a collaged image of burial mounds with a floating abstract shape

2021 Research Fellow: Ali Ismail Karimi

We are pleased to announce the second of our 2021 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellowship awardees: Ali Ismail Karimi.

Ali Ismail Karimi’s Research Fellowship will focus on Robert Smithson’s 1966 works Grave Mounds with Object and Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea and the relationship of Smithson’s work to the landscapes of the Middle East.

Ali is a Bahraini architect whose work explores social housing, public space, and the landscape of the GCC countries. He is, along with Hamed Bukhamseen, co-founder of Civil Architecture, an architecture office based in Manama and Kuwait City whose work has been shown in the Sharjah Architecture Triennale, Oslo Triennale, Seoul Biennale, and Amman Design Week. Together they curated the Kuwait Pavilion “Between East and West: A Gulf“ at the 2016 Venice Biennale.   

Our Research Fellowships aim to encourage new research on the work, ideas, and creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. We look forward to thinking with Ali to expand and develop critical research on the works of Robert Smithson.

Robert Smithson, Grave Mounds with Object (1966)

Magazine photo collage

 6 x 7 5/8 in. (15.2 x 19.4 cm)

©Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Archived News

Nancy Holt's Electrical System Prototype

Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at Gropius Bau, Berlin

Holt/Smithson Foundation and Gropius Bau are pleased to announce the most comprehensive presentation of Nancy Holt in Germany to date. Taking a journey through Holt’s output, starting with her first artwork made in 1966, Circles of Light expands over the Gropius Bau’s ground floor and atrium. Paying attention to Holt’s experimental approach to the interplay between the immaterial and the material, this exhibition underscores the singularity of Holt’s oeuvre.

drawing by Robert Smithson showing wandering earth mounds and gravel paths

Chapter Six of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout January we will be publishing a sixth chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson. This chapter of Tuesday Texts will focus on artworks by Robert Smithson.

Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.