The South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley is delighted to launch Crisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series, a new speaker series that addresses provocative and generative intersections between creative processes and societal, cultural, and environmental crises. The Series features conversations among artists, art professionals, curators, and scholars.
The fourth event in this series features a conversation between Pakistani artist Naiza Khan and Assistant Professor of Performance Art at UC Berkeley, Asma Kazmi where Naiza Khan discusses her visual practice and explores how ideas of a performative, embodied mapping can create a complex field site of situated knowledge -from a specific geography, text or memory.
Khans visual practice is built on a process of critical research, documentation and mapping-based exploration. Through a range of media, including drawing, archival material and video, she brings together ideas of embodiment and ecology. Her work looks at geography as a heterogeneous assemblage of power, colonial history and collective memory. Working with the materiality of space, Khans multi-disciplinary practice raises questions about optics and erasure and frictions between old and new infrastructures.
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DATE: Wednesday, March 31, 2021
TIME: 9am Berkeley | 4pm London | 9pm Lahore | 9:30pm New Delhi | Calculate Your Local Time
This event will also be live streamed on the Institute's FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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Speaker Bios
Naiza Khan trained at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her early concerns with the politics and aesthetics of the female body are now rooted to the embodied experience of geography, exploring the continuity and disjuncture between different terrains and their entanglements.
Khans practice encompasses teaching, curation and writing. In 2000, she co-founded the Vasl Artists Collective, Pakistan, affiliated with the Triangle Network and is currently a Senior Advisor in the Visual Studies Department, University of Karachi. Khan has curated several exhibitions of contemporary Pakistani art, notably The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan, 19902010 (Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, 2010). Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including the Lahore Biennale 02 (2020), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), the Shanghai Biennale (2012) Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan at Asia Society, New York, USA (2009).
In 2019, Khan represented Pakistan at the inaugural Pavilion of Pakistan at the 58th Venice Biennale.
In 2013 she received the Prince Claus Award in recognition of her initiatives in the fields of art and culture. The artist has been awarded residencies at the Institute for Comparative Modernities, (ICM) Cornell University (2017); the Rybon Art Center, Tehran and Gasworks, London.
Khan is currently a research candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London and works between London and Karachi.
Asma Kazmi s art practice is research based and trans disciplinary where she unearths invisible, forgotten, and ignored histories linked to the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial contexts. She combines material as well as virtual objects to create complex visual, aural, and haptic relations. As a person shifting between multiple languages and cultural contexts, Kazmis process allows her to create works in the US, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Asma Kazmi teaches video, performance art, new media, drawing, and graduate seminars. Kazmi holds a join appointment at the Berkeley Center for New Media.
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Other events in this series include:
Oct 8, 2020: Allan deSouza + Gayatri Gopinath (New York University)
Nov 12, 2020: Alwar Balasubramaniam + Atreyee Gupta (University of California, Berkeley)
Feb 18, 2021: Naeem Mohaiemen + Yasufumi Nakamori (Tate Modern, London)
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The South Asia Art Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley promotes research-based conversations and collaborations around the arts of South Asia + its diasporas from the ancient period to the now. To read more about the Initiative and help support its various fundraising goals, please click HERE.
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Event made possible with the support of the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies
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The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
