajectories, among other events—are central to understanding both the emergence of contemporary art practices and the stakes of the category “contemporary art” itself. Lenssen’s essay contributions examine the art commissions for the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah; the early exhibition record of Houria Niatia’s No To Torture painting installation; a portrait of Sana’ Muhaydli by Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun and mediated cultures of resistance; and Syrian artist Moustafa Fathi’s 1989 exhibition Syrie: Signes d'étoffe. In parallel, she is writing an article about Rabbia Sukkarieh’s performances in Beirut’s Kaskas Park during the Lebanese civil war and their broadcast over Lebanese state television in 1988.
Lenssen has been engaged in several recent curatorial collaborations meant to give a public dimension to aspects of her research. Over the academic year 2022-23, she worked with a team of students enrolled in her 192Cu curatorial seminar to organize Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization for the Brown Gallery of Doe Library, https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/reimagined-language(link is external). In 2023, she was a consulting scholar for the exhibition A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran at The Drawing Center in New York, https://drawingcenter.org/exhibitions/a-greater-beauty-kahlil-gibran(link is external). Presently, Lenssen is working with colleague Stefania Pandolfo and the members of Abounaddara, an anonymous collective of Syrian filmmakers, to produce an exhibition that will open at the Berkeley Art Museum in October 2024.
She is a recipient of the Toban Family Faculty Fellowship. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute; the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley; and the Hellman Family Foundation; among numerous other granting agencies.
She is currently on the Editorial Board of Representations and ARTMargins, and a faculty affiliate of the Arts Research Center and of the department of Middle East Languages and Cultures. She is also an Investigator with the Arab Art Archive project at Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi. Before coming to Berkeley, Lenssen taught at The American University in Cairo, where she directed the Visual Cultures Program (2013-2014).
Anneka was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 - she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.