Salar Mameni - Angel of Critique - Nazar Speaker Series

Nazar is traditionally used as an amulet or talisman to ward off the evil eye and attendant feelings of jealousy or envy; it is generally understood in interpersonal terms and invests in a particular suspicion and superstition that is widely known across many parts of the global South, especially within global Islam. For the purposes of developing an anti-colonial theory of sight, we offer Nazar as a framework in which to triangulate race, colonialism, and psychoanalysis.

We ask: What might it mean to think about surveillance and racist technology using Nazar as an animating framework? If we understand the harm caused by sight as surveillance, oversight, or violent watching, what might it mean to reconsider it as a protective or healing power, necessary and potentially having its own kind of magic?

Nazar, as the study of anti-Muslim surveillance, arrives from journalist Vanessa Taylor’s newsletter Nazar, focused on harmful forms of statist technologies and vigilante forces surveilling Muslim communities. As an animating framework, Nazar might allow for otherwise theories of repelling the evil eye, the malevolence of the gaze. It might, too, allow for dispersing the structural forms of desire and disgust that compose sight as embedded in systemic forms of racism, fascism, and white supremacy.

For Dark Opacities Lab, the concept of Nazar includes not only the traditional meaning of the evil eye but also the psychoanalytic approach to racism. This approach seeks to understand what is to be coveted, where the envy lies, and where the repeated looking of jealousy reveals itself.

We are excited to welcome scholar Salar Mameni (UC Berkeley) to Concordia. He will present a lecture entitled "Angel of Critique." In addition, this talk will be hybrid (in person and virtual), registration is at the zoom link. Please join us for this exciting talk by Salar Mameni!

Speaker Bio:

Salar Mameni is an artist, art historian and associate professor of comparative ethnic studies and affiliated faculty in the History of Art Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author ofTerracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), which received honorable mention from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present in 2024 and Outstanding Achievement in Media, Performance, and Visual Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2025. Mameni is the recipient of the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and is currently completing a second book project titled Blood of Tulips.

Mameni’s essays have appeared in scholarly journals Representations, Qui Parle, Catalyst, Ramus, Resilience, Signs, Women & Performance, Critical Ethnic Studies, Visual Studies, Routledge Companion to Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change, and Al-Raida. His art criticism has been published in Canadian Art Journal, Fuse Magazine, and Fillip Review and in exhibition catalogues at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai, Mana gallery in Istanbul, and Sharjah Biennial.

As an artist, Mameni has participated in numerous exhibitions with drawings in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. Most recently, Mameni has collaborated on lecture performances with Roshanak Kheshti performed at Human Resources in Los Angeles, ProArts Gallery in Oakland, Goldsmiths college in London, the Listening Academy in London, and the Hemispheric Institute held in Mexico City.