LIVESTREAM PANEL
ASIAN FUTURISMS
Moderated by: Mehrin Masud-Elias Futurism can refer to the genre known as science fiction, aesthetic movements meant to liberate art from the confines of western and colonial paradigms, or speculative fiction and imagined visual realities that propose new worlds and ways of being. Asian Futurism, in turn, is a difficult movement to define, if it can be described as one movement at all. This discussion with several groundbreaking artists and writers will explore the queerness of time, the othering of Asian ways of being, the drag of history upon the present moment, and how these ideas are all depicted, addressed, and complicated in a multitude of Asian Futurisms. This program will livestreamed on 11/5 at 11:00 AM EST
MEHRIN MASUD-ELIAS
MODERATOR:
(she/her) is a poet, writer, and lawyer from Bangladesh. Her collections of experimental poetry, Natural Alien and Apocalypsia, are in the submission process for poetry prizes. She is a co-founder of Twelve Gates Arts as well as a member of the Board of Pasión y Arte. She won the 2021 Peregrine Prize and the 2022 inaugural Universe in Verse prize from UPenn’s Kelly Writers House.
NUDRAT KAMAL
(she/her) is a PhD student of Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focuses on South Asian literature in Urdu and English, particularly in the intersections of environmental humanities, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, and science fiction and fantasy.
JARET VADERA
(he/him) is an artist and cultural producer whose work examines the ways that images, and technologies colonize vision. Vadera’s work is influenced by science fiction, post/decolonial theory, Rorschach tests, koans, and impossible objects. Vadera’s prints, collages, sculptures, videos, and installations have been exhibited and screened at venues in the US, Canada, and India.
PAAFF 2022
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