Bernard O'Kane Wins Iran's Book of the Year Award

Could a robot have painted the Mona Lisa? Will AI ever be the next Van Gogh? Brenda Segone is asking these very questions as she analyzes what it means for a machine learning model to “create” art.

The summer after his first year of university, Bernard O’Kane boarded a train from Ireland to Istanbul, emerging in a world of brightly colored tiles. The next year, he took the same train to Istanbul and boarded a boat to Alexandria to see the architecture of Egypt. He continued this habit a third summer, venturing further east from Turkey into Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The colorful art and architecture of the Islamic world captured O’Kane in a way he wasn’t able to shake then.Now a professor of Islamic art and architecture in the Sheikh Hassan Abbas Sharbatly Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, O’Kane’s love of travel never faded. He regularly visits places in the Middle East and Central Asia to investigate the historical architecture and tilework around the region. Most recently, O’Kane traveled to Turkmenistan, researching the tilework of monuments in Kuhna Urgench. This historical site was the capital of the Khorezm region with monuments including a mosque, the gates of a caravanserai, fortresses, mausoleums and a 60-meter-high minaret. O’Kane was drawn to the tilework, whose soulful colors have endured more than seven centuries.“Tilework is a particularly important form of Islamic art. It serves as a colorful, vibrant way to shape the identity of sacred and secular spaces,” he said. 

Known as Hollywood on the Nile, Egypt’s film industry experienced its golden age in the 1960s.The nationalization of its film industry buoyed the budgets of directors to capture the hopes and fears of Egyptian society in hits like Dawn of a New Day and Struggle of the Heroes. Tamara Maatouk, assistant professor of film studies in the Department of the Arts, sees film as a vessel for history, offering insights beyond textbooks. Her research explores how Egypt’s private- and public sector films captured the socialist 1960s. AUCToday spoke with Maatouk to learn more. 

“I always insist on the collective because this is how you change history,” says Bahia Shehab (MA ’09), professor of practice in the Department of the Arts and co-editor of Revealing, Recording, Reflecting: Graphic Women from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), the first publication of its kind to document the work and legacy of contemporary women designers.“This landmark book is about the ‘us’ of women,” says Shehab, who founded AUC’s graphic design program in 2011. ‘When people hold the book, I want them to recognize women’s voices in the Arab world. They are beautiful, they are colorful and they are varied. And they’re not limited to the geography of the Arab world. We are everywhere.”Full of vibrant images, the book emerged from a collaborative initiative aimed at documenting and celebrating the contributions of SWANA women in the field of design. It all started when four women graphic designers from different institutions — Shehab from AUC in Egypt, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès from Khatt Foundation in the Netherlands, Yasmine Nachabe Taan from the Lebanese American University in Lebanon and Soukeina Hachem from Shape interior design studio in Morocco — decided to research and showcase the work of Arab women designers. “We are four women from various parts of the region who came together to reflect, collect and reveal stories of Arab women designers,” says Shehab. Not only were they tapping into an undocumented frontier, but their research process was atypical. “The normal route usually involves archives and a lot of reading,” explained Shehab. “But for this book, we decided to do something else: We opened up our research to a bigger community. So we were four curators, not authors. The idea is that it is a collective story of over 80 Arab women graphic designers that we are telling together, so there isn’t a single authority or voice.”The first step for the co-editors was to focus on themes, the types of stories they want to tell. For Shehab, the choice was clear. “I love everything about Arabic design — its calligraphy, letters and typography — so I chose to work on Ladies of Letters: women who are as passionate about Arabic letters as I am. Each of us worked on a topic that she felt eager to explore in-depth.” The book explores themes of Visual Storytelling by Women, Engaged Image-Making for Social and Political Commentary, Ladies of Letters (connecting generations of women writers and designers) and Navigating Diasporic Identities. Focusing on the work and impact of Arab women graphic designers, illustrators, calligraphers and typographers, the book includes critical writing, testimonials, primary documents and artwork. The co-editors proposed the project online, collecting reflections on the different themes through Zoom panels and collaboration with a cultural space in Berlin, Germany for people to share their insights and recommend women in the field who can be featured in the book. “That physical space became our living research space, with sticky notes, observations, posters and new books. It was the first time for us to experiment with collective crowd-sourced research, and it was an enriching experience,” Shehab says.Questionnaires were then sent out to women graphic designers, asking them to tell their own stories. “In the book, we are not reflecting on how they feel or assuming the meaning of their work. They are choosing what stories they want to tell — in their own words,” affirmed Shehab.