Cristiana de Marchi, Mapping Gaps. Beirut (Dubai, 2016-2017). Louvre Abu Dhabi, Art Here 2021, Richard Mille Art Prize, November 18, 2021–March, 27 2022. Courtesy of Cristiana de Marchi
Robert Kilroy
Materiality in the Museum: Some Thoughts on a Media Postmortem
Join us in the Reading Room for a talk by art historian Robert Kilroy.
Robert Kilroy is a visiting lecturer at the Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, where he teaches Historiography and Aesthetics on the MA in Art history and Museum Studies. In his talk, he will reflect on how this personal and professional trajectory, from a grounding in aesthetic theory to an alignment of art historical, curatorial, and pedagogical practices, has informed and guided his research and thinking, culminating in a heightened materialist approach to the study of images, what Kilroy terms a media postmortem.
Who’s on Campus? is a series of impromptu talks by artists, thinkers and cultural practitioners held in the Reading Room of the NYUAD Art Gallery. The remit of the series is to catch those passing through Abu Dhabi to talk about their trajectories, most recent projects or work in progress. Meant to offer spontaneous conversations, Who’s on Campus? aims to provide a casual but exacting platform. The series is an adaptation from its initial iteration at SALT, Istanbul, titled Who’s in Town? and can be reproduced anywhere that acts as a hub or stopover for artistic thinking.
About the speaker
Robert Kilroy is an art historian, curator, and theorist. Between 2020 and 2023 he was Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of Collection Studies at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. He holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin on the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is the author of a monograph on Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later (Palgrave 2017), and has published in English, French, German, and Arabic in collective works alongside contemporary thinkers such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Alain Badiou (forthcoming).
Kilroy has since returned to his native Ireland where he teaches Art history, Media Literacy and Art & Design Education at Limerick School of Art and Design (Technological University of the Shannon).
