Archival Alchemy SAWCC 20th Anniversary Visual Arts Exhibition Catalog

Table of Contents (4) 20 Years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective Sarah Burney and Ambika Trasi (10) Curator’s Notes: On Archival Alchemy and Alternate Facts

by Saisha Grayson (19) Curatorial Statement Saisha Grayson (22) Golnar Adili (24) Marium Agha (26) Blank Noise (28) Priyanka Dasgupta (30) Sabba Elahi

(36) Maya Mackrandilal (38) Zinnia Naqvi (40) Yamini Nayar (42) Nirmal Raja (44) Patience Rustomji (46) Himali Singh Soin (48) Archives, Algorithms, and Resistance: Documenting SAWCC Uzma Z. Rizvi and Jaret Vadera (54) Artist Biographies (59) Acknowledgements

South Asian Women’s Creative Collective 20th Anniversary Visual Arts Exhibition

(34) Amy Khoshbin

Archival Alchemy

(32) Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani

20 Years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective Sarah Burney and Ambika Trasi

We live in the age of the archive. We have the luxury (and burden) of seemingly infinite streams of information available to us through the mere touch of our fingertips and, at a moment’s notice, have access to innumerable articles and resources. Google, the most widely known and used online search engine, has become an official verb for seeking out an answer to a question, a fact, or any article on the web.

Wikipedia, which defines itself as “a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” is a website we now almost unquestionably accept as a reliable source. Anyone with an email account or a presence on social media has the ability to archive a conversation or post, making anyone who possesses such an account an archivist of their own material.

This is in stark contrast with how archives have been considered traditionally—stockpiles of records and historical accounts, written and stored by scholars and academics, which remained unattainable to those outside of privileged networks. Yet while the advent of the Internet promised a democratization of knowledge-building and accessibility, with new avenues for telling and disseminating the untold stories and buried histories of marginalized people, it did not take long for capitalism, increased privatization, government surveillance, and supremacism to enter and establish virtual hierarchies and enclosures and to practice exploitation and policing in the same ways it is exercised offline.

With current manipulation tactics ranging from “clickbait” articles to algorithms that influence and control what we see—based on our own biases—navigating the web is a much murkier experience than it has ever been before. What’s more, the gatekeepers operating from behind the screens belong to privileged groups, intending to influence not just which narratives get exposed and gain traction over others, but also what we share and consume—even how we vote and think about our neighbors and fellow citizens.

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For South Asians and othered communities—particularly those who have grown up in the diaspora—questioning and doubting the knowledge and propaganda that we receive and are asked to absorb everyday is not an unfamiliar task. With some exception, nearly all of us at some point in our lives became imbued with the understanding that history has always been narrated and circulated through one dominant (white, male) perspective. Upon this realization, we learned to look at the world through suspicious lenses, to unlearn lessons we were taught in our schools and universities, and to let go of certain absurd

Archival Alchemy South Asian Women’s Creative Collective 20th Anniversary Visual Arts Exhibition April 6–May 10, 2017 Golnar Adili, Marium Agha, Blank Noise (Jasmeen Patheja and fellow Action Heroes: Sapna, Anon, Freshly Divorced, Unrelenting Furiosa), Priyanka Dasgupta, Sabba Elahi, Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani, Amy Khoshbin, Maya Mackrandilal, Zinnia Naqvi, Yamini Nayar, Nirmal Raja, Patience Rustomji, Himali Singh Soin Curated by Saisha Grayson Abrons Arts Center 466 Grand Street New York, New York

Exhibition Managers Sarah Burney Ambika Trasi Catalog Designer Samuel Chun Catalog Editor Anjali Goyal SAWCC Board of Directors Shruti Chalamani Brijeet Dhaliwal Ambika Samarthya-Howard Ambika Trasi Installation photography/documentation by Steven Paneccasio.

