Event
Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia’s only contemporary South Asian arts nonprofit, is preparing for our biggest and most ambitious art event this year – perform(art)ive. This inaugural event consisting of contemporary performance art work by both local and South Asian diaspora artists addressing social change will be shared with Philadelphia for just one day, on Sunday 10/25 from 5-10pm at Drexel’s URBN Center Annex at Westphal College (34th and Filbert), including a reception and a short panel discussion with the artists. The full press release is attached.
We are very excited to announce the following artists whose works will be featured in perform(art)ive (in addition to several Philadelphia-based artists, including Sham-e-Ali Nayeem and Danielle Currica, who will be joining us):
Pakistani-born artist of international acclaim, Shahzia Sikander, whose pioneering process-based work uses diverse experimental media to examine the forces at stake in contested cultural and political histories.
Bangladeshi-American artist, Monica Jahan Bose, whose work addresses diverse topics ranging from gender and sexuality to climate change.
Indian artist, lawyer and academic, Sumit Baudh, whose work aims to explore thought, language, body and performance and concepts related to identity (e.g., Dalit, queer, gender).
Manchester, England-based visual artist and writer, Qasim Riza Shaheen, who works across performance, installation, film, photography, often with the audience as participants, and whose work explores various ways of sharing memories and enters the fragile architecture of the space between people.
Although their works range widely in terms of themes and modes of presentation, an emerging theme in the works these artists propose to present at perform(art)ive is one of transgression and control - how bodies, whether human or geographic, and emotions, identities, places (including, nature itself), and the representations thereof are controlled and transgressed upon, as well as the tensions inherent in such representations (including the artist's own act of artistic representation).
We would also like to acknowledge our community partners in helping make this festival a reality: the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University, the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Asia Contemporary Art Week 2015, Leeway Foundation, the BlackStar Film Festival and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.