Jeff O'Brien

Specialization:

Modern and contemporary art of the Arab world; photography and lens-based media; critical theory; Indigenous archives and digital stewardship; digital humanities and critical data practices

Education:

Ph.D. University of British Columbia, Canada
M.A. University of British Columbia, Canada
B.A. University of Victoria, Canada

Bio:

Jeff O'Brien is an art historian and curator whose work takes the archive as its central problem: what images and histories archival systems make visible, and what they suppress or fail to record. He is curator of MIRL, the Material / Image Research Lab in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he leads interdisciplinary projects that investigate the shifting relationship between digital images, analogue objects, and the archives that structure meaning. His ongoing research on contemporary art and visual culture in the Middle East examines how artists mobilize lens-based practices and archival materials to interrogate questions of visibility, representation, and the conditions under which bodies, histories, and communities appear or disappear. This research draws on sustained engagement with the Arab Image Foundation, Ashkal Alwan, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, and Darat al Funun in Amman, where he held a fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art. He was a Liu Scholar at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, and has held a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is co-editor of What Are Our Supports? (Information Office, 2022), a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. He serves on the editorial board of Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, has acted as juror for the California Arts Council and the J.M.K. Innovation Prize, and has presented his research across the United States, Canada, and the Middle East.

Publications:

Image

What Are Our Supports? co-edited book with Joni Low (Vancouver: Information Office, 2022). 244 pages.

“Under-Writing Beirut-Mathaf, Whose Ghosts Must be Summoned” in Inside / Outside Islamic Art & Architecture , ed. Saygin Salgirli (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021).

“Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Dismemberment” in Arcades Materials: Blue, Threshold to Cosmos , eds. Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor (London: BAPPS, 2019).

“Photophobia,” in Choreographies of Resistance (London, ON: McIntosh Gallery, Western University, 2017).

“Clement Greenberg” in Oxford Bibliographies in Art History , co-authored with John O’Brian and Jessica Law, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

“Two Brief Polemics,” in For Machine Use Only, ed. Mohammad Salemy (Grand Rapids, M.I.: &&& Publishing, 2016).

“The Taste of Sand in the Mouth: 1939 and ‘Degenerate’ Egyptian Art ,” Critical Interventions 9 no. 1 (March 2015).