Guest Room:
Shoair Mavlian

Shoair Mavlian is a curator at Tate Modern, London, focusing primarily on photography. Shoair researches acquisitions for the international collection whilst curating exhibitions and displays across Tate Modern. She curated the major exhibition The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection (Tate Modern, 2016), Conflict, Time, Photography (Tate Modern, 2014) and the collaborative exhibition Project Space: A Chronicle of Interventions (Tate Modern and TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica, 2014). Shoair has also worked on many of the photography displays of the permanent collection across Tate Modern including New Documentary Forms (2011), Lewis Baltz and Carl Andre (2012), Harry Callahan (2013), Charlotte Posenenske and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (2014) and Close Up: Identity and the Photographic Portrait (2015). Her independent writing is regularly published in magazines and recent independent curatorial projects include the exhibition Don McCullin: Looking Beyond the Edge (Arles 2016) and In flux (Kanellopoulos Cultural Centre, Greece, 2015).

Shoair has a background in fine art photography practice and the history of photography focusing on the twentieth century. She has a strong interest in photography relating to conflict and memory, Central and Latin American photography and emerging contemporary practice.