Mona El Mousfy explores the relationship between art and architecture through three lenses: contemporary exhibitions as counter-sites, the critical strategies of site-specific art, and their influence on her architectural practice in Sharjah. Interwoven with readings from DAAS conversations, the session unfolds across different spaces in Al Mureijah Art Spaces, turning movement and setting into part of the conversation itself.

Conversation II: Shaden Almutlaq on Dress as a Space

Shaden Almutlaq traces how dress becomes a site to question physical and emotional thresholds. The session unfolds her process through the narrative form of a salfa: a layered recounting of conversations and observations that move across scales of body, mind, space, and time. Touching on themes such as the politics of dress and the mind as a city, the session reflects on how lived experience and knowledge intertwine, making conversation both subject and method of research. The session will be held as a collective reading in a majlis at Obaid Al Shamsi Heritage House, followed by a dialogue with guests.

Conversation III: Olfa Farhat on Hybrid Identity

Olfa Farhat explores confusion as a productive state of in-betweenness, shaped by the entanglement of Tunisian heritage and her family home. Rather than a problem to be solved, confusion becomes a practice of belonging and resistance, where hybrid identities can generate new forms of creativity and dialogue. Through a collective reading interwoven with objects and images, the session opens a space to reflect on memory, hybridity, and decolonial design as ongoing practice.

Conversation IV: Zaynab Kriouech on Inheritance and Resistance

Zaynab Kriouech reflects on memory, inheritance, and the struggle against erasure through the lens of her Amazigh heritage. Departing from the rooftop where her grandmother wove carpets, she reclaims personal and ancestral practices as acts of decolonization. The session, held on the rooftop of Beit Al Shamsi, draws on family conversations and embroidery to open a dialogue on what it means to inherit fragmented legacies and how collective memory can be sustained as resistance.

Conversation V : Ida Bencke on Whiteness and Decolonization

Ida Bencke examines the affective processes of decolonization from the perspective of a white European curator entering DAAS with institutional backing, and with a curatorial practice of commoning land in rural Scandinavia. She reflects on feelings of disorientation, guilt and desire for belonging, alongside practices of troubled hospitality and attempts to carve out a curatorial practice of sharing resources across sites and positionalities. Through a collective reading and dialogue with invited guests, the session confronts questions of whiteness, privilege, and purity politics in art and academia, while rethinking practice-based research as rooted in conversation and affect.

Conversation VI: Zarmeene Shah on Karachi as Method

Zarmeene Shah reflects on her curatorial practice through the lens of Karachi, where the exhibition space becomes both a site of pedagogy and a space of refuge and solidarity. In this session, a collectively read and discussed text anchors the conversation, accompanied by images that trace how a place can act as teacher and guide, extending curatorial practice into community, writing, and shared reflection.

Conversation VII: Nadia Asfour on Visual Counter-Narratives

Nadia Asfour presents her project as a visual story shaped by conversations with friends from different backgrounds and by her own position as Palestinian-Lebanese. Her illustrated narratives emerge as both personal reflections and tools to challenge dominant worldviews, offering counter-narratives to polarization and paralysis. The session combines a presentation of her process and exhibition with an open discussion on how visual storytelling can resist, intervene, and reframe.

Conversation VIII: Nihal Halimeh on Land as Practice

Nihal Halimeh, the Palestinian camp in Lebanon was her first site of permanence, where architecture meant survival, adaptability, and community. From this departure point, she reflects on how exile and memory shape her relation to land. Through planting hindbeh, a dish of her mother’s, she redefines reclamation not as ownership but as care. In the courtyard, participants gather to harvest, cook, and share, turning food, music, and conversation into ways of reimagining land as practice — shared, nourished, and sustained across distance.