Khaled Malas

Khaled Malas is an architect and art historian from Damascus, Syria. His primary research interests lie in the role of images and image-making technologies in producing and challenging the potential of places, real and imagined. He is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts and is writing a dissertation on medieval magico-medicinal bowls that bear a depiction of the Kaaba. He is the principal and co-founder of Sigil, an art/design collective that seeks to explore the marvelous and terrifying metamorphoses of Arab landscapes marked by historical and contemporary struggles. ‘birdsong’, Sigil’s most recent project, was commissioned by the 2019 Triennale di Milano. Elements of ‘birdsong’ have been exhibited in Majdal Shams (Fateh al-Mudarris Center for Arts and Culture), Basel (FHNW Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst), and Orléans (Rue Jeanne d’Arc), and the associated monograph was awarded an honorable mention by the Syrian Studies Association. Malas’s most recent publication is “Entwined: surrounded by benedictions” (Expansions: Responses to ‘how will we live together?’, Venice, 2021). He has taught a critical cartography seminar on the occupied Jawlan at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and a course on an Umayyad bathhouse at Columbia University’s Middle East Research Centre in Amman. During the 2020-2021 academic year, Malas was a fellow at the Gallatin’s Urban Democracy Lab.