Process/Practice/Portfolio 2.0

A Seminar for South Asian Visual Artists and Academics

Saturday, July 13 and Sunday July 14, 2013
@ Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
8 Washington Mews (between University Place and Fifth Avenue)

SAWCC is proud to present Process/Practice/Portfolio 2.0 (P/P/P 2.0), an exciting opportunity for academics and emerging visual artists to meet SAWCC artists, curators, and arts professionals; participate in panels; present and receive feedback on their work; and tour artists’ studios.  P/P/P 2.0 is an intensive seminar geared toward helping female South Asian visual artists by fostering academic exchange and dialogue about their work.  The aim is to provide artists and academics with a community of peers to support, challenge, and fine-tune their practice through sustained interaction. Our first seminar, held at Pratt Institute in 2011, was attended by 20 women from around the country and has resulted in three participants joining the SAWCC board. With P/P/P 2.0, we are including discussions with art historians and academics to broaden the dialogue. As a follow-up to P/P/P 2.0, selected participants will be able to hold regular studio visits, culminating in group presentations to the public through SAWCC’s Studio Circle.

For this seminar, there will be 22 slots available to artists and eight slots available to academics. An application with work samples is required to be considered for this program. Women wishing to access SAWCC’s resources beyond the seminar are strongly encouraged to apply.

General public interested in attending P/P/P should RSVP (capacity is limited, so registration is required).

Please contact studiocircle@sawcc.org  with any questions.

Schedule

Saturday, July 13

10am – Introduction by Jaishri Abichandani and Amita Manghnani on SAWCC, A/P/A at NYU, and presenters.  Distribute agenda and supplemental materials.

10:30-11:30am – Artists’ talks by Anoka Faruqee, Chitra Ganesh, and Mala Iqbal. Established and award-winning artists with divergent practices present slide shows and talk about overarching themes in their work.

11:30am-1pm – Curatorial presentations by South Asian curators Jaishri Abichandani, Leeza Ahmady, Megha Ralapati, Sadia Shirazi, and Jasmine Wahi.

1-2pm – Lunch

2-3:30pm – Artist Slide Slam with group feedback. Featuring the works of Beena Azeem, Michelle Cherian, Sunny Chohan, Ala Dehghan, Anjali Deshmukh, Meena Hasan, Leena Jayaswal, Archana Kushe, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jayanthi Moorthy, Zahra Nazari, Romy Scheroder, Hiba Schahbaz, Meera Sethi, Samantha Sethi, and Negin Sharifzadeh. Each participant will present their work in 10 minutes.

3:30-3:45pm – Break

3:45-5:30pm – Artist Slide Slam with group feedback continues. Each participant will present their work in 10 minutes.

5:30pm – Travel to Brooklyn for cocktails

7pm – Cocktail mixer at Ruby Chishti’s studio rooftop in Bushwick

Sunday, July 14

10am-12:30pm – Academic panels featuring Roshni Bhambhwani, Gayatri Gopinath, Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Alpesh Patel, Vanita Reddy, and Uzma Rizvi. Moderated by Sunita Mukhi

12:30-2pm – Lunch provided

General public interested in attending P/P/P should RSVP (capacity is limited, so registration is required).

Bios

Anoka Faruqee is a painter who lives and works in New Haven, CT and Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her work in the US and abroad, including Leo Koenig Gallery (New York), Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco), the PS1 Museum (Queens), and Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo). She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her BA from Yale University in 1994. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, the Skowhegan School of Art, and the PS1 National Studio Program. Grants include the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Artadia. Faruqee is currently an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art. She has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal Arts, where she was Co-Director of the Art Program

Mala Iqbal was born in the Bronx, NY in 1973. Mala received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998.  She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, NY, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, FL, and the Fine Arts Work Center, MA. In 2008 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship in Painting. Exhibitions include: solo shows at PPOW Gallery and Bellwether Gallery in New York, Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles; and group shows throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and India.

Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where she currently lives and works. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations seek to excavate and circulate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. Ganesh graduated from Brown University magna cum laude with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art Semiotics in1996. In 2001 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002.

