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Articles & Reviews

The Immigrant Artist Biennial- In Dialogue

Art as Political Vehicle? Pritika Chowdhry, Marcelo Brodsky, and Rafael Yaluff

Exhibiting in Conflictual Distance at EFA Project Space within the framework of The Immigrant Artist Biennial: 2023 Contact Zone Pritika Chowdhry, Marcelo Brodsky, and Rafael Yaluff explores, in Oraib Toukan’s formulation, ‘cruel images.’ Images that contain evidence of political and bodily violence but are confronted at an extreme political or geographic distance from their events’ site of occurrence. Together with the artists, co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand discusses the politics of art and how the artists approach personal histories and historical and political events before the exhibit.

The Immigrant Artist Biennial Names 48 Artists and Art Spiel as Media Partner for their 2nd Edition

The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, titled “Contact Zone”, will showcase the work of 48 artists at seven locations across New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. The curatorial trio adopted the biennial’s theme from a term coined in 1991 by linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt, which she used to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations.” Katherine Adams, co-curator and an affiliate of EMPAC, explains in a statement how this concept guided their curatorial research: “It allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home.”

Revisiting Pritika Chowdhry’s Feminist and Decolonial Installations Speaking to India’s Partition for Women’s History Month

On India’s 75th year anniversary, the horrors of the Partition cannot be forgotten. Yet despite the atrocities committed against women, their experiences are often excluded from discussions of Partition’s impact. In What the Body Remembers and Queering Mother India, artist Pritika Chowdhry pushes back against this historical erasure. Revisiting two of Chowdhry’s installations for women’s history month, one is struck by the sensitivity and delicacy of her work alongside the urgency of her message.