Biography
Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London, working on experimental music and archival interventions across Middle Eastern contemporary sound and visual arts. Combining ethnographic research and curatorial practice, her practice-based research is looking at artist-led institution building, emotional aspects of creative labour, and interpretations of care and solidarity in curatorial activism.
She is currently a Research Associate in the field of curation on the UKRI project 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa'. As part of the project, she organises the project’s artist residency programme with practitioners from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iraqi-Kurdistan to reflect on contemporary sound art and experimental music that emerged as either counter archival practices or artistic responses to the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arabic Music.
Since 2019, she organises installations, performances, art exhibitions, craft-based workshops, and panel discussions for the annual Planet Ears symposium for contemporary global culture in Mannheim, Germany. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD in Ethnomusicology & Curatorial Practice at King's College London (2020-2023) and holds a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford (2018), and a joint honours BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg (2017). In 2021, she won a British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) Fieldwork Grant Award.
Research interests and PhD supervision
- Contemporary Sonic and Visual Arts
- Emotional Labour and Social Justice
- Curation, Ethics and Care
- Diaspora and Migration
- Institutional Ethnography
- Critical Theory
Teaching
Irscheid teaches curatorial studies, critical theory, and anthropological approaches to mixed media art in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities and the Department of Music at King's College London. She previously taught at the University of Oxford and guest lectured at Columbia University, Central Saint Martins (UAL), Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Mannheim.
Expertise and public engagement
Since 2019, Irscheid co-organises civic initiatives, workshop formats and residency programmes for diaspora musicians, researchers and creative industry workers in Germany and the UK. She also regularly engages with press, policy and cultural workers in Germany and Switzerland to speak about the working conditions and discourse around migrantised musicians working in Germany. As part of the Beyond 1932 project, Irscheid works with artists from across London and the SWANA region to encourage knowledge exchange initiatives and skills sharing in the fields of sound art and archival practices.
With a keen interest in cultural policy, she advises institutions and funding juries on anti-Arab racism and diversity-sensitive principles of curation that bring greater visibility to experimental sound and image outside orientalist narratives surrounding Arab musicians.
Selected Publications
- Accepted. 'On the Presence of Others: Performing Palestinian Absence in Bodies of Knowledge (2024) and For a Palestinian (2022)', with Abir Al-Laham. For 2025 Special Issue, ‘Scenographies of Absence/Scenes of Disappearance', Theatre and Performance Design.
- 2025. 'Sonic Acts of Care: Friendship-based Networks and Grassroots Activism in Beirut', Regards 34: 133-150.
- 2024. ‘The aftermath of German world music: Affective dimensions of collaborative cultural productions across Berlin and Beirut’, in: Yearbook Song and Popular Culture, Center for Popular Culture and Music 68: 79-95. Münster: Waxmann.
- 2023. ‘Radio AlHara: Towards a More Sustainable Curatorial Practice, field notes: magazine for contemporary music in Berlin.
- 2023. ‘Curating Narratives, Sensing Their Meaning: How Tuning Into Our Environment Inspires Meaningful Art', Sonic Matter.
- 2021. ‘Radical unintentionality’, Norient: the now in sound.