Symposium Abstracts & Speaker Bios

Thresholds of Perception: Rethinking How We Know

A Surplus of Vision: Collaborative Revolutions and Ethical Answerability in Relational Creative Practices

In offering an exploration of relational aesthetics that is less about social practice art and more about the practice of art for the social, this philosophical paper considers relational creative practices between self and other that generate multi-perspectival meaning-making and ethical action. I rely on the Bakhtinian dialogic, including answerability, and the concept of “outsideness,” which affords highly perspectival and contextual knowledge that, by its very nature, is never complete or total (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 22). In resisting a concept of the whole or the finalized, Deleuze extends this idea by celebrating the and as disruption of the whole; he calls the and a “creative stammering”… positioning the word to “work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in between… it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 44-45).

Focusing on such revolutions, this paper explores art and creative practices that, as Greene (1995) suggests, cultivate the social imagination “to begin to see what might be, to respond to the ‘not yet’—and to make it present” (p. 19). To make this ‘not yet’ present, we must look beyond our own horizons and engage with the surplus of vision that only an encounter with an other can provide. Grounded in a dialogic that resists singularity and finalizability, Bakhtinian “outsideness” is the unique vantage point we hold relative to others. We each possess an “excess of seeing,” or the ability to see parts of the other that they cannot see themselves. This threshold between us is not a barrier; rather, it is an ethical bridge that allows us to understand our place in the world and our duty to one another.

By embracing these gaps in perception, art and creative practices function as a kind of collaborative revolution, transforming the limitations of our individual sight into a collective opportunity for response. In this light, creative work is never a ‘finalized’ object, but an ongoing ethical action that uses the friction of our differing views to spark the possibilities that Greene and Deleuze envision. A surplus of vision relative to the other recognizes the limitations of individual seeing necessitating ethical care for one another through our creative practices.

Moving from theory to praxis, this paper examines a selection of contemporary artists whose work embodies these relational ethics demonstrating how creative practice is uniquely equipped to meet the ethical demands of our time. The artistic examples offer models for relational care stemming from our shared blind spots and revealing how we might move beyond individual limitations to cultivate collective answerability that is both necessary and transformative. I also discuss art-based interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of art and health to demonstrate how creative inquiry serves as a vital tool for navigating the complexities of caring for each other.

The examples illustrate how creative practices can bridge the gaps in our perception, transforming ‘outsideness’ into shared, responsible action within the contemporary moment.

Sara Wilson McKay, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Art Education, previously serving as Department Chair. She values community in learning and directs the Marshall-Hunter Integrated Arts Research Fund to cultivate transdisciplinary learning through art. Since 2012, Dr. Wilson McKay has worked at the intersection of art and healthcare: she co-founded “VCU Art of Nursing,” working with 1500+ nursing students to enhance clinical reasoning; and she co-developed an Arts in Medicine course focused on mitigating biases in healthcare, which won the 2021 Medical Education Innovation/Research Award. She was selected as a 2022-23 Harvard Macy Institute Fellow in the Art Museum-Based Fellowship for Health Educators, a 2024 delegate to Arts Health Research Intensive in the UK, and she investigated creative aging and health equity for people with disabilities through research grants. She currently leads the VCUarts Arts & Health Lab and previously chaired the National Art Education Research Commission.

I Knew This Would Happen: Revisiting Epistemic Boundaries in Contemporary Art – A Curatorial Perspective

The following contribution asks how creative practices can “reconfigure epistemic boundaries” from the vantage point of curatorial practice. To this end Zolghadr will offer examples of “thresholds between the tacit and explicit, experiential and conceptual” which draw on his own observations in the curatorial field. That said, curating will not be defined as a discipline or institutional prerogative. Rather, this presentation approaches curating as a set of professional tools which are typically deployed not only by curators but also by artists and administrators, even if these efforts aren’t always credited, historicized or theorized as such. Artists, in particular, have perhaps taken full advantage of the epistemic potentials of curating more consistently than curators themselves. Their ability to draw on sensory registers, unconventional modes of interdisciplinary research as well as educational strategies arguably allows them take knowledge production to more groundbreaking, ambitious conclusions than curators currently do.  

