Research Interests
- Amazigh arts
- Social and political histories of art
- Maghribian Modernisms
- Abstraction and text
- African anti-colonial thought and praxis
- Black and Indigenous methodologies
- Language sovereignty
Education
BA, Fine Art, University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK
MA, Contemporary Curating, University of Sunderland, UK
Bio
Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz is an artist, curator, poet, and PhD candidate in Art History with a specialization in modern and contemporary art from the north of Africa. Their doctoral dissertation, titled Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Art and Resistance, focuses on the manifold expressions of indigeneity and Indigenous philosophies in art. It explores the nexus between Amazigh artistic production and sovereignty movements across the Indigenous territories known as Tamazgha, connecting recent revival movements to larger discourses on indigeneity and Africanity. Indigenous Presentness theorizes the innovative artistic forms that emerged in the region after the 1960s, particularly sign- and script-based abstraction, a form deeply rooted in ancient practices like tattooing and rock-engraving, as a mode of decolonizing praxis.
Khaymaz is the 2023 recipient of the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) for their paper titled “To Twist a Historical Knot: Projects of Pan-Arabism, Hurufiyya, and Amazighism. In 2022, they were awarded the Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) for the paper titled “Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Unlooking and Untelling of Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960.”
Between 2023 and 2024, Khaymaz held curatorial fellowships and positions at the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the International Art Department at Tate Modern, London. They are a founding member of Lungs Project, a curatorial collective and independent press operating between the UK and USA since 2016 fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue among early-career artists and writers, and co-editor and publisher of New Landscapes Anthology, a 2019 collection of emerging poetry by QTBIPOC poets.