Thursday, July 8, 7-9 pm

Join SAWCC for a reading in solidarity with American immigrants! South Asian writers Marina Budhos (author of Tell Us We’re Home, Atheneum 2010), Tania James (Atlas of Unknowns, Knopf 2009), and Rinku Sen (The Accidental American, Berrett-Koehler 2008) will read from their recent work which explores identity, family, and diaspora. Following the reading, Rinku Sen will discuss ways to fight the current anti-immigration legislation in Arizona and elsewhere. Attendees will have the opportunity to write postcards to prominent legislators and the White House advocating for immigrant rights. This event will be SAWCC’s first at the new Asian American Writers’ Workshop space.

at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
(btwn 6th and 7th Avenues)
New York, New York

$5 suggested donation
Register through http://sawcc.eventbrite.com/
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Join the celebration of this ground-breaking anthology, the first collection of US poets from South Asia.  Newly published by the University of Arkansas Press, Indivisible brings together forty-nine American poets who trace their roots to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The poems gathered here take us from basketball courts to Bollywood, from the Grand Canyon to sugar plantations, and from Hindu-Muslim riots in India to anti-immigrant attacks on the streets of post–9/11 America.

Featuring poets Vijay Seshadri, Subashini Kaligotla, Pramila Venkateswaran, and Ralph Nazareth with a reading, signing, and reception at the wonderful evanescent Tamarind Art Gallery.

Tamarind Art Gallery
142 East 39th St.
New York, NY 10016
www.tamarindart.com

Free to the public
RSVP to  rsvp@tamarindart.org

If you’d like to find out more about the anthology, visit http://www.indivisibleanthology.com

Co sponsored by SAJA (South Asian Journalists Association) and SAWCC (South Asian Women’s Creative Collective)

Impossible Communities
A conversation on the emergence and history of a South Asian Queer
Diaspora in NYC, and the use of party spaces as social and political
interventions that help define immigrant communities in new hybrid
formulations.

Thursday, April 22nd 2010
6:30 – 8:00 PM
Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Library, Brooklyn Campus
http://www.pratt.edu/about_pratt/visiting_pratt/maps_and_directions/

There will be an off-site reception after the panel.

This event is the first event in SAWCC’s speaker series, “What’s Left
of SAWCC”. In this inaugural speaker series, SAWCC presents talks in
which the concept of “Left” will be explored, firstly through the
ability to identify social spaces as political interventions and
progressive politics; secondly, as a play on words, in which the idea
of what is “left” is also used as a way to interrogate the archive,
and finally as a more synthetic approach to redefining how artists,
intellectuals and communities redefine urban spaces through cultural
production. Each talk explores this theme of progressive politics and
the many ways in which SAWCC links cultural production to social and
political interventions. Each talk will be presented at locations that
illustrate our collaborations across the city.

Co-sponsors for this panel include the Critical and Visual Studies
Colloquium and the Initiative of Art, Community and Social Change
(IACSC) as a part of the series, “Constructing Spaces:  The Politics
of Art and Community,” Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.

Wednesday, April 14, 7 pm

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective presents Look Left, an evening of readings featuring eclectic, left-of-center poetry and prose. Writers explore what it means to them to “look left,” whether it be traveling opposite of expectation or casting a glance out at the periphery, with works by Beena Ahmad, Sunu Chandy, Shymala Dason,Madhu Kaza, Alka Khushalani, Shivani Manghnani, and Amy Paul.

This event was curated by SAWCC board members Anjali Goyal and Anantha Sudhakar and is presented in conjunction with the current exhibition, A Wild Gander, curated by Baseera Khan.

at BRIC Rotunda Gallery
33 Clinton Street
(btwn Pierrepont St. and Cadman Plaza West in Brooklyn Heights)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
FREE
http://www.bricartsmedia.org/contemporary-art/public-programs/a-wild-gander-public-program

Bios:
Beena Ahmad is a third year law student at CUNY Law, just about the only place on earth that she’d be willing to study the law when she could be writing poetry.