Tirdad Zolghadr is a curator and writer. He joined the curatorial team of Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art Doha in 2024. Published writing includes fiction, art criticism and curatorial research, e.g. REALTY: Beyond the Traditional Blueprints of Art & Gentrification (Hatje Cantz 2022). As a curator he has worked with a range of public museums, international biennials and independent project spaces, and is co-curating the group exhibition Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie at de Appel Amsterdam in September 2026. Zolghadr has taught at the International Art Academy Ramallah, the Center for Curatorial Studies NY, and the postgraduate program of the University of the Arts Berlin, among other settings. He has been an advisor at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam since 2008.

Nostalgic for the Present: Object-Making as a Tool for Documenting of the Now

This presentation explores textile as a platform where perception, memory, and knowledge intersect; where what is seen, felt, and remembered becomes materially entangled. Rooted in my practice as a designer working across traditional crafts as well as contemporary fabrication practices, I approach making not as a means of producing objects, but as a method of inquiry. Through processes such as weaving and modular construction, I investigate how knowledge is formed through repetition, touch, rhythm, and time.

My work draws from the rapidly shifting lifestyles as well as architectural and cultural landscapes of Qatar, where memory often exists in fragments embedded in buildings that no longer stand, or in structures that remain and exist in the present moment but are at risk of being exchanged with another architectural form. These conditions position memory as something unstable, continuously shifting alongside the environments that hold it.

In response, I translate architectural forms, coordinates, and spatial systems into textile compositions that function as both documentation and speculation. These works are not literal representations, but reconfigurations where geometry, contemporary typographic forms, and material processes create new ways of sensing and understanding place and memory. Memory in this context is not necessarily tied to the past, but also to the present, what is unfolding now and what may soon disappear or transform.

This presentation will share selected projects that demonstrate how designed objects can operate as a relational medium connecting past and present, architecture and body, system and intuition. It ultimately reflects on how making can reveal what is not immediately visible, and how design can function not only as representation, but as a way of producing knowledge.

Maryam Al-Homaid is a Qatari interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Graphic Design at VCUarts Qatar. Her practice bridges traditional craft and contemporary production / fabrication practices, with a particular focus on the topic of documenting memory, architecture, and cultural identity. Through weaving, printmaking, and material experimentation, her work explores how knowledge can be generated through making and embodied processes. Al-Homaid’s work has been recognized by Architectural Digest Middle East [AD Middle East] Top 100 Designers (2024, 2025 and 2026) and the Asia Design Prize (Gold, 2024). She has exhibited locally and internationally including London Design Biennale and Milan Design Week, and her work was selected for the Qatar Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka [Japan]. Alongside her practice, she develops experimental pedagogies that position the design studio as a site of research, collaboration, and critical inquiry.

Translating a Flour Mill Into an Art Museum

The Art Mill Museum is a forthcoming museum of modern and contemporary art in Doha, part of Qatar Museums. The international multidisciplinary museum will present an international collection assembled over four decades, spanning art, architecture, design, film, fashion, and crafts from 1850 to the present. The building is designed by the Chilean architecture practice ELEMENTAL, on the site of an industrial flour mill. During its pre-opening phase, the Art Mill Museum is engaged in exhibitions, research, and international collaborations that explore multiple narratives of global modernity and support long-term institutional partnerships.

Caroline Hancock is the Art Mill Museum Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs / Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. She is an art historian, curator and writer. Between 1998 and 2009, she worked in museums in Paris, London, and Dublin. In 2008, she was awarded the Joanna Drew Travel Bursary which led to long-term research on arts and cultures in Africa and West Asia. From 2010 to 2019, she was an independent curator, writer, editor, translator, with projects in the public and private sectors.

Translocal Knowledge: Archives, Diasporas, and Circulations

Between Leaving and Arrival: The Body as a Quiet Archive

This presentation introduces an evolving research framework that explores diasporic traditions through the idea of the body as an archive, a site where memory, adaptation, and longing are carried through everyday gestures and material practices. Grounded in parallel research into Cuban and Afghan diasporas, the presentation will introduce a set of guiding questions that will shape the project’s development, attending to the subtle ways memory persists through material, gesture, wear, and use. 

