Tarek Elhaik’s work looks at creative practices in the contemporary arts and experimental media worlds, with a special interest in modes of curatorial practice. The aim of his fieldwork-based inquiries is to problematize the mediatory role and increasing influence of curatorial practice in contemporary life and to evaluate the ethical, existential, political, and aesthetic implications of curation for imagining other ways of living and being human.
His first book, The Incurable Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film & Media Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), engaged curatorial collectives whose critical practice and exhibition strategies signaled a breakdown of Mexicanist aesthetics and modernist cultural forms inherited from the Mexican historical avant-garde. His second book, Aesthetics and Anthropology: Cogitations (Routledge, 2022), is a journey across an ecology of venues and media, spanning conceptual art exhibitions, architectural environments, frescoes in late medieval churches, photographic interventions in natural history museums, and more.
Tarek Elhaik has collaborated on various public programs, symposia, research clusters, and editorial projects that examine what he calls the “zone of mutual intrusion” between anthropology, art, and philosophy. He directs AIL: the Anthropology Image Lab. Between 2023 and 2026 he was co-director of the research program Future Flourishing that won the competition for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Global Call entitled the Future of Being Human. He was a member of Experimental Cinema in Latin America (2014–2017), a research and curatorial program funded by the Getty Foundation.
He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and lives between San Francisco and Rome.