Framing Relations: Cultural Entanglements Between Australia and the Arab World

Join us for a day-long symposium convened by Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Sary Zananiri, titled "Framing Relations: Cultural Entanglements between Australia and the Arab World."

Exploring cultural entanglements across art and literature between Australia and the Arab world, the symposium will run all day, and conclude with a keynote by Chrisoula Lionis, presented as the 2025 Margaret Plant Art History Lecture by Monash University’s Fine Art department with Monash University Museum of Art.

The symposium schedule is as follows:

10.30am Coffee and Tea with registration

11am Welcome to Country

11.15am Ways of Framing Cultural Relations

Suzannah Henty, Hugh Ramsay Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne – “George Washington Lambert in Palestine”
Sary Zananiri, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Monash University – “Shaping Perceptions? Towards a History of Palestinian Cultural Diplomacy and Australia”
Bader Rizk, PhD Candidate in Architecture, Monash University – “Blast to Blast: Visualising the Urbicide-Ecocide Nexus in Armed Conflict”
Azza Zein, interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Narrm/Melbourne – “Mimesis, Subversion and Inter-iconicity: Tracing Contemporary (Arab Diasporic) Practice in Australia”

1.30pm Lunch catered by Flavours of Syria at Monash University Museum of Art - with registration

3pm Arab Australian Writing in the Shadow of Gaza

Jumana Bayeh, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University, in conversation with:
Micaela Sahhar, Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University
Michael Mohamed Ahmed, founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement
Lina Koleilat, Academic Fellow at the Australian National University

5pm Drinks

6pm Keynote Margaret Plant Lecture:

Chrisoula Lionis
“Praxes of Displacement: Contemporary Art as Method for Cultural Resilience”

This lecture will discuss the relationship between contemporary arts practice, visual evidence, and legal interventions in contexts of forced displacement. With attention focused on the key sites of Palestine, Greece, and Australia, it will consider the capacity for art to operate both as an instrument of cultural resilience and as a legal tool for forcibly displaced populations.

Chrisoula Lionis is a writer, cultural producer and curator based in Athens. She is co-director of the pedagogical platform Artists for Artists and author of books Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (I.B. Tauris, 2016, 2022), (ed) Comedy in Crises: The Weaponisation of Humour in Contemporary Art (Palgrave, 2023) and the forthcoming Displacement and the Art of Intervention: Contemporary Art and Methods for Cultural Resilience (Routledge, 2026).

Tickets for the Margaret Plant Annual Lecture are available here

7.30pm Finishes

_{Presented in partnership with Monash Art, Design & Architecture}