Sunu P. Chandy is an attorney, social justice activist, and poet. She has served as an attorney with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since August 1999, and prior to that she was an associate at the union-side labor and employment law firm, Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss LLP. Sunu earned her J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston in 1998 and her B.A. from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana in 1994. Sunu will be starting her MFA in creative writing/poetry in Fall 2010 in NYC.

Shymala Dason is a first-generation Indian-Malaysian immigrant. Her work, often explorations of diaspora, race, identity, language, culture, and class, has previously appeared in the Massachusetts Review, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop anthology Topography of War, the Swarthmore Review, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. She is a Bennington College alumna and a former NASA consultant.

Madhu Kaza was born in Andhra Pradesh, India and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently an educator, writer, and artist based in New York. Much of her work is informed by her astonishment at everyday life.

Alka Khushalani was born in Bombay, India and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She has had a career in media and advertising as a project manager and producer. Her previous work has appeared in EGO magazine and the Kartika Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and children.

Shivani Manghnani received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and a BA in English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has received residencies and grants from the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Urban Artist Initiative/NYC grant program, and the Insituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil.

Amy Paul is a grant writer at the Culture Project by day. Her other affiliations include host/co-producer of Asia Pacific Forum Radio; board member of Adhikaar; and former writer/performer with Mango Tribe, an Asian American women’s theater collective. In 2008, Amy served as a project manager of Sukh aur Dukh ki Kahani (Stories of Joy and Sorrow), a domestic workers’ theater project. Currently, Amy facilitates writing and theater workshops with Adhikaar’s arts and activism group for Nepali youth.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 784-2084
http://ps1.org/

Satuday Sessions
April 3rd, 4-6pm

Saturday Sessions on April 3rd is hosted by Jaishri Abichandani (SAWCC) and features an afternoon of music and dance with DJ Ashu Rai from Sholay Productions, Ammr Vandal from the Parul Shah Dance Company, Samita Sinha and Julia Ulehula, and Bedstuy Ewe.

Experience the space between notes and movements, a dialogue without words between musicians and dancers! An afternoon of musical reflections and slow turns presented on Christian Marclay’s vinyl-record floor installation, 2822 Records (PS1), and in conjunction with the exhibition 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009).

Ashu Rai is a resident DJ and co-founder of Sholay Events’ “Desilicious”, NYC’s monthly and queer South Asian dance party since March 2002. She has performed at many of New York’s premiere venues, including Limelight, Pachita, Club Shelter, Pyramid, Highline Ballroom, BB King’s and Rebel. She has also taken the Desilicious
party and her signature mix of Bollywood-House music to Amsterdam’s Paradiso for the city’s India Festival and around the East Coast.

Ammr Vandal has been a member of the Parul Shah Dance Company for the last eight years.

The Parul Shah Dance Company is a talented group of dancers and musicians creating original works through the medium of Kathak, a North Indian classical dance. Based in New York, the company builds upon Kathak’s mythological storytelling roots to explore bold, contemporary narratives. Parul’s choreography reflects her own perspective as a highly trained Kathak dancer born and raised within New York’s hybrid community. The company’s signature works illustrate the paradoxical intensity and grace of Kathak movements, while preserving the emotive quality unique to Indian classical dance forms. The dance company has performed at prestigious venues such as Jacob’s Pillow, Fall for Dance at City Center, Lincoln Center, Summer Stage, Central Park, among others.

Samita Sinha is a vocalist, composer and sound artist who combines a contemporary vocabulary with her grounding in classical Hindustani vocal music to explore the possibilities of her voice. She has performed her solo and ensemble work at venues such as The Kitchen, Roulette, Le Poisson Rouge, Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concerts, Issue Project Room, Blue Note, UC Berkeley, and Macalaster College, toured internationally with poet Sekou Sundiata’s music-theater work the 51st (dream) state, and performs as an improvising vocal instrument with jazz groups including Marc Cary’s FOCUS Trio and Sunny Jain Collective. Current projects include a solo performance, a duo collaboration with Marc Cary (a Hindustani/jazz/electronic/groove heavy project called ANATOMY), and a commission to compose a score for Fiona Templeton’s The Medead. She has received awards from NYSCA, Queens Council on the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, Urban Artists Initiative, and Millay Colony for the Arts.

