Khaled Malas

Khaled Malas is an architect and art historian. His research focuses on images and image-making technologies that produce and challenge the potential of places, real and imagined. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Islamic Art and Architectural History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His dissertation explores medieval magico-medicinal bowls that bear a depiction of the Kaaba, the cubical structure in Mecca. He is also the principal of Sigil, an art/design collective based in Beirut and New York City that explores the metamorphoses of Arab landscapes marked by historical and contemporary struggles. Sigil’s most recent project, birdsong (2019-ongoing), explores the poetic entanglements between birds and other bodies present in the Syrian landscape in collaboration with comrades in the occupied Jawlan (Golan Heights) who planted an apple orchard equipped with a scarecrow and a birdhouse. Elements from this work are on view at the British Museum (“Artist Making Books: Poetry to Politics”, until 2/2024) and the forthcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial (“This is a Rehearsal”, 11/2023-11/2024). Khaled also teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and has taught at the Cooper Union and at Columbia University. His most recent publication is “Concerning the Observation of Other Corpses” (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Dec. 2021: 395-396). A recent interview on his creative practice was published as “What we opt to do” (Art Papers, Spring 2022: 30-33). Khaled holds a Post-Professional Master’s Degree in Architecture from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture from the American University of Beirut.