Art historian Hala Auji presents her recent research on Qur'an manuscripts from South and Southeast Asia, and the challenges they pose to conventional understandings of sacrality and authenticity in Islamic art studies.

Hala Auji is an associate professor of art history and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Her research focuses on transcultural modernity, print culture, and photography in Eastern Mediterranean communities during the long nineteenth century. With a background in graphic design, art criticism, and art history, Auji examines intersections between art, design history, and comparative literature, particularly in relation to Islamic and Middle Eastern art. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) and co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Islamic Art History and the Global Turn: Theory, Method, Practice, part of the Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art Series (Yale, forthcoming). Her current book project investigates printed portraiture in Ottoman provincial cities. Auji also co-chairs the Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art.

Between 2005 and 2019, Hong Kong-born Australian artist John Young Zerunge created a body of work called "The History Projects", exploring diasporic memory, transcultural identity, and what Young has described as an ‘ethical responsibility’ towards the past. This panel builds on themes from a major new publication discussing this cycle of works, John Young: The History Projects, edited by Olivier Krischer and published by the Power Institute.

John and Olivier will be joined by Professor Lisa Slade, the Hugh Ramsay Chair in Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne, and Shuxia Chen, a curator and writer based at the University of NSW. Together they will discuss how artists and curators today are tackling the medium of history as an ethical project, navigating contentious and contending histories, and how art can still foster new forms of subjectivity and community outside the stubbornly narrow narratives of Australia's settler colonial history. 

Image: Installation of John Young, OPEN MONUMENT, 2015, Permanent architectural monument, Len T Fraser Reserve, Ballarat. 

John Young: The History Projects
Edited by Olivier Krischer

Contributors: Carolyn Barnes, John Clark, Venita Poblocki, Caroline Turner, Jen Webb, Sylvia D. Volz, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfgang Huber, Anette Simojoki, Thomas J. Berghuis, Jacqueline Lo, Marc Glöde, Brian Castro, Jennifer Mackenzie, Claire Hielscher, Nadia Rhook, Cyrus Tang, Pei Pei He, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Mikala Tai, Matt Cox, Claire Roberts, Aaron Seeto.

Featuring more than 400 images, and a wide variety of texts—including new essays and interviews, key republished articles, poetry, artist reflections, and diary pages—this book is a definitive reference for John Young’s transformative recent practice and its urgent reckoning with history as unfinished business.