“Art is a powerful tool for empathy and healing.”

Recent Projects

The sound of your voice is home: Yasmine Nasser Diaz In Conversation with Ikram Lakhdhar at the Getty Museum

Yasmine Nasser Diaz builds an affective world by and for the South West Asian and North African diaspora and beyond. In her multimedia installation the sound of your voice is home (TSOYVIH), she turns oral communications between distant loved ones into an immersive soundscape. Cassette tapes sent between her family in Yemen and Chicago inspired this nostalgic installation of ritualized correspondence to document the evolving ways diasporic communities maintain connectivity and share memories, shedding light on how art and stories migrate through cultures, time, and space.

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Water/ماء: Trespassing Liquid Highways, Gallery 102, Washington DC

  • Washington Post | In the galleries

    The sea is both barrier and escape route in “Water: Trespassing Liquid Highways.” The artists in the Gallery 102 exhibition are of Middle Eastern or Caribbean origin, as are the featured poets. Some works are highly specific; others are spare and symbolic.

  • Al Jadaliyya | The Year in Art

    Curated by Ikram Lakhdhar, this exhibition presented the subject of water as a transnational grounding between demarcated areas of the Mediterranean Sea and the Caribbean. Edouard Glissant’s Theory of Relationality was used as an interpretative tool to intersect the histories of these bodies of water (referred to as liquid highways) being crossed by humans bodies—provoked by natural and human-made disasters.

  • Dirt

    “WATER / ماء: Trespassing Liquid Highways,” is the politically-minded, socially engaged and ambitious exhibition currently on view at GWU’s Gallery 102 . The exhibition, which focuses on work by Mediterranean and Caribbean artists

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  • Ikram Lakhdhar reflects on her experience building an inclusive network of arts organizers and organizations during her time as a staff member.

    Read more here.

  • Writer and curator Ikram Lakhdhar looks at a selection of artworks in “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” an exhibition at the Center for Book Arts, to find her own histories emerge from the works on view.

    Read more here.

  • Hermonie ‘Only’ William’s Solo Show Not Now Offers Solemn Introspection in Powerful Forms.

    Read exhibition review here.

  • Small Victories at School 33 Considers the Value of Repurposed Material.

    Read Review here.