Twelve Gates will host a public scholarly conversation that engages 12G's iteration of Common Ground, honoring Mohammad Omer Khalil's legacy.
On Saturday, April 18th, 2026, from 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM ET, at Twelve Gates Arts, we will host a public scholarly conversation that engages 12G's iteration of Common Ground, honoring Mohammad Omer Khalil's legacy. The panel will explore Khalil's work on view and draw connections between his practice and South Asia. The conversation will feature Sudanese historian, Bayan Abubakr, Common Ground co-curator, Amina Ahmed, and museum director and equity-driven arts advocate, Isra El-Bashir. The panel will be moderated by scholar of Black Diasporic Art, Anna Arabindon-Kesson.
Bayan Abubakr
is a historian who received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2026.
Her work focuses on and addresses Sudan's historical and contemporary dilemmas as they relate to issues of racialization, militarization, and global and local empire-making schemes. Bayan’s dissertation, "The Marketplace of Empire: Frontier Reform and the Making of Ottoman Sudan, 1840-1924," centers Sudan in trans-Saharan and Ottoman histories of slavery and circuits of capital. Bayan’s academic and public facing writings have appeared in Mada Masr, The New York Times, and Jadaliyya.
Amina Ahmed
(b. 1964, in Uganda, East Africa is a multidisciplinary muslim artist working across painting, printmaking, bookmaking and textiles.
Of Kutchi-Indian, Turkic (Bukhara), and Nubian heritage, Amina grew up in England and currently lives in the USA. She studied at Winchester School of Art and Chelsea School of Art before earning an MA in Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts from the Royal College of Art.
Isra El-Beshir
has ten years of experience in museums and academia.
She has devoted her career to fostering equity-driven initiatives through the arts and culture, inspiring organizations to think boldly and dynamically while fostering growth with purpose and integrity. Currently the Director of Art Museum and Galleries at Washington and Lee University, she oversees the Reeves Museum of Ceramics, Watson Galleries, McCarthy Gallery, and a collection of 15,000 fine and decorative arts. Previously, she served as the Associate Director of Museums at W&L (2020-2022); the founding Director of the Illinois Art Station, a community arts program of Illinois State University; Development Consultant for the premier journal, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora; and as the Curator of Education and Public Programming at the Arab American National Museum. Isra holds a Master’s in Cultural Anthropology and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration.
Panel Moderator
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
is an Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology.
Born in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia, and worked as a Registered Nurse in the UK before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University.Professor Arabindan-Kesson's research and teaching focus on Black Diaspora Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and medicine in the long 19th century. She also has interests in British, South Asian and Australian art. Her award-winning first book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World is available from Duke University Press. She is also writing a book, supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, with Professor Mia Bagneris (Tulane University) on 19th century Black Diaspora art. Her second monograph is called An Empire State of Mind: Plantation Imaginaries, Colonial Medicine and Ways of Seeing. She is the director of Art Hx, a digital humanities project that addresses the intersections of art, race and medicine in the British empire. She was the 2022-2023 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, is the Senior Research Fellow at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Anna works closely with artists, and frequently contributes to catalogues and exhibition texts, most recently for Shiraz Bayjoo, Monica Di Miranda, John Akomfrah and Salman Toor. She has curated shows at 12 Gates and other institutions, including a co-curated installation of new work by Sonya Clark with Paul Farber and Yolanda Wisher of Monument Lab, called The Descendents of Monticello currently on view at Declaration House in Philadelphia.
*Maximum of 2 tickets per person