Joint event with the Oxford Arab Society.

Copies of the book will be available on sale for £5 (cash only!).

About the seminar:
The Middle East is the mysterious land of veils, minarets and Orientalist clichés. Karl Sharro, aka Karl reMarks, talks about his seven year journey of satirising how his enchanted native land is represented in Western media and punditry. From the Arab Spring to the rise and decline of ISIS, Sharro discusses how his online alter ego tackled those delicate topics in tweets, blog posts, memes, animations and badly-drawn cartoons. From a more realistic James Bond movie that depicts him delivering a shipment of tear gas to a repressive regime to his ‘one sentence explanation of the rise of ISIS’, the talk will cover an eclectic range of subject matter. It closes with Sharro’s Occidentalist work, as he returns the favour to the West in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump. The talk is titled after his recent book which was published in July by Saqi Books in London.

About the speaker:
Karl is an architect, satirist and commentator on the Middle East. He is the author of And Then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News’ and Style: In defence of Islamic Architecture and co-author of Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture. He has practised architecture in London and Beirut, and taught for five years at the American University of Beirut.

Karl has written for a number of international publications such as Foreign Policy, The Atlantic and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He blogs at Karl reMarks.

He has spoken on a range of issues such as satire, art, architecture, urbanism and politics. He presented his argument for open borders in a TedX talk in London in 2011 and taken part in several BBC broadcasts. He wrote and presented the ‘simple one-sentence explanation for what caused ISIS’, a short video produced with Channel 4. His idea for a ‘1000 Mile-City’ along the East Mediterranean coast was broadcast on the BBC’s This Week’s World as part of the ‘Think Again’ strand, exploring radical ideas for the future.

Joint event with the Oxford Arab Society.