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Staff Profile

Dr Katarzyna Falecka

Lecturer in Art History

  • Address: Fine Art, School of Arts and Cultures,
    King Edward VII Building,
    Newcastle University,
    NE1 8QB
Background

My research and teaching interests span modern and contemporary art from North Africa and the Middle East, archives, photography, gender and memory. I am currently working on a book titled Archival Excavations: Photography, the Algerian War of Independence and the Afterlives of Images. Following the completion of my AHRC-funded PhD at University College London, under the supervision of Tamar Garb and Azzedine Haddour, I was a Postdoctoral Humanities Fellow at the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT). I studied for a BA at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a MA at the University of Oxford, funded by the Edgar Wind Scholarship, and held Fellowships at MECAM, Tunis; the African Art Department, Free University Berlin; the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress.


I co-lead the CAORC/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Modern Art History at CEMAT, which aims to assist graduate students, scholars, and professionals in the arts with developing their research projects related to modern art in the Maghrib, and to facilitate knowledge exchange in the region. As part of the programme, I also serve as interviewer for the Modern Art in the Maghrib podcast series. In 2021, I curated Beyond Metaphor: Women and War at apexart in New York, an Open Call winning exhibition. The show featured works by Marwa Arsanios, Kader Attia, Katia Kameli, Nadja Makhlouf and Zineb Sedira that explore women's experiences during the Algerian War of Independence.

Research

My research examines histories of modern and contemporary art, with an area specialisation in North Africa and the Middle East. I am particularly interested in the archival turn in contemporary art in relation to memory politics, gender and the restitution of cultural heritage. Currently, I am preparing my first book titled Archival Excavations: Photography, the Algerian War of Independence and the Afterlives of Images, which discusses the work of contemporary artists who engage with photographic archives of the Algerian War of Independence, one of the most prolific wars of decolonisation. The book situates their engagements with archives in close relation to ongoing debates surrounding the return of these contested collections and cultural artefacts from France to Algeria.

Other ongoing research projects include an investigation into histories of photography in mid-twentieth-century Algeria, artistic exchanges between Africa and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, and the relationship between gender and state-building in modern art from North Africa. Approaches from visual studies, anthropology, memory studies, and postcolonial theory are particularly important to my work.

I try to expand audiences for scholarship through exhibitions, public events and podcasts.


Teaching

Stage 1

Art Histories I

Art Histories II

Stages 2 and 3

Histories of Photography

Contemporary Art and Globalisation

Dissertation Supervision

PhD Supervision

Paulina Michnowska, 'Tracing Memory: Clay in Relation to an Endangered Rainforest Sign Language of the Penan Hunter-Gatherers. Proposing an Aesthetic Practice as Means of Ethnographic Research', co-supervised with Professor Andrew Burton.

Sara Qaed, 'Continuous Visual Production in Editorial Cartons: Post-Publication (Re)Making', co-supervised with Professor Richard Talbot.

Other 

Photography Forum

Publications