Art as an Archival Witness

• Date and time: Saturday and Monday, 18 and 20 July 2026, 5-8 PM
• Type: Two-day Workshop
• Language: English
• Venue: The Art Kitchen
  

Looking at archives, paintings, and texts can unfold various topics and layers, including culture, history, economy, industry, sociology, the environment, urbanism, and more.

Throughout this workshop, we will look at paintings and texts as archival witnesses to multiple narratives and contexts, and explore how looking at a painting or a text can become a method of research. At the same time, we will examine how archival materials can be reinterpreted to reveal narratives of our histories and realities.

The goal of this workshop is to empower participants by providing them with the space and tools to explore paintings, texts, and archives, and to investigate their histories and narratives. The workshop will move between multiple exercises, discussions, and collective readings.

We will specifically be looking at modern art paintings, artworks, and related texts from Bahrain and the Gulf region as research methods for exploring our present realities and historical contexts. Alongside this, we will examine practices and projects from the region that work with the archive as a method of research and as a medium transformed into artworks.