Ganesh’s work has been exhibited widely at venues both domestically and internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum of Art, the Asia Society, Bronx Museum of Art, and Exit Art in New York. International venues include the Gawngju Art Museum in Korea, Fondazione Sandretto in Italy, Nature Morte in New Delhi, and the Royal College of Art in London. Her works have been featured in several publications including the New York Times, Flash Art, Art Asia Pacific, and Time Out New York.

Jasmine Wahi is a curator, art advisor, and activist based in New York City. Wahi, a graduate of New York University, began her endeavors in the commercial sector at Christies, followed by positions in several Contemporary Asian art galleries around Manhattan. In 2008 Ms. Wahi opened up her own consultancy, which focused primarily on cultivating emerging artists in a largely competitive marketplace. Since it first opened, Jasmine Wahi Contemporary has grown beyond an advisory service to include curatorial projects and non-profit endeavors. Curatorial work primarily focuses on social narratives, such as feminism, individualism, sexuality and sexual orientation, and personal flaws and achievements.

In 2010, Wahi co-founded Project For Empty Space (www.projectforemptyspace.com), a non-profit arts organization in New York City dedicated to bringing contemporary art to a multitude of communities through the utilization of abandoned and unusual urban spaces. In 2011 Project For Empty Space expanded its programming to other parts of the world, including, Bogota, Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and Toronto, Canada. Project For Empty Space has allowed Wahi to further the reach of her social justice and women’s empowerment involvement.

Megha Ralapati is an independent curator, writer, and researcher interested in the contemporary moment within visual culture as it relates to art practice, networks and the effects of globalization. She is a contributing editor at ArtAsiaPacific and was co-editor of its 2009 Almanac issue. She was formerly director of Bose Pacia in New York and has developed curatorial projects including A Perfect Human at Dorsch Gallery in Miami (2009) with Milena Hoegsberg, Double-Jointed at Scaramouche gallery in New York (2012), and contributed to New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India at the Chicago Cultural Center (2007) curated by Betty Seid. She has presented at School of the Art Institute (Chicago 2012), Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (New York 2012) and as a participant at the Incheon Biennial (Korea 2011). She received an MA in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths (2010) with a focus on informal financial networks and currently manages an international artist-in-residence program at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

Born in Bombay, India, Jaishri Abichandani immigrated to New York City in 1984. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London and has continued to intertwine art and activism in her career, founding the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, http://www.sawcc.org, in New York and London. She has exhibited her work internationally at various venues including P.S.1/MOMA, the Queens Museum of Art, and Exit Art in New York, the 798 Beijing Biennial and the Guangzhou Triennial in China, Nature Morte, & Gallery Chemould in India, the IVAM in Valencia, Spain and the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Germany. Jaishri served as the Founding Director of Public Events and Projects from 2003-6 at the Queens Museum of Art where she co- curated Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now and Queens International 2006 Everything All at Once. Other international curatorial projects include Sultana’s Dream, Exploding the Lotus, Artists in Exile, Shapeshifters and Aliens, Anomalies and Transitional Aesthetics. Her work is included in various international collections including the Burger Collection, the Florian Peters Messers Collection and the Saatchi Collection

Leeza Ahmady’s pioneering work in the curatorial field takes Central Asia as its focal subject of inquiry, and has quickly evolved to complicating categorical representations of Asia as a conceptual, philosophical and geographical space that is both interconnected and fragmented. She is recognized for her innovative educational platforms AhmadyArts and Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW), which strategically partner with multiple museums, galleries, biennials and institutions to contextualize artists, while connecting audiences to practices in New York, Asia and elsewhere. Ahmady has presented numerous exhibitions, public programs and artists at notable art events and venues such as dOCUMENTA 13, Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Guggenheim Museum, Asia Society Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Asia Art Archive, Independent Curators International, (ICI), Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Queens Museum of Art and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, among many others.

