Sary Zananiri
Sary Zananiri
Sary Zananiri is a cultural producer and theorist. Their research focuses on how visual culture can shed light on modern transformations of identity categories such as gender, nationalist and religious identification, communalism, and class through transnational prisms, particularly in the modern Middle East. Much of their research applies methodologies of practice-led research to historical contexts, utilising cultural diplomacy as a critical framework.
Zananiri completed a practice-based PhD at Monash University in 2014. They were a Postdoctoral Fellow on the NWO funded project CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine 1918-1948 and the Netherlands Institute for the Near East at Leiden University in The Netherlands, a Visiting Scholar at Dar al Kalima in Bethlehem, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens and a cultural heritage consultant in Saudi Arabia.
Recent exhibitions include the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023), University of Groningen Library (2023), INALCO, Paris (June-July 2022), the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival, Tunis (September 2022), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 2021-February 2022), the National Glass Museum, Wagga Wagga (July-November 2021), Rijksmuseum Oudheden, Leiden (May-October 2020) and Der Haus Der Kunst der Welt for ALMS, Berlin (June 2019). Zananiri has undertaken residencies at the Camargo Foundation (France), Al Mamal Foundation (Jerusalem), and the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (Greece). Their work is the collections of the Qattan Foundation and National Glass Museum.
Zananiri is currently finishing a monograph, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris) looking at constructions of nationalism religion and masculinity through the photographic work of Frank Scholten. They have co-edited two volumes: Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (Brill, 2021) and European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave McMillan, 2021). A third edited volume Revisiting Palestine Illustrated (Amsterdam University Press) is due out in 2025.