Speaker Series: Anita Toutikian

Sabancı University
Gender and Women’s Studies Forum
Speaker Series

Woman Outside The Comfort Zone: 25 Years Of Counteractive Art
By Anita Toutikian

Anita Toutikian

Monday, 21 March 2016

14.40 – 15:40

FASS G049

Biography of Anita Toutikian
Artist, psychologist, art therapist, lecturer, lives and works in Beirut Lebanon. Studied art at studio Paul Guiragossian, Academie Michleange de Beaux Arts, Toros Roslin Art Academy in Beirut, later perused a PhD degree in clinical psychology at Saint Joseph University in Beirut.
Participated in 100+ solo and collective exhibitions in Beirut, Tripoli, Yerevan, Paris, London, Amman, New York, York Pennsylvania, Algiers, Toronto, Nicosia, Tunis, Washington, Los Angeles and Istanbul. Has received the Sursock Museum Honors in 1997 and the Sursock Museum First Prize in 1998. Has taught at Haigazian University and Notre Dame University, and has authored many publications including a book titled “Counteractive Art from the Middle East.”   
Anita’s art is primarily an activism against mental oppression, which she thinks is the initiator of all wars, suffering, manipulation and injustice.  Her works are intervention systems, aiming to break limits of perception, interrupt mental habits and shake routine patterns of thought in the minds of the viewers. She constantly manipulates art theory, form, medium and framework, to oblige the viewers to rethink their own blinding belief systems, to activate their own sense of self vis a vis the other. Toutikian has created Lebanon’s very first post-war art as of 1990.  Her work has been described as “Hope Machines,” “Collective Prayers,” “Cultural Exorcism,” and “Reverse Colonization.”