All images of artworks courtesy of the artists unless otherwise noted. Š 2017 South Asian Women’s Creative Collective 110-112 West 27th Street #601 New York, NY 10001 info@sawcc.org

Table of Contents (4) 20 Years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective Sarah Burney and Ambika Trasi (10) Curator’s Notes: On Archival Alchemy and Alternate Facts Saisha Grayson (19) Curatorial Statement Saisha Grayson (22) Golnar Adili (24) Marium Agha (26) Blank Noise (28) Priyanka Dasgupta (30) Sabba Elahi (32) Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani (34) Amy Khoshbin (36) Maya Mackrandilal (38) Zinnia Naqvi (40) Yamini Nayar (42) Nirmal Raja (44) Patience Rustomji (46) Himali Singh Soin (48) Archives, Algorithms, and Resistance: Documenting SAWCC Uzma Z. Rizvi and Jaret Vadera (54) Artist Biographies (59) Acknowledgements

20 Years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective Sarah Burney and Ambika Trasi

We live in the age of the archive. We have the luxury (and burden) of seemingly infinite streams of information available to us through the mere touch of our fingertips and, at a moment’s notice, have access to innumerable articles and resources. Google, the most widely known and used online search engine, has become an official verb for seeking out an answer to a question, a fact, or any article on the web.

Wikipedia, which defines itself as “a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” is a website we now almost unquestionably accept as a reliable source. Anyone with an email account or a presence on social media has the ability to archive a conversation or post, making anyone who possesses such an account an archivist of their own material.

This is in stark contrast with how archives have been considered traditionally—stockpiles of records and historical accounts, written and stored by scholars and academics, which remained unattainable to those outside of privileged networks. Yet while the advent of the Internet promised a democratization of knowledge-building and accessibility, with new avenues for telling and disseminating the untold stories and buried histories of marginalized people, it did not take long for capitalism, increased privatization, government surveillance, and supremacism to enter and establish virtual hierarchies and enclosures and to practice exploitation and policing in the same ways they are exercised offline.

With current manipulation tactics ranging from “clickbait” articles to algorithms that influence and control what we see—based on our own biases—navigating the web is a much murkier experience than it has ever been before. What’s more, the gatekeepers operating from behind the screens belong to privileged groups, intending to influence not just which narratives get exposed and gain traction over others, but also what we share and consume—even how we vote and think about our neighbors and fellow citizens.

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For South Asians and othered communities—particularly those who have grown up in the diaspora—questioning and doubting the knowledge and propaganda that we receive and are asked to absorb everyday is not an unfamiliar task. With some exception, nearly all of us at some point in our lives became imbued with the understanding that history has always been narrated and circulated through one dominant (white, male) perspective. Upon this realization, we learned to look at the world through suspicious lenses, to unlearn lessons we were taught in our schools and universities, and to let go of certain absurd

values perpetuated in our own communities. Decolonization is an unending task, a process that is simultaneously internal and external.

Founded twenty years ago by Jaishri Abichandani, the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) grew out of the ‘90s zeitgeist of identity politics and its demand for the visibility and rights of those marginalized on the basis of their class, race, gender and/or sexuality.

Alongside other South Asian activist groups of its time, including Sakhi for South Asian Women and SALGA-NYC, SAWCC emerged with the rise of the Internet, which became an indispensable tool for building community among these individuals and groups; SAWCC harnessed the power of this new medium to network, share, and connect with other South Asian women artists. Holding its first official meeting on March 7, 1997, fourteen South Asian women of diverse ages and sexualities attended; and soon after, women began to gather monthly at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to share their work. It did not take long for SAWCC to establish itself as a grassroots sisterhood, becoming an eclectic and unique space of support and community.

Over the course of its vibrant lifetime, beginning as a small artists’ community and transforming into its current status as a nationallyrecognized nonprofit, SAWCC has acted as both a physical and virtual space for South Asian women and gender nonconforming artists to connect on their creative and intellectual work across disciplines. The organization has launched the careers of hundreds of artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers, some of whom are now prominent figures in their fields. Through its programs, SAWCC has documented and preserved the creative output of a complex community, grappling with issues of identity, gender, politics, race, and globalization long before they emerged in the mainstream art world. And though we are reasonably wary of the elitism and privilege represented by the educational and art institutions that surround us in New York City, we also accept their value as powerful platforms. Over the years, SAWCC has aligned itself with allies in such spaces while remaining an independent organization— infiltrating more established centers and thereby subverting the expectations of what one usually finds in such realms.

When we, Sarah and Ambika, joined the SAWCC board only a few years back, we were drawn to the collective’s powerful history, aware that we were joining an archival body and would be upholding an important legacy of creating a safe space to support artists now and into our unpredictable future. In being part of this community, we gained invaluable camaraderie from those in this diverse and caring network.

