Contact Zone – Art Spiel

November 20, 2023November 20, 2023, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

The Immigrant Artist Biennial, In Dialogue

Sanié Bokhari and Umber Majeed Discuss the Forbidden

Sanié Bokhari. It’s 11.49 pm here, 2022. 36 x 48 in. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.

As part of The Immigrant Artists Biennial: Contact Zone, Sanié Bokhari, and Umber Majeed present their work in the Enmeshed: Dreams of Water group exhibition. As artists of Pakistani descent currently residing in the US, both Bokhari and Majeed tap into the changing landscape of globalization and the unstable experience of international migrants’ identity formation. Evoking water as a symbol of fluidity and change, Bokhari’s painting and Majeed’s video deploy a metaphoric framing that is beautiful and complex. In this conversation with Jenny Wang, they critically reflect on the geopolitics of belonging and identity.

October 4, 2023October 6, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Interior Worlds of Sculpture and Performance: Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith

Nyugen Smith and Marvin Fabien, *After the Fracture* 2019. Performance at Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Photography Pascal Bernier.

Creating work that both resists and grapples with their immigrant experiences, Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith offer distinctive approaches to sculpture. Their perspectives on their immigrant experiences show some overlap but also many differences. As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Kim’s work in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water explores how new morphologies of identity emerge across time, place, and patterns of self-reflection, while Smith and De Lara’s work that will be on view in Excavated Selves, Becoming Magic Bodies begs the viewer to interrogate place through storytelling. 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.

July 13, 2023July 10, 2023, by Art Spiel

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

Sanié Bokhari. *It’s 11.49 pm here*, 2022. 3 x 4 ft. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.

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.”