What remains when continuity is broken? When histories are fragmented by migration, loss, or assimilation, how do partial objects, interrupted narratives, and acts of repair hold meaning without becoming whole again? Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of objects as bearers of lived time, marked by touch, circulation, and use, the project treats material traces not as remnants of what has been lost, but as evidence of ongoing life. In this research framework, wear, simplification, and repair are not failures of preservation but inscriptions of survival, adaptation, and care.

The project draws on anthropologist Veena Das’s work on violence and what she terms the “descent into the ordinary” (2007) to understand diasporic memory as something sustained through everyday practice rather than narrative closure. From this perspective, memory is carried forward through use, through gesture, habit, and material maintenance, rather than through preservation or recovery. Fragments such as garments, photographs, and embodied routines allow life to continue even when repair remains incomplete. Building on this framework, assimilation appears as a material negotiation shaped by safety and legibility, often involving the recalibration of visible difference rather than its erasure.

The presentation enters into dialogue with recent exhibition models such as KIXIMBI: meditations on the middle passage and other Atlantic phantoms (2021), curated by Paula Nascimento and Suzana Sousa, which takes the South Atlantic as a site of historical and ongoing forced movement. Bringing together artists from the Global South and its diasporas, KIXIMBI offers a framework for thinking about collective memory as something carried across geographies and temporalities, present in practice and identity rather than fixed to a single origin. Rather than serving as a model to be replicated, the exhibition functions here as a point of dialogue, demonstrating how diasporic histories can be approached through resonance, fragmentation, and relational attention rather than through totalizing narratives.

Central to the research is fragmentation as a working method rather than a problem to be solved. Partial records, interrupted narratives, and acts of repair are treated as forms of knowledge that emerge in the space between leaving and arrival. By lingering in this in-between condition, the presentation considers how such research might eventually take form, potentially as an exhibition, but not limited to that format. It asks how design history and fashion practice might come together through collaborative research to cultivate forms of attention that value process over impact.

Das, V. (2007). Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. University of California Press.

Hawa Stwodah (B.F.A., M.F.A.) is a designer, illustrator, and educator with experience in fashion, textile design, product development, and technical design. She has worked in the US and Middle East, collaborating with European and Asian companies on experimental projects using innovative textiles for menswear, women’s sportswear, healthcare, and infant accessories.

After working in the private sector, Stwodah returned to the Virginia Commonwealth University Fashion Design + Merchandising Department in 2005, to teach at both the Virginia and Qatar campuses. Her research and design practices explore social and cultural behaviors through material investigation and meaning. Her work draws from diaspora studies, unconventional textiles and their uses, and traditional Central Asian surface design techniques. She has presented her research and projects at both national and international venues, including conferences, museums, and workshops. She aims to encourage creative problem-solving and promote cross-disciplinary collaborations in both classroom and professional settings.

Sara Desvernine Reed, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Interior Design at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches the history and theory of interior environments at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She is committed to helping students deepen their design practice through rigorous historical inquiry and critical analysis. Reed earned her doctorate at the University of Delaware in American material culture studies, with a focus on American art and decorative arts. Her dissertation expanded into the Atlantic world, examining domestic advice literature in Cuban popular magazines of the 1950s and 1960s to explore shifting ideals of modernity, gender, and domesticity during a period of political transformation. In addition to her scholarly research, Reed’s collage practice investigates storytelling and “story healing” as forms of empathic connection across time and place. Her broader research interests include design pedagogy and the integration of historical analysis into contemporary design processes.

SentimentVoice: Translocal Emotional Archives from the USA to Korea 

SentimentVoice is a series of participatory VR and emotion-AI projects that collect, re-voice, and archive migrant narratives as place-based emotional memory. The series reframes emotion-tracking technologies, often used for surveillance, or commercial profiling, into a relational system for empathetic listening and witnessing. Across its iterations, SentimentVoice asks how emotional knowledge circulates through migration, including the grief, uncertainty, and resilience shaped by displacement: how it is translated across languages and cultures, how it becomes interpretable or misrecognized, and how technology amplifies or flattens culturally specific affect. 

