Lara Baladi is a multi-disciplinary Egyptian-Lebanese artist, archivist, and educator. Her art practice encompasses photography, video, collage, multimedia, architectural installations, sculpture and scent. Informed by critical investigations into historical archives and the study of popular visual culture, Baladi’s work questions the theoretical divide between myth, memory, reality and the cycles inherent to history.
Since 2011, her ongoing initiative Vox Populi: Tahrir Archives, includes a series of media initiatives, artworks, publications and an open-source timeline and portal into web-based archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and other global social movements. Baladi’s work has been published, exhibited and featured internationally—from the Centre George Pompidou, Paris 2004, Transmediale, Berlin, 2016, the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea, 2018 to the Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden, 2021.
Within her artistic practice, she is active in socially engaged projects. For more than twenty years, she has been on the board of directors of the Arab Image Foundation in Lebanon and the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Egypt.
Baladi received fellowships from the Japan Foundation (2003) and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab (2014). She was an artist-in-residence at Art Omi (Ghent, New York, 2014), MacDowell (New Hampshire, 2015), and MIT (Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence, 2015) amongst others. Since 2016, Lara Baladi has been a lecturer in MIT’s Program Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT).
