Laura Hindelang

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Art and Architectural Historian with regional expertise in the MENA region. Laura is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Preservation at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern, Switzerland. Her book Iridescent Kuwait: Petro-Modernity and Urban Visual Culture since the Mid-Twentieth Century (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2022) is a transdisciplinary study of Kuwait’s urban visual culture in the context of petro-modernity. Based on a broad range of historical sources and visual material such as aerial photography, postage stamps and urban master plans, the book discusses petroleum’s ambiguous contribution to modernity, national memory, and urban space along the analytical-aesthetic concept of iridescence. She has published on oil media in Switzerland, spectacular urbanism in the Persian Gulf region, and infrastructures of crude and water in Kuwait. Laura serves as a committee member of Manazir – the Swiss Platform for the Study of Visual Arts, Architecture and Heritage in the MENA Region and an editorial member of Manazir Journal.

Publications Hindelang (order by year)

  • Laura Hindelang and Nadia Radwan, Between Affect and Concept: Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture from the Middle East and North Africa, in: Thomas Gartmann, Cristina Urchueguía, and Hannah Ambühl (eds.), Studies in the Arts II. Perspektiven auf Forschung über, in und durch Kunst und Design. Bielefeld: transcript 2023 (forthcoming).
  • Laura Hindelang, Photographing Crude in the Desert: Sight and Sense among Oilmen, in: Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana Limbert (eds.), Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil. Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press 2023, 57–86.
  • Laura Hindelang, Iridescent Kuwait: Petro-Modernity and Urban Visual Culture since the Mid-Twentieth Century, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714739
  • Laura Hindelang, Oil Media. Changing Portraits of Petroleum in Visual Culture between the US, Kuwait, and Switzerland, Centaurus, 2021, vol. 63, no. 4, 675–694. https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12418
  • Laura Hindelang, Precious Property. Infrastructures of Water and Petroleum in Kuwait, in: Carola Hein (ed.), Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape, Abingdon: Routledge 2021, 159–175. www.doi.org/10.4324/9780367816049-12