2025
May 2025
Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia
This group exhibition features works by Aaron Cohick and Divya Victor; Priyanka Dasgupta & Chad Marshall; Utsa Hazarika; and Baseera Khan. Imagined as a “continuum room,” the space of the gallery explores the shifting intersections of religion and race that have shaped South Asian lives in the United States. The featured projects connect multiple timelines in US history, often using objects and methods that speak of crossings or journeys. A trunk lined with hand-painted scrolls depicts the travels of a parafictional Bengali sailor, who migrates to the US in 1918 and lives as Black in Harlem, New York City. A book of poems unfurls like a tourist map, a type of document that instantly marks the person holding it as a foreigner. And a tiny postage stamp encapsulates a global history of solidarities—as well as unfulfilled promises—between South Asian and Black communities.
The artworks and installations are further shaped by each artist’s interest in the built environment: from the scale of a city neighborhood or the forested ghats of India, down to a concrete sidewalk in suburban USA or the privacy of an imagined interior space; and, from the cross-section of a monumental neoclassical column resurfaced in handmade rugs from Kashmir, down to the glitched surface of a latticed screen that recalls a jaali from the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar. The artists use these different scales and elements as conceptual—and at times physical—scaffolding for their inquiry into race and religion.
Unlike the single historical moment of a period room, the visitor to this gallery toggles between objects and portals that reveal people, time periods, spaces, and little-known histories that are so central to the South Asian (and American) experience. Taken together, the gallery space and featured works speak to the complexity and spectrum of these experiences.
2020
September 2020
Wallach Art Gallery, New York
The Uptown Triennial 2020 exhibition, the second iteration in the series, presents the work of contemporary artists in dialogue with the Harlem Renaissance, a defining moment in American modernism and African-American cultural history, during its centennial year.
Uptown Triennial 2020 is organized by Wallach director and chief curator, Betti-Sue Hertz. The exhibition features 25 artists whose works project a confidence in Black identity that reflects a quest for making visible emerging subjectivities that mine popular and historical iconographies.
Uptown Triennial 2020 includes works by artists Derrick Adams, Tariq Al-Sabir, Dawoud Bey, Sanford Biggers, Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo, Jordan Casteel, Renee Cox, Gerald Cyrus, Priyanka Dasgupta & Chad Marshall, Damien Davis, Delano Dunn, Awol Erizku, Derek Fordjour, Hugh Hayden, Leslie Hewitt, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Autumn Knight, Whitfield Lovell, Glendalys Medina, Rashaun Rucker, Xaviera Simmons, Dianne Smith, and LeRone Wilson. These 25 accomplished artists work in a wide range of media including painting, photography, video, sculpture, installation and performance.
2019
December 2019
Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019
Goa, India
Curated by Rahaab Allana
Showcasing works by: Aamina Nizar; Arfun Ahmed; Arpan Mukherjee; Aung Myat Htay; Basir Mahmood; Bay Bay; Bijon Sarker; Bunu Dhungana; Debashish Chakrabarty; Dr. Noazesh Ahmed; Gayatri Ganju; Habiba Nowrose; Homai Vyarawalla; Hetain Patel; Irina Giri, Keepa Maskey and Sonam Choekyi; Ismeth Raheem; Jagadish Upadhya; Kaamna Patel; Karthik Dondetti and Ashwin Iyer; Komail Naqvi; Kristina Chan and Rahul Nadkarni; Krithika Sriram; Lionel Wendt; Madan Mahatta; Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II; Mayco Naing; Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury; Naib Uddin Ahmed; Natasha Raheja and Vijayanka Nair; Payal Kapadia; Pramod Pati; Pranay Dutta; Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall; Ravikumar Kashi; Rupesh Man Singh; S. L. Parasher; S. N. S. Sastry; Sadia Marium; Sai Htin Linn Htet; Sangita Maity; Sanjeev Maharjan; Seher Shah; Sheikh Mohamed Ishaq; Shimul Saha; Shivani Gupta; Somnath Hore; Souvik Majumdar; Subash Thebe; Sunil Janah; Supranav Dash; Tahia Farhin Haque; Tara Jauhar; The Packet; Tina Modotti; Venkatesh Shirodkar; Vishwajyoti Ghosh; Walter Bosshard; Wonder Wang; Zishaan Akbar Latif
Photography is a free, independent art. It must not be subjected to alien, antiquated laws, nor should it be enslaved to nature.
– Werner Graff
– Werner Graff
The words from ‘Look, Stranger!’, W.H. Auden’s evocative poem awakens a sense of simultaneous estrangement and immersion, loss and retrieval, dissociation and elision – all in natural, active play when one literally or metaphorically leaves the shores of one’s homeland or the door of one’s home. For artists, the rites of aesthetic departure and arrival are a complex catalyst for the metamorphosis of both selfhood and practice. And like the Arabian Sea that could be seen just beyond the topography of the installed exhibition, the works on display may also be read as a shifting constant, one that urges viewers to reflect upon what lies within sight or may lie beyond the image horizon, enigmatically seducing and eluding the eye.