Bedstuy Ewe is a percussion ensemble that performs traditional West African pieces of the Anlo-Ewe speaking people of Ghana, Togo and Benin. Some pieces are several centuries old and due to strong beliefs and informal oral education, many pieces have kept their traditional integrity. The members of the ensemble are all disciples of master Ewe drummer Alfred Kwashie Ladzekpo whom they learned the music from. Bedstuy Ewe are based in Brooklyn.

Amino Belyamani: Lead Drum
Qasim Naqvi, Andrew Munsey: Supporting Drums and Shaker
Ochion Jewell: Bell

Curated by Baseera Khan, BRIC Assistant Curator and SAWCC Board Member

Mala Iqbal, In Sight of Coconino, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 90 in.

Mala Iqbal, In Sight of Coconino, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 90 in.

Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 24, 7 – 9 pm

The title of the exhibition, A Wild Gander: Artists from the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, is inspired by Joseph Campbell’s collection of essays, The Flight of the Wild Gander. Campbell’s title references the Sanskrit concept of the paramahamsa, an enlightened spiritual teacher who transcends the mundane, just as geese (hamsa) are able to transcend the earth through flight. According to Campbell, this sage feels equally at home on water and on land, just as the artists in this exhibition adeptly negotiate between disparate geopolitical cultural codes and spaces. Campbell also stresses that local myths inevitably contain new variations, cross-fertilizations, and the appropriation of old and new ideas.

The artists in A Wild Gander transcend and look beyond conventional understandings of contemporary South Asian identity. They reclaim representations of their heritage, reference pop culture and art history, and reveal the influences between East and West in a dizzying fashion. Skillfully interweaving medium and material, these artists produce diverse bodies of work that conceptualize the presence of liminal spaces between identity and formal study of artistic practice.

Artists in the exhibition include: Chitra Ganesh, Mala Iqbal, Jesal Kapadia, Yamini Nayar, and Divya Mehra.

Public Program: Wednesday, April 14, 7 pm
Look Left: Curated by SAWCC board members Anjali Goyal and Anantha Sudhakar

Free

Writers from SAWCC will read works that explore what it means to them to “look left,” whether it be traveling opposite of expectation or casting a glance out at the periphery, taking a new and risky look at contemporary South Asian identity. Curated by SAWCC board member and writer Anjali Goyal.

BRIC Rotunda Gallery

the contemporary art space of BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn

33 Clinton Street between Pierrepont & Cadman Plaza

Brooklyn, NY 11201

718.875.4047

Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm

FREE

bricartsmedia.org/contemporary-art

Located in Brooklyn Heights, BRIC Rotunda Gallery is a short walk from the 2,3; 4,5; M; or R trains at Court Street/Borough Hall; or the A, C trains at High Street.

Date: Nov 18th 2009

Panelists: Rocio Aranda Alvarado, Dr Gayatri Gopinath, Vandana Jain, Divya Mehra, Sa’dia Rehman

Moderated by: Dr Radhika Subramaniam

Venue: The Guild Art Gallery, 45 W 21st Street, 2nd Floor, NY, NY 10010

Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Rocio Aranda Alvarado: is Associate Curator, Special Projects at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. She also works on independent projects, including a group show of emerging artists titled Hair Tactics for Jersey City Museum in 2010 and exhibitions for the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance of New York. She is also currently on the faculty of the Art Department at the City College of New York.

Ms. Aranda-Alvarado has been invited to speak at the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Initial Public Offerings program and the Americas Society. Her writing has appeared in catalogue essays for the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), and El Museo del Barrio, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Nexus, Review, the journal of the Americas Society, NYFA Quarterly, BOMB and American Art.

Dr. Gayatri Gopinath: is Associate Professor, Program Director, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Impossible Dreams: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Her articles on the politics of Bollywood, Bhangra music, sexuality, and diaspora have been published in Social Text, positions: east asia cultures critique, Journal of Homosexuality, and Diaspora. She is the recipient of various fellowships including the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Vandana Jain: is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. She studied studio art and art history at New York University, and textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her recent awards include the LMCC Workspace Residency, the 2007 Emerging Artists’ Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park. She has shown at a variety of venues, including Toronto Free Gallery, the Queens Museum, ABC No Rio, Momenta and the Soap Factory. Her work was recently included in the 798 Biennial is Beijing.

Vandana’s work parses the corporate symbols that surround us. Ostensibly meant to serve as brand markers so we can distinguish between different producers of the same goods, these symbols have the potential to reveal so much more about our inner desires.

Divya Mehra: is a multimedia artist who recently earned an MFA from Columbia University, New York. She obtained her BFA with Honors from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. In her practice she explores issues of cultural displacement and hybridization, deploying a humorous perspective in the execution of the works. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions and screenings across North America.

Mehra’s work uses humor to activate repressed impulses, disrupt convention, and explore power relations in terms of gender and sexuality, as well as racial and cultural identities..

Sa’dia Rehman: was born in Queens, New York. Her works have been exhibited both, internationally and nationally, at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art, Abrons Arts Center, and Exit Art. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of Art (New York, 2008) and National Gallery of Art (Islamabad, 2006). She lives, works, and drinks tea in Brooklyn, NY.

Sa’dia Rehmans work proposes hypothetical narratives and references personal experiences and observations fused with a historical knowledge of her own self.

Radhika Subramaniam: is a curator, editor and writer based in New York. She is presently the Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design where she is also assistant professor of Art and Design History and Theory. Her recent projects include Art in Odd Places (co-curated with Erin Donnelly, October 2009) Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008), Rods and Cones: Seeing from the Back of One’s Head (Guest curated for the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, 2008) and a major two-year international initiative Cities, Art and Recovery (LMCC, 2005-2006) focused on the work of art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. Subramaniam was also the founding and Executive Editor of an interdisciplinary art journal, Connect:art.politics.theory.practice, published by Arts International.

Exhibition Dates: November 12 –December 12, 2009

Opening Reception: November 12, 2009, 6:30–8:30pm

Panel Discussion: November 18, 2009, 7:00–9:00pm
Conversation with panelists Dr. Gayatri Gopinath, Curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, and artists Vandana Jain, Divya Mehra and Sa’dia Rehman. Moderated by Dr. Radhika Subramaniam.

at The Guild, NY
45 West 21st Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10010
www.theguildny.com

Curated by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

This exhibition explores the various meanings of the words “domestic” and “policy,” both separately and as they relate to one another. Together, these words signify the laws and decisions made by governments in relation to their citizens: the “domestic policies” that construct national ideologies and behaviors. Taken separately, each word offers layered possibilities of meaning and interpretation, from references to gender and the private spaces of home and family to rigorous sets of rules and behaviors, which often become microcosms of the larger society. The nine artists in this exhibition address the various issues conjured by the words “domestic policy,” and their influence on contemporary life.

Curatorial Essay

Press Release

Artists

Jaishri Abichandani, Shalalae Jamil, Asma Kazmi, Swati Khurana, Vandana Jain, Divya Mehra, Sa’dia Rehman, Gazelle Samizay, Apnavi Thacker

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective

{ SAWCC }

is pleased to invite you to our

{ 3rd ANNUAL ART AUCTION BENEFIT }

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
The Guild Art Gallery, NYC
45 W. 21st Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10010

Cocktail Reception starts at 6:30 PM

Silent Auction ends at 8:30 PM

Afterparty with DJ Rekha 9:30 – 11:30
The Lounge at Elmo
156 Seventh Avenue (between 19th & 20th Street)

Tickets for the event are $35 in advance or $50 at the door.

SOLD OUT

{ ARTISTS }

Jaishri Abichandani, Fariba Alam, Blanka Amezkua, Afruz Amighi, Firelei Baiz, Rina Banerjee, Anjali Bhargava, Alexis Callender, Ruby Chisti, Martin Dust, Mike Estabrook, Safia Fatimi, Chitra Ganesh, Mariam Ghani, Sarah Hardesty, Vandana Jain, Shalalae Jamil, Baseera Khan, Swati Khurana, Joey Kilrain, Natalie Kocsis, Pooneh Maghazehe, Annu P. Matthew, Divya Mehra, Samanta Batra Mehta, Christopher Meyers, Naeem Mohaiemen, Nitin Mukul, Yamini Nayar, Ramya Ravisankar, Sa’dia Rehman, Joyce Riley, Miriam Romais, Katayoun Vaziri, Anahita Vossoughi, Richard Wilson

{ SPONSORS }

Thorsten Albertz

Komal Dhall

Nina and Koji Inoue

Izze

Swati Khurana

The Art Law practice group of Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt LLP

Elaine Ng and Art Asia Pacific Magazine

Ashu Rai and Sholay Productions

DJ Rekha and Sangament

The Greene Grape Fine Wine Compay

SAWCC is recognized as tax exempt under section 501 c (3) of the Internal Revenue Code

Download the Invite

SAWCC Auction 2009

Tuesday, September 29th, 7–9pm

SAWCC is proud to present a panel discussion on Pakistani art and censorship. As contemporary Pakistani art quickly crosses borders and gains international leeway, local art production is nevertheless stifled by government manipulation and censorship. Acutely aware of the nation’s socio-economic state of affairs, controversial imagery as a means of commentary and communication is still gravely discouraged and suppressed.

Razia Sadik from Columbia University comes together with Ruby Chishti, Shalalae Jamil, and Asma Kazmi, three female Pakistani artists practicing in the U.S., to generate a dialogue around negotiating censorship and art production in the West as Pakistani artists. What are the consequences of such liberties and assuagements when practicing in the diaspora? What responsibilities must still be considered within this framework?

Asian American Writers’ Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn 5th Ave and Broadway)
New York, NY
$5–$7 sliding scale
Food and beverages will be served

Ruby Chishti graduated from the National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan and resides in New York. She has been exhibiting internationally since 2000 in Lahore, Sydney, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Chicago, Islamabad, New York, and recently at Center of Contemporary Art, Sacramento. Her work is held in private collections and featured in books and magazines. She has held residencies in England and Pakistan and in 2006 she received a fellowship award at Vermont Studio Center. Her work is very personal and political, making strong statements about gender issues and war. She takes humble and ephemeral materials and creates works of art such as “Weapon of Mass Destruction” and “Cessation.”

Shalalae Jamil was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1978. Educated at Bennington College (BFA, 2001) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (MFA, 2006) she has since then taught, exhibited, and curated work in Pakistan, the U.S., and the U.K. Using photography, video, installation, and elements of performance, her works target home as a region consumed by the collisions between religion, tradition, and modernity. In 2009, she has shown work at the Kara Film Festival, Grey Noise, and Woman Made Gallery. Her work is in private collections in India, Pakistan, and the U.S. Currently the artist lives and works between Karachi and New York.

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.

Razia Sadik is an artist, curator, and college art teacher. She was born in Karachi in 1972 and was educated at the National College of Arts in Lahore. She completed her MFA at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London in 1999. Following this she was a studio and contextual studies instructor at the Department of Design and the Department of Fine Art at the National College of Arts, Lahore and the Beaconhouse National University–School of Visual Arts, Lahore, Pakistan for seven years. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in the Art and Art Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. In 2008 Razia coordinated and presented “Conversations Across Cultures: South Asian Imaginaries” symposium on art, video, and music and curated its accompanying “Critical Studio: Dialogue with South Asian Artists” exhibition and forum at Teachers College. She is collaborating with two faculty members from Teachers College on producing a comprehensive publication about this event. Razia is a studio instructor, student-teacher supervisor, and the director of the Macy Art Gallery in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College.