AHA X WD: Mercedes Baptiste Halliday and Dima Srouji

Join us for the second event of collaborative programme between the Archaeology–Heritage–Art Research Network and West Dean College. This series of online talks brings together artists, academics, and writers whose work engages with, and at times subverts, the practices, politics, and theories of archaeology, critical heritage studies, contemporary art, and craft.

The speakers

Mercedes Baptiste Halliday 

Mercedes Baptiste Halliday is a black British-Caribbean artist, archaeologist-anthropologist, currently reading a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, where she is doing ethnographic research on Asante Traditional Buildings scattered around the outskirts of Kumasi, Ghana. 

She has previously been artist-in-residence at the Fitzwilliam Museum and UCL East, and has exhibited at the Horniman Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, UCL East, Studio Voltaire, and London College of Fashion, and has worked with various cultural organisations, such as the Council for British Archaeology, London Museum, Archaeology South-East, and Royal Museum Greenwich in curatorial, learning and engagement capacities. Mercedes is the founder of BlackArchaeo, an organisation that seeks to centre the health and wellbeing of Black and Brown people through an engagement with archaeology, heritage, art and ecology. She is also a fencing coach on the Muslim Girls Fence project, run by the Muslim social justice organisation Maslaha.

Dima Srouji 

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect and visual artist exploring cultural heritage as a space for potential collective repair. Srouji looks for ruptures in the ground where imaginary liberation is possible. She works with physical and ephemeral materials from Palestine understanding each as an evocative object and emotional companion the help her restitch endangered histories. Her projects are developed closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, stone masons and glassblowers. She was the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2022-2023 and is currently leading studio Underground Palestine in MA City Design at the Royal College of Art in London.

Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Victoria & Albert Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, Corning Museum of Glass, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Art Jameel, and the Sharjah Art Foundation. She has exhibited works at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, Sharjah Art Biennial 15, Lagos Biennial 2024, Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019, the first Islamic Art Biennale 2023, the first Doha Design Biennale, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Ford Foundation Gallery, Tai Kwun Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, Alserkal Arts Foundation, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati and others. Her writing has appeared in multiple platforms, including The Architectural Review, The Avery Review, Migrant Journal, and The Architecture Review of New York. She is currently serving on the Executive Committee as a Board Member of the Palestine Exploration Fund.