Noit BANAI, Dr

Noit Banai (PhD, Columbia University) is an art historian and critic who specializes in modern and contemporary art in a global context, with a particular focus on conditions of migrations, exile, diaspora, border-regimes and statelessness. Before joining HKBU, she served as Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna and Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has held Visiting Positions in Art History at NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China; Lesley University, Boston, USA; Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia; and University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. She has also conducted international seminars at the European Forum Alpbach, Austria; Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia; and the Maumaus School, Lisbon, Portugal.

 

Noit Banai is the author of Yves Klein (Reaktion Books, 2014), Being a Border (Paper Visual Arts, 2021) and articles appearing in journals such as Third Text, Stedelijk Studies, Public Culture, Performing Arts Journal, and Texte zur Kunst.  Her essays have been published internationally by Sternberg Press, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, documenta, Kontakt Collection, Americas Society and Bronx Museum of the Arts. She served as assistant editor for the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics and is a regular contributor to Artforum International. 

 

Noit Banai is currently researching the artistic, material, and cultural representation of experiences of migration, exile, statelessness, and formation of diasporic communities by those who fled Europe for Latin America, the Middle East, and China during the 1930s and 1940s. She is also studying the trans-national permutation of these historical issues in diverse contemporary contexts with a particular focus on sites and techniques of memory production.

 

Engaging the intertwinement of aesthetics, visual, and material practices, political forces, and commercial mechanisms, Noit Banai’s teaching focuses on the critical ‘potentialities’ and historical ‘blind spots’ of diverse propositions in a trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary perspective that challenge both traditional geographical limitations and disciplinary boundaries.