Murtaza Vali

Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator and art historian based in Sharjah and Brooklyn. His ongoing research interests include materialist art histories, ex-centric minimalisms, ghosts and other figures of liminal subjectivities and repressed histories, the weight of color and contemporary art of the Indian Ocean littoral. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he regularly publishes reviews and essays in various international art periodicals and publications for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries around the world. Vali is also an Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he curated the widely acclaimed inaugural group exhibition Crude (2018), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across West Asia. He is currently organizing the final installment of Substructures: Excavating the Everyday, a series of exhibitions about “intimate infrastructures” in the Gulf at Warehouse421 in Abu Dhabi, tackling subjects such as manual and domestic labor, the instrumentalization of flora by capital and politics, and the aesthetics and rituals of neoliberal real estate development. He is co-curator (with Uzma Rizvi) of Accommodations, the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, and part of the Artistic Team for the 2nd FRONT Triennial in Cleveland in 2022. A Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, he was a Lead Tutor (with Uzma Rizvi) of Campus Art Dubai (2015-20) and a Lead Mentor for the inaugural Hayy:Learning Curatorial Fellowship (2020-21).