The SentimentVoice USA chapter established the project’s core method through an oral-history process with immigrant communities in Richmond. Stories are organized around five “memory locations” that commonly structure immigrant life: airports, schools, immigration offices, hospitals, and workplaces. The project treats these sites as zones of everyday struggle, where immigrants must continually translate themselves across language, cultural norms, and institutional systems, often under pressure and vulnerability, just to belong, and be recognized. As participants speak, the system analyzes voice and facial expression in real time (via face tracking, speech-to-text, and language model–assisted processing). The AI’s emotion analysis becomes particles, textures, light, and sound, an immersive gesture of acknowledgment and active listening. 

In the installation, participants enter one of the VR “memory locations” and choose between two modes: (1) speak their own place-based memory, or (2) reenact a collected immigrant narrative. In this second mode, participants receive a script card before wearing the headset, so they can read and retell the story in their own voice while immersed in the corresponding location. The prompt functions as a score that participants translate and reshape through personal reflection, the imagined viewpoints of neighbors or friends, and culturally specific emotional language. 

This re-voicing makes translocal knowledge tangible by revealing how testimony transforms as it circulates, from one speaker to another, across accents and languages, and within new cultural frames of interpretation. With participant consent, these retellings can be recorded and layered into the archive, producing a living record of how stories change through revoicing. 

SentimentVoice Korea extends and complicates the platform by foregrounding cultural specificity of emotion, focusing on the experiences of married migrant women in Korea. In their own words, these women describe emotional shifts within Korean society and the ways culturally embedded affect can become marginalized in social life. The project explores Korean emotional frameworks such as Han (한) and Jeong (정), which do not map cleanly onto dominant emotion taxonomies that many AI systems assume. SentimentVoice treats ambiguity and misrecognition as evidence: where the system fails becomes a site for cultural critique and expanded empathy. 

Positioned within Session 2-Translocal Knowledge: Archives, Diasporas, and Circulations, SentimentVoice proposes the archive as a participatory form shaped by displacement, translation, reenactment, and culturally situated emotional worlds. 

Semi Ryu is a media artist and professor of Kinetic Imaging at VCUarts and an affiliate associate professor in Internal Medicine at VCU School of Medicine. Her avatar, and XR works draw on Korean healing rituals and embodied performance. She earned a BFA from Korea National University of Arts, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD (Highest Honor) from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Her work has been presented in 23 countries. Her writing appears in peer-reviewed journals including Performance Arts and Digital Media and Arts & Health, and she contributed a chapter to the Routledge Handbook of Arts and Health. She received the Hamilton International Arts in Health Award and VCU’s National/International Recognition Award, and gave a TEDxRVA talk, “Virtual Reality for Han.” Her SentimentVoice series integrates emotion AI and VR to amplify immigrant voices in the USA and Korea.

Archipelagic Documentary: Building Puerto Rican Memory Across Island and Diaspora 

This presentation proposes archipelagic documentary: a documentary practice shaped by Puerto Rico’s dispersed reality—across island and diaspora—and by my own practice of repeated return between the two, marked by uneven access to language, history, and community. This work begins from the problem of legibility: Puerto Rican belonging is often judged through language, distance, and recognizable markers of identity, even when lived ties and responsibilities are real. Rather than smoothing that tension into a clean narrative, these projects build documentary forms that can hold partial access, contradiction, and return. 

Two completed projects anchor this talk. Isla de las Palmas is a wordless photobook shaped by years of field research and conversations with historians, anthropologists and archaeologists, clergy, musicians, poets, and other cultural practitioners. Moving across what it means to have been, to be, and to become Puerto Rican, the book spans deep time and present crisis without explanatory text. It resists documentary authority. 

Isla de las Palmas: 100 Years extends documentary through shared authorship. Contributors on the island and in the diaspora wrote letters addressed one hundred years into the future in response to selected images. These letters do not caption the photographs; they alter them. Memory shifts depending on where you live, what you have lost, and what you can claim. Documentary becomes collective—not a single account, but overlapping voices that expand what the images can carry. 

A third project—still in production—serves as the conceptual spine: Islas de Sombra y Sol. This photo-literary work sequences images with “sutra” prose: brief, rhythmic fragments that move between field note, humor, history, and the surreal, borrowing the vernacular and tonal shifts of lived conversation rather than institutional language. The writing does not resolve the images; it unsettles them, creating an experiential path through repetition, doubt, and partial understanding. In this form, documentary becomes archipelagic at the level of voice: multiple registers, unstable authority, and a refusal to smooth complexity into safe narration. The project reflects the reality that Puerto Rican belonging is not singular, and that access—geographic, linguistic, and economic—shapes what can be seen, remembered, and said. 

