Jurors

A diverse group of internationally based curators and scholars have been invited to serve as jurors for the project - they will each be encouraged to develop an updatable list of up to ten favorite entries (there will be no "winner" of this competition).   March 19, 2008, the fifth anniversary of the start of the Operation Iraqi Freedom, will serve as an initial first deadline for the jurors review of proposals.    

About the "First Juror's Review"
The results of the "First Juror's Review" are now available via the links next to each juror's name below. Jurors were allowed complete latitude in regard to developing their list of top ten entries. Some chose to rank their selections - others simply noted their choices in an alphabetical listing. This flexibility was also encouraged towards the consideration of juror's comments or statements - jurors were free to write about their choices or not. The jurors worked completely independent from each other without consultation toward developing their individual lists.

A very special thanks to all of our jurors for taking the time to participate in this process!

Yaelle Amir - link to juror's selections
Independent Curator and Writer, New York City

Yaelle Amir is an independent curator and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA in Art History from Tel Aviv University and an MA in Modern Art History and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. She is a regular contributor to numerous contemporary art publications, including ArtLies , ArtSlant, Beautiful/Decay , Sculpture Magazine, and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art . Her writing and curatorial projects focus primarily on bringing to light emerging artists whose works meld the artistic process with activism by addressing immediate social concerns. Her recent curatorial project, Into the Private Eye , was featured in January 2008 at the ISE Foundation in NYC.


Dr Bernadette Buckley - link to juror's selection (due to unforeseen circumstances, Dr. Buckley's juror's selections will be posted by Friday, May 9th, 2008)
Lecturer in International Politics, Goldsmiths University of London
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/politics/staff/buckley.php

Dr. Bernadette Buckley joined the Department of International Politics at Goldsmiths in 2007. Before arriving at Goldsmiths, she was a lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory & Practice at the International Centre for Cultural & Heritage Studies, Newcastle University. Buckley's research interests traverse a number of different fields. She has long since been interested in the complex relationships between art and war and/or art and terrorism. Simultaneously however, her interest in 'Gallery Studies' has led her to explore the relationship between 'curating' and 'creating' and to investigate the ontology of curating from the perspective of the 'event'. In this vein also, she is also interested in the (de) differentiation between 'contemporary art', 'heritage', 'education' and other areas of practice. Additionally she has explored notions of (un)'education' both in 'artistic' and in 'gallery' practices. Dr. Buckley is a Board Member of Tate Papers and the Journal for Museum Education and a member of Polarts, the ECPR Standing Group for Politics and the Arts.   She has written a chapter entitled, Mohammed is Absent, I am Performing'   for the forthcoming text, Iraq and the Destruction of Heritage ,   by P.Stone, & J. Farchakh, eds., HMP: London, 2008.  She wrote the chapter, Terrible Beauties , for Art in the Age of Terrorism , eds. G. Coulter Smith & M. Owen, Paul Holberton, New York, 2005.

Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta - link to juror's selections
The Raqs Media Collective
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/

Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta are members of The Raqs Media Collective.   Raqs is a collective of media practitioners that works in new media & digital art practice, documentary filmmaking, photography, media theory & research, writing, criticism and curation. The collective began working in 1991. Based in New Delhi, India it is one of the initiators of Sarai: The New Media Initiative, (http://www.sarai.net) a programme of interdisciplinary research and practice on media, city space and urban culture at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Dr. David Simpson - link to juror's selections
Professor of English, University of California Davis
http://wwwenglish.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Simpson/simpson.htm

Professor Simpson joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1997, as the G.B. Needham Fellow. Previously he taught at Columbia, University of Colorado, Northwestern University, and Cambridge. He is a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism and of MLQ. He is the author of numerous books, most recently The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (University of Chicago Press,1995), Situatedness; or Why we Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (Duke University Press, 2002).About his most recent book, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Amazon.com notes:

"In four elegant chapters--two of which expand on essays originally published in the London Review of Books to great acclaim--Simpson analyzes the response to 9/11: the nationally syndicated "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times; the debates over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center towers and the memorial design; the representation of American and Iraqi dead after the invasion of March 2003, along with the worldwide circulation of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs; and the urgent and largely ignored critique of homeland rhetoric from the domain of critical theory."

John David Spiak - link to juror's selections
Curatorial, Arizona State University Art Museum
http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/bios/john.htm

John Spiak is Curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, joining the staff in 1994.   Spiak is one of the most energetic and innovative curators of contemporary art working in the Western United States. His curatorial emphasis is focused on contemporary art and society, with focus on works in video and new media by emerging artists.   Select past projects include:   New American City , addressing the role artists play in the development of Phoenix; When I Grow Up ..., a look at the contemporary lives of senior citizens ; Screenshots: Jon Haddock; Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean and Other Videos; Sean Duffy: The Grove; and Not Quite Myself Today, which looked at the stereotypes and perceptions of artists .   In 1997, he founded the annual ASU Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival.  

Dr. Marjorie Vecchio - link to juror's selections
Director/Curator, Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno
http://www.unr.edu/art/site/galleriesevents/sheppard_gallery.html

Recently from New York City, Vecchio was a curator, artist and teacher for over ten years. She curated numerous international exhibitions and catalogs including The Grotesqueness of Desire, Tracking (in search of objects), and Arranged Marriage - outer space(s), and was also president of Artemisia Gallery, Chicago where she was especially involved in the international exchange program. Her doctorate from the European Graduate School in Switzerland is in Philosophy of Communications Media, and she holds degrees from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts (MFA), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA), and Mount Holyoke College (BA). She also teaches at the Transart Institute in Austria. Her concentration is in the connection of contemporary art to other fields such as philosophy and the sciences.

Dr. Nadje Al-Ali
Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Due to unforeseen commitments, Dr. Nadje Al-Ali is unable to participate in Iraqimemorial.org at this time.