Student profile

Manar Abo Touk

Faculty

Program

Manar Abo Touk (she/her) is a Syrian-born independent curator and PhD candidate in Art History at Concordia University, Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. Her research investigates contemporary Syrian art in the diaspora with a focus on memory, displacement, and visual strategies of healing and resistance. With over a decade of experience curating exhibitions and working with artists across the SWANA region, Europe, and Canada, Abo Touk explores cross-cultural storytelling, political aesthetics, and the material poetics of survival. Her doctoral research examines anti-violent image-making practices among Syrian artists in exile, paying particular attention to installation based art forms as sites of affective memory and soft resistance.

Thesis Title: TBD

Supervisor: Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim

Research Interests:

Contemporary Art
Syrian Art
Arab Art
Diaspora
Decolonial and Transcultural methodologies
Trauma
Healing
Anti Violent Image approaches

Research Assistantships:

Managing Editor. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) Academic publication. Co-curator for the WPC Exhibition 2023, Co-ordinator and panelist for the WPC Montreal conference 2023. Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim

Conferences:

"Suspended Memory: Reem Yassouf’s Cloud and the Textiles of Displacement". Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC).
Threads in Motion: Textiles, Movement and Resistance. Panel. Toronto. October 17 2025 "Transformations: Contemporary Syrian Art in the Diaspora". Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC).
Modern and Contemporary Art in the Diasporas of the MENA (Middle East, North Africa), Turkey and Iran). Panel. Banff. 20 October 2023