Introduction
Fareed Armaly is an artist and curator whose work, since the late 1980s, has introduced a research-driven methodology that draws guidelines from different roles and fields of inquiry, setting them into new correspondences, “coercing constellations” (Helmut Draxler). Armaly considers the open definition of artistic practice as the medium through which a contemporary syntax can be rendered, implicit to the politics of how identities and subjectivities are inscribed through culture, representation, nation and narration. This is critical to producing a space of positionality, for Armaly embodied by the emerging and submerging hyphen of Arab American, the emancipatory spirit of a “recording culture” generation, and the affective dimension of artistic practice explored in working relations with institutional frameworks. His exhibitions develop as aggregate identities comprised of different “scripts” at work, mediated through research, architecture, design and media archaeologies.
Armaly has exhibited extensively in international institutions and distinguished platforms, including Documenta 11 (From/To). His artistic practice encompasses: music/culture publications Terminal Zone and R.O.O.M. (1987–89); engagement with roles and institutional positions, such as in the formation of Galerie Nagel (1989–94), artist and advisory in Project Unité (1993), co-curation and artist production (? in NowHere, Louisiana Museum, 1995–96); Artistic Director “haus.0” program (1999–2002) for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Visiting Fellow, Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths (2011–13); selected commissions and projects: Shar(e)d Domains, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (2006–07); Empty Fields, SALT, Istanbul (2016), The (re) Orient (1989/2021) mumok, Vienna. Collections include most recently, mumok, Vienna. Armaly was awarded the 2025 Käthe Kollwitz Prize, which he declined.