Asma Kazmi

Bio
Asma Kazmi was born in Pakistan and studied at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited and included in collections such as the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis; Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago; Boston Underground Film Festival; Balagan Film and Video Series, Boston; Women In Film & Video/New England; and the MassArt Film Society.

Artist Statement
Exposing oneself to unfamiliar territory is an aesthetic process since it breaks habitual order and heightens one’s awareness of simultaneous realities. It is with a view to this theoretical position that I explore unfamiliar spaces via relational methods in much of my art practice. My past projects include a performative/web-based work that documents my training at various slaughterhouses in Illinois. This was an attempt to complicate the ever-growing distance between three linked, but habitually distinct, spheres of behavior: consumption of meat, religious observance, and the reality of death. Similarly, my most recent performative work engages a subaltern section of modern Indian society—cross-dressed biological men, eunuchs, or hermaphrodites, who are known traditionally as hijras. I spent the summer of 2009 working with three hijras in New Delhi, learning the conventions of gender parody. The culmination of these interactions was a theatrical event in which the hijras had the sole agency for constructing performative scenarios that included both them and me.

The images in Domestic Policy are fragments of my interactions with disabled beggars in Nizamuddin, New Delhi. The premise for our interactions was to photograph their homemade prosthetic limbs. The disembodied objects became vehicles for me to intimately engage with the beggars. I posed the same set of questions to each person regarding their relationship with the artificial object. I also asked them to determine a price for this object. One of the motivations behind this project was to investigate the overlapping, yet distinct, categories of objects and bodies.

Work Details:
Not For Sale
Digital print
4’ x 3’
2009