Sadia Shirazi is an architect, curator, and educator based in New York City. She is engaged in a transdisciplinary practice investigating the relationship of art, architecture and urbanism to socio-political issues, cultural memory, and exhibition practices. Her recent curatorial projects include 136 MB / Exhibition Without Objects at The Drawing Room in Lahore (2012) and Foreclosed. Between Crisis and Possibility at The Kitchen in New York City (2011). She has worked in architectural practices in Cambridge, Cairo, and Chicago and as a researcher and designer for the artists Kyrzstof Wodizcko and Andrea Geyer. Shirazi holds a MArch degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a BA from the University of Chicago and is a former fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is assistant professor of contemporary art & critical theory at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida. He is also director of FIU’s MFA program in visual arts, and an affiliate of FIU’s Women’s Studies Center. A frequent contributor to Artforum, Frieze, and Artforum.com, he is working on a book project exploring queer South Asian diasporic subjectivity and authorship in contemporary art history that is based on his article recently published in darkmatter: “Open Secrets in Post-Identity Era Art Criticism: Raqib Shaw’s Queer Garden of Earthly Delights.” With Natasha Bissonmauth he will co-chair a panel titled Color Me Queer at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in London in 2014. Trained in art history at University of Manchester in England and Yale University, he has worked in the curatorial and director’s offices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC. Exhibitions he has recently organized include “Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street” (Manchester, England, 2007) and “Inner Space/Global Matter” (Miami Beach Urban Studios, 2012). He is currently organizing the first exhibitions of artists Asim Waqif and Sarvanan Parasuraman in the United States.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor and Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and was faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of California at Davis prior to joining NYU. She is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and has published articles on gender, sexuality and South Asian diasporic culture in numerous anthologies and in journals such as GLQ, Social Text, positions, and Diaspora. She is currently at work on a new project on critical regionalities and queer diasporic visual culture. Her recent book chapters related to this project include: “Who’s Your Daddy? Queer Diasporic Reframings of the Region,” in The Sun Never Sets: South Asians in the Age of US Empire, eds. Vivek Bald et al, (NYU Press, forthcoming); “Archive, Affect and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-Visions” in Political Emotions, eds. Ann Cvetkovich et al (Routledge 2010) and “Queer Regions: Locating Lesbians in Sancharram,” in The Blackwell Companion to LGBT Studies, edited by Molly McGarry and George Haggerty (Blackwell, 2007).

Uzma Z. Rizvi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Brooklyn, where she teaches archaeology, ancient urbanism, heritage politics in the contemporary world, thing theory, and art and community development. Her current research interests include ancient South Asia, political economy, social aspects of metallurgy, memory and war/trauma studies and the postcolonial critique. Since receiving her doctorate from the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania in 2007, Rizvi has been Faculty Fellow and Chair for the Initiative on Art, Community Development and Social Change at the Pratt Center (2007-2008; 2010-2011) and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University (2008-2009). Rizvi’s research has been supported by Fulbright Hayes DDRA (2003), George Dales Foundation (2004), and the Mellon Foundation (2006-2007; 2007-2008; 2010-2013). Rizvi’s interest in art and objects, and commitment to cultural production has provided her with opportunity to work with many artists from the South Asian Diaspora. She has recently written catalog essays for artists Navjot Altaf, Jaishri Abichandani, Swati Khurana, Gazelle Samizay and Sa’dia Rehman, and directed the documentary ‘Telling Stories, Constructing Narratives: Gender Equity in Archaeology’ (2007). She also serves in an advisory board capacity to various academic and cultural institutions, including the journal Dialectical Anthropology, the Queens Museum of Art, South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC – board member 2007-2010) and South Asian Theater Arts Movement (SATAM). Work link: http://pratt.academia.edu/UzmaRizvi

Santhi Kavuri-Bauer is an associate professor at San Francisco State University, where she teaches Asian American and contemporary Asian art history. She writes on monuments, identity, photography and Asian art.  She has also curated an exhibition called Picturing Parallax that included several prominent South Asian American photographers and video artists.
Vanita Reddy is an assistant professor of English at TAMU and will be joining the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington as a Postdoctoral Fellow this fall. Her first book, from which this talk is drawn, examines cultural economies of fashion and beauty in South Asian American diasporic literature and culture and attends to the material and affective force of beauty and fashion in shaping diasporic belonging. She has also begun research on a second book project which examines non-heternormative modes of intimacy and affiliation between South Asian diasporic and other racialized populations.