The Third Space Project Program

THETHIRDSPACE

The Third Space is a program series that seeks to highlight Diasporic Arts of South Asia as a distinct, expansive, and emergent tradition within American contemporary art. This four-part series will combine artistic practice and scholarship to envision a cultural consciousness within the art industry that also acknowledges the diasporic artist, their transnational experience of identity, place, and time, as a primary grounding for the conception, aesthetics, and impact of their work. The Third Space presents an examination into American contemporary art, utilizing scholarship to unravel artistic expressions of the diaspora and transnational identity within the American socio-political landscape.

The Third Space is funded by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and is a collaboration between Twelve Gates Arts (12G) and The Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania (ASAM). This project is a four-part program series curated by founder and Executive Director of 12G. Aisha’s curation will build from the gallery’s decade-long experience presenting diasporic artists of South Asia. In partnership with ASAM, this series presents an additional layer of interrogation into American Contemporary Art, utilizing scholarship to unravel artistic expressions of the diaspora and transnational identity within the American socio-political landscape. The series will take place at the University of Pennsylvania.

Co-Director Asian American Studies

PROGRAM

THE CURATOR'S TALK WITH AISHA KHAN

FEBRUARY 8, 2023 / 12:00 PM

MCNEIL 473

THE WORKSHOP WITH RUBY CHISHTI

FEBRUARY 22, 2023 / 5:00 PM

ARCH 108

THE ARTISTS' PANEL WITH SABA TAJ, CHITRA GANESH & TAUSIF NOOR

MARCH 27, 2023 / 5:00 PM

PERELMAN FORUM

THE ARTISTS' TALK WITH AROOJ AFTAB AND SHAHZIA SIKANDER

APRIL 06, 2023 / 5:00 PM

ARCH 208

THECURATOR'STALK WITHAISHAKHAN

FEBRUARY 8, 2023

MCNEIL 473

This Talk is part of Aisha Khan's Curatorial Residency in ASAM this spring 2023, as part of the ASAM's Sachs 2022 Grant. “The Third Space: Unfurling Diasporic Arts of South Asia”, is a series of programs that seek to highlight Diasporic Arts of South Asia as a distinct, expansive, and emergent tradition within American contemporary art.

Aisha Khan co-founded 12Gates Arts in 2009. Ms. Khan has extensive experience in curating art exhibitions and organizing art-related events. With a degree in Social Work, there is a socially aware angle to her work.

Aisha Khan’s residency and The Third Space Project represent a critical opportunity for ASAM to premier South Asian American arts in an examination of diaspora, ethnic identity, and immigration history."

THEWORKSHOPWITH RUBYCHISHTI

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

ARCH 108

Artist Ruby Chishti will facilitate a workshop for participants to engage in creating art through a transnational lens. What fragment of you survives in me? The workshop aims to engage the participants though dismantling and transforming unknown peopleʼ s clothing through the process of hand sewing. What do these discarded mass produced garments tell us about ourselves, and our interdependence on other humans and life forms?

Ruby Chishti is a Pakistani American artist based in New York City. She is Primarily a representational sculptor and installation artist. Her work is largely autobiographical in nature.

This events has limited space & will be open to Penn undergraduate community. Please RSVP in advanced!

Photo courtesy of the artist

THEARTISTS'PANELWITH SABATAJ,CHITRA GANESH&TAUSIFNOOR

MARCH 27, 2023

This panel will examine both Third Space Arts and its expressive methods of identity as practice. Prominent artists Chitra Ganesh, Tausif Noor, and Saba Taj will share their nuanced perspectives envisioning and critiquing Third Space Arts as a framework for diasporic identities, solidarity, and marginalization. Curator in Residence Aisha Khan will moderate the Panel.

TAUSIFNOOR

Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His criticism, interviews, and profiles of artists can be found in Artforum, frieze, The New York Times, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, BOMB, The Nation, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The New York Review of Books online, Jewish Currents, the Brooklyn Rail, the New Yorker online, and various other periodicals, and his essays have appeared in collected volumes published by Paper Monument and the India Habitat Center, as well as in artist catalogues for Alex Da Corte and Ficre Ghebreyesus. He is a 2022 recipient of the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. Noor has organized various exhibitions, lecture series, and events in Philadelphia and Berkeley, including solo exhibitions of Shwarga Bhattacharjee at Twelve Gates Arts (2022) and Asif Mian at FJORD (2018). From 2014-15, he was a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in India, where he worked at the Kochi Biennale and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). He has also worked at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow from 2017-2020.

Photo courtesy of the artist

SABATAJ

Saba Taj is a visual artist based in Durham, NC. Inspired by beauty, queerness, and Islam, Taj engages with representation as a resilience practice Their work includes mixed-media drawing, painting, and collage, as well as sewing and performance. Through these techniques, Taj explores the liminality of minoritized individuals as an embodiment of resistance, hope and possibility.

Taj is the 2023 Brightwork Fellow at Anchorlight, 2019-2020 post-MFA Fellow for the Documentary Diversity Project at CDS, and 2017 Southern Constellations Fellow at Elsewhere Museum. They earned their MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and their BA in Art Education at North Carolina Central University.

Photo courtesy of the artist

1 Miraj

2 Liminal Beings

3 Borders/Portals

CHITRAGANESH

Chitra Ganesh is an lives and works in Brooklyn. For the past 20 years, Ganesh's drawing based practice has shed light on narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Ganesh’s installations, comics, animation, sculpture, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms.

Photo courtesy of the artist

1 Rainbow body

2 Soccer Practice

3. She the Question, Head on fire

THEARTISTS'TALKWITH AROOJAFTABAND SHAHZIASIKANDER

APRIL 06, 2023

ARCH ATRIUM 208

Arooj Aftab was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents Her family returned to Pakistan in the '90s, where Aftab found inspiration in Lahore's lush gardens, intricate architecture, and Urdu poetry. She emigrated to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music, completing a degree in Music Production and Engineering. In 2011 she was named as one of National Public Radio's Top 100 young composers, and made the New York Times' list of best 2012 concerts. In 2021 her Vulture Prince album was met with critical acclaim from The Guardian, Time Magazine, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. President Barack Obama included album single "Mohabbat" on his official Summer Playlist, and her performance of the song "Mehram" for Coke Studio Pakistan has garnered over 11 million views In 2022 the composer and singer Aftab joined Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as the second Pakistani to be nominated for a Grammy, in the Best New Artist and Best Global Music Performance categories. She became the first Pakistani to win, taking home the 2021 award for Best Global Music Performance. Aftab has since been invited to perform at major international music festivals including Coachella, Glastonbury, Primavera Sound Barcelona, Roskilde Festival, and Montreal Jazz Festival. Earlier this year she marked the end of Ramadan by speaking alongside President Biden and the First Lady at the White House's Eid al-Fitr celebration. Aftab is signed to Universal Music Group, and is working on the follow-up to Vulture Prince She currently resides in New York City

Album Vulture Prince 2021, New Amsterdam Records

Aftab was nominated for the Best New Artist award and won the Best Global Music Performance award for her song "Mohabbat" at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in April 2022 She became the first-ever Pakistani artist to win a Grammy Award

Photo courtesy of the artist

SHAHZIASIKANDER

The Pakistani-American artist, Shahzia Sikander is a citizen of the world. Over the course of three decades, Sikander has developed a multi-media practice that embraces the production of compelling objects that practically and theoretically transcend borders. Her meaningful artistic and social collaborations probe contested histories of colonialism, mechanisms of power, notions of language and migration. Sikander is internationally renowned for a pioneering practice that takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure, and inflects it with contemporary South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives.

1. Malala

2. Confrontation

3. Shahzia Sikander, potrait of the artist

4. Patology of suspension

Photos from Artist's personal website