Together, these projects argue for documentary as a structure of relation rather than a claim to authority. Archipelagic documentary names a practice that keeps distance, disagreement, and

incomplete belonging visible. The aim is not to romanticize survival, but to build forms that acknowledge what survival costs and what it leaves unresolved. 

Paul Thulin-Jimenez is an Associate Professor of Photography + Film whose work spans analog photography, digital montage, appropriation, and alternative materials. Through photobooks and hybrid text-image forms, he examines how history, cultural identity, consumerism, memory, and myth are constructed—and who gets to author those constructions. 

Over the past six years, his most public work has centered Puerto Rico and its diaspora, developing what he calls archipelagic documentary: structures built through return, fragment, and shared authorship rather than a single authoritative voice. Projects include Isla de las Palmas, a wordless photobook shaped through field research and conversations with cultural practitioners; Isla de las Palmas: 100 Years, a collective portfolio pairing images with letters written by contributors on the island and in the diaspora; and Islas de Sombra y Sol (in production), a photo-literary work that sutures sequenced imagery with fragmentary prose. His practice continues to investigate wildness, resistance, and the unstable grounds of belonging.

Wander Lines

How do we give form to loss that is continuously unfolding? Wander Lines traverses the entangled landscapes of empire, family, memory, and loss. At its heart is my shifting, reflexive relationship with my mother, who is gradually losing her memory.

Taking its title from Fernand Deligny’s concept of “wander lines,” the project draws on his work with children with cognitive disabilities. Deligny mapped their movements – initially perceived as erratic – only to discover that these paths formed their own coherent patterns. Rather than following pre-existing structures, the line itself generated meaning. Against a world governed by maps, rules, blueprints and imposed forms, he proposed a reversal: to let the line precede the form, and to remain open to modes of being that resist standardization.

Through this intimate lens, I meditate on the afterlives of empire and the forms of resistance that pass through personal and intergenerational narratives and photographs. My mother’s forgetting becomes both a private rupture and a reflection of broader, collective erasures that shadow post-imperial identities.

I trace the interwoven lives of three generations – from my maternal grandfather’s years with Saudi Aramco (the Arabian-American Oil Company), a cornerstone of American imperial infrastructure in the Gulf, to my mother’s memories of “American Arabia” and civil war Beirut, to my own reflections shaped by Lebanon’s cycles of war and rupture.

At the center of the project is my family archive, spanning several decades and geographies. Drawing from my mother’s memoirs, diaries, and letters, alongside my grandfather’s extensive photographic archive, I dismantle and recompose family history – not as a fixed chronology, but as an embodied, affective terrain. This porous, living archive is etched into the body, the home, and the landscape: a sensory map where emotion, silence, and small gestures of domestic life reveal a quieter, more intimate story of empire. The intimate is not separate from the imperial, but one of its most potent registers.

Rather than reinforcing the narratives embedded within historical photographs – often produced within structures of empire, modernization, and extraction – I attempt to destabilize them by foregrounding their emotional and intimate dimensions. Through recomposition and juxtaposition, the archive becomes a space where private memory intersects with broader political histories – a living counter-archive.

Echoing Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and his search for his mother’s essence in a photograph, I do not attempt to restore what has been lost. Instead, I dwell in fragile, disjointed moments where traces persist – in a gesture, a shadow, a voice. Here, beyond linear time, mourning and memory blur, and time folds in on itself. I imagine possible worlds shaped not by mastery over the past, but through fragments, fictions, and love.

Ultimately, Wander Lines positions women’s memories, family archives, and intimate narratives as central to understanding regional histories of empire, displacement, and transformation. By bringing these stories into dialogue with broader historical landscapes, the project seeks to challenge erasure, foreground resilience, and build emotional bridges between personal memory and collective history.

Rola Khayyat is a Lebanese visual storyteller, curator, and educator based in Doha. Her work blends photography, archives, and personal narratives to explore memory, silenced histories, and belonging. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is Assistant Professor of Art at VCUarts Qatar.