Thursday, August 18, 2011, 7-9pm
@ Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
New York, NY
$5 at the door
SAWCC presents a slide slam with five visual artists working across genres to produce lyrical animations, installations, drawings and paintings. Nida Abidi, Fariba Salma Alam, Afruz Amighi, Tehniyet Masood, and Katayoun Vaziri will present their works followed by a Q&A moderated by Razia Sadik and Jaishri Abichandani.
This event is open to the public.
Artist Bios:
Nida Abidi was born in Lucknow, India and relocated with her family to the Midwest at the age of 3. At the age of 5 her family permanently moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey. She attended Rutgers University where she received a BA in visual arts, and a BS in evolutionary anthropology in 2007. She relocated to New York CIty in 2009 to obtain her MFA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in the East Village. Abidi’s work challenges the viewers acceptance and perception of mediated images through the use of visual transformations and repetition. The tension between artist and viewer constructs a charged confrontation that blurs the line between the intimate and the staged, as well as notions of trust and deception. Within the work, the veil is used as a time-based material since a veiled face conjures visions of how it was unveiled in the past, and how it will be unveiled in the future.
Afruz Amighi received her BA in political science from Columbia University in 1997 and her MFA from New York University in 2007. In 2006 Amighi was selected for EMERGE 7, a program for emerging artists sponsored by the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in collaboration with Creative Capital. Amighi has shown her work extensively in the United States, London, and the Middle East. She is the recipient of the inaugural Jameel Prize awarded by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2009. Amighi was included in the exhibition Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2010. In 2011 Amighi received the fellowhip in sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Amighi is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York and by Isabelle Van Den Eynd Gallery in Dubai. Amighi’s work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX, the Bristol Museum in Bristol, UK and the Devi Institute in New Dehli. Amighi (born in Tehran, Iran 1974) lives and works in New York.
Fariba S. Alam is a Brooklyn, NY based photographer born in Massachusetts. Her work has been shown at The American Museum of Natural History, The Queens Museum, The Asia Society, Exit Art, The Museum of African Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art/Shanghai, among others. Fariba has volunteered her creative services for Sakhi for South Asian Women and The Acid Survivor’s Foundation in Bangladesh. Fariba holds a BA in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia College, Columbia University (1998) with a focus on postcolonial theory. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship (1998/1999) and holds an MA in studio art from New York University (2004).
Tehniyet Masood was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1979 and moved to the United States in 1998. She studied painting and sculpture at Bennington College where she received her BA in 2002. In 2006 she received her post baccalaureate certificate in painting at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Masood lives and works in New York City.
Katyoun Vaziri (born in 1983 Tehran/ Iran) received her BFA from Tehran University and her MFA from Yale University in 2009. She has participated in residencies of Skowhegan (2010) and Salton Stall (2011). Katayoun currently lives in New York and is presented by Meulensteen gallery in Chelsea and her work has been shown in Dubai, New York, and California. In her work she reflects on simultaneous sentimentality and absurdity of politics by exploring the dynamic between public and personal domain. Besides her art practice, she has curatorial projects such as Hand Held History Video Summit at Queens Museum (2010) and Futuro Perfecto (2011) at Zora Space in New York. She also reports on the art scene in New York for BBC Farsi TV station.
Moderators:
Jaishri Abichandani received her master of visual arts degree 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 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; the 798 Beijing Biennial and the Guangzhou Triennial in China; Nature Morte and Gallery Chemould in India; the IVAM in Valencia; and the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Jaishri served as the founding director of public events and projects from 2003–2006 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, Anomalies, Shapeshifters and Aliens and Transitional Aesthetics. Her work is included in various international collections including the Burger Collection, the Florian Peters Messers Collection, and the Saatchi Collection.
Dr. Razia Sadik is an artist, curator, and college art teacher. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan and was educated at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, and Columbia University, New York. Sadik is currently adjunct assistant professor of art and art education and director of Macy Art Gallery at Teachers College, Columbia University where she teaches both theory and studio courses. Her research interests lie in arts-based research methodologies, critical pedagogy of art in higher education, and contemporary art curating.