But alongside the incredible milestone we commemorate this year, we must acknowledge the important work that still needs to be done. Our

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community has weathered triumphs and setbacks in being witness, and sometimes victim, to the ever-changing political climate in the United States and internationally over the last twenty years. The current jingoistic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic climate we find ourselves in now, filled with hate rhetoric and acts of violence, signals that we are at a crucial moment in our collective’s history, though this is not the first time we have felt a strong urgency towards resistance.

We can recall the late 80s-early 90s era of the Dotbusters and antiimmigrant violence; frustrations over how narratives around the “success” of Indians in America were too-often favored over the struggles of the broader South Asian community and newer immigrants; the beginnings of the Hindutva movement; and in the early 2000s, the fears South Asians faced in the post-9/11 atmosphere; all of which, in some ways, strengthened—and in other ways fractured­—our community’s solidarity. Such issues, which are being closely paralleled in the present day, drove communities like SAWCC into being. The rise in Islamophobia and resurgence of white supremacy that has led to war, aggressive policing, vigilantism, and the incarceration of Muslims and other South Asians, propelled the US directly into its current chaotic political reality and Trump’s presidency.

Our anxieties today feel more pressing than ever. In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, among the frantic finger-pointing by the media, identity politics—the very thing that brought SAWCC into being—was blamed as the reason for disharmony on the left by many white liberals. But we must hold steadfast in our knowledge that the precise thing that empowered us twenty years ago is not the enemy, but the antidote. SAWCC must continue to push forward, tap into our activist roots, and acknowledge the intersectionality in our ever-growing community, with an emphasis on solidarity with those most vulnerable, and with our allies, from whom we accept support in return.

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On the occasion of SAWCC’s twentieth anniversary, we are proud to present Archival Alchemy, curated by Saisha Grayson: a fitting tribute to SAWCC’s past that examines the current fragile state with a mix of gravity and optimism. Through her curatorial vision, Grayson has selected works by artists that delve into their personal memories and shed light on what is so often invisible in broader representations of the South Asian experience. From knick-knacks found in immigrant households that feel remarkably familiar, to little-known histories about the first South Asian immigrants to the United States, to works that hold accountable the systems, people, and technologies that make us feel unsafe and use victim-blaming to perpetuate their agendas, this exhibition showcases an incredible bounty of artists who are unashamed and unafraid to turn hegemonies on their heads. Archival Alchemy

celebrates this community’s collective, continued resilience. Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani’s Index of the Disappeared work, seen from the outside of Abrons Arts Center’s street-facing windows, states a declaration and reminder on our community’s behalf and an invitation and wake-up call to passersby: “We will not be silent / Your silence will not protect you.”

Sarah Burney is a New York–based independent arts advisor specializing in South Asian and Middle Eastern contemporary art, emerging NYC artists, and contemporary printmaking. Raised between Kuwait and Pakistan, Burney studied printmaking at Wellesley College and worked with Zarina Hashmi, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, and Bodhi Art prior to launching Sarah Burney Art Advisory. Notable projects include Zarina Hashmi’s 2012–2013 traveling retrospective, Zarina: Paper Like Skin (Hammer Museum, Fall 2012; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Winter 2013; Art Institute of Chicago, Spring 2013); Gallery Espace’s participation in the Armory Fair (2013, 2015, 2016); the Studio Immersion Project Fellowship at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; and Ornate Contemplate, SAWCC’s 2016 symposium on visual art.

Ambika Trasi is an artist and arts organizer based in New York. Her research-based projects consider the histories, myths, aesthetics, and poetics deeply embedded within ordinary objects and models to investigate residual influences and systems of colonialism.

From 2013–2017 she was the Managing Director of Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW), through which she organized and assisted in the curation of major programs at the Asia Society (2014, 2016), 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015), Hunter College Art Galleries (2015), Seattle Art Fair (2015), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2016), among other venues.

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Curator’s Notes: On Archival Alchemy and Alternate Facts Saisha Grayson

What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming. [1] —Jacques Lacan This exhibition, Archival Alchemy, has been an idea in gestation for over a year and a half. I was first invited to guest curate SAWCC’s next visual arts exhibition at a holiday party back in December 2015. Even at that early stage, the conversation between then-SAWCC board member Sarah Burney and me came to circle around how artists have a special ability to reconfigure the base elements of the world in ways that transform our understandings of what was, is, and could be. In the summer of 2016, I saw a painting by friend and artist Hayal Pozanti that suggested the perfect title for the themes in mind, Archival Alchemy, and she was kind enough to share it. In the fall of 2016, I finalized the call for artists to submit their works for SAWCC’s twentieth anniversary exhibition. In that original text, I noted: Artmaking has always had its roots in magic. Along with storytelling and religious ritual, it is a method for transubstantiating disparate elements from one state or set of meanings into newly charged formations that expand our sense of the possible. Archival alchemy, as performed by a current generation of artists, focuses this transformative power on materials, identities, and structuring ideologies gathered from historical sources. Through this process, a stable image of a singular truth is put through the grinder of repressed narratives, alternate experiences, gaps filled in by desire, imagination, and unheard voices to produce a dazzling diffraction of what has been previously given as a transparent reality.

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On November 9, 2016, it was determined that Donald J. Trump would become the 45th President of the United States of America, after pursuing a campaign in which old-fashioned oppositions of truth versus lies and reality versus fantasy were cynically put through the grinder. Just days after Trump assumed the presidency, his administration informed us that they would be producing and disseminating “alternative facts” if they did not like the ones objective documentation had to offer. [2] I suddenly found myself drastically less enthusiastic about a dazzling diffraction of transparent reality.

For the last several months, then, I’ve been confronting the question of how to parse the line between these two impulses—how to defend the necessary work of disruption that postcolonial and feminist artists are doing to address millennia of historical erasure, misrepresentation, and unacknowledged experiences without affirming the ideology that each individual (or institutional power) has the right to pick and choose the version of history that favors them. How to assert, now more than ever, the importance of uncovering alternate histories and what they have to teach us about complex, conflicting perspectives, without capitulating to arguments that “alternative facts” are just part of this relativism.

Thankfully, artworks are powerful agents for thinking through such fraught issues, and the artists in this exhibition offer strategic guidance for making such distinctions. In thinking about the works gathered here—and the moment we are in—I’ve found the below distinctions helpful and hope we can hold on to them as we resist this attempted ideological coup.

Believe in Truth While Problematizing the Given While their approach may be fantastical, speculative, or subjective, most artists are seeking to share something true—whether that be evidentiary or experiential; individual, identitarian, or universal—through their work. They might not imagine their truth is the only truth; they might characterize truth as messy, unstable, fluid, even problematic.

Yet, they pursue their work because they believe they have some insight that is worth sharing about the world as they encounter it. That insight might disrupt the given, but it is not put forward as a lie.

(Work that is created to be intentionally misleading we call propaganda or advertising.)

The artists in Archival Alchemy, in particular, begin their work intently grounded in the realms of facticity—archival evidence, bibliographic sources, material culture, oral testimonies. This then becomes the basis from which alternate ways of looking at a shared slice or swath of reality can be put forward, played with, or perhaps incorporated into a reformulated understanding of that bit of reality. The perspectival changes wrought by this operation come from acquiring new information, however, and not from ignoring or inventing it. Rather than being dismissive of truth, artists can be seen as continuously attending to the production of truths—simultaneously believing in the value of this pursuit while not expecting their conclusions to hold still. Priyanka Dasgupta’s installation, When Straight Lines Fail, is an evocative example of this practice in action. The work is rooted in new research on the lives of Bengali sailors passing as African American in turn-of-thecentury Harlem, but it invites viewers, through its meditative videos and

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Installation view (L-R): Sabba Elahi, identified suspects, CIA/Pakistan Drone Strikes; everyday suspects #4; writing the unknown: identified suspects, CIA/Pakistan Drone Strikes

fragmentary documentation, to consider all the ways this might impact their thinking on histories and current practices of racial categorization, immigration biases, and reconfigured identities.

Dealing with current erasures and their implications, Sabba Elahi draws on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s “Naming the Dead” online database to calligraphically memorialize the individuals killed by drone strikes in Pakistan. This act resists the dehumanizing, politically polarizing coverage that would record them simply as militants or collateral damage. It is in relation to this data-driven, research-based project that the embroideries of everyday suspects offer haunting imaginative leaps for a presumably “safe” viewer. What might these individuals have been doing when death struck, without warning, from above? By rendering scenes of Western domesticity that could parallel the lives of Pakistani counterparts—sitting in one's living room, preparing dinner, going to the bathroom—Elahi uses art’s speculative capacity to ask audiences to connect their daily comforts to the daily terror being enacted on other people half a world away. The artist is not rewriting history—rather, she is threading aspects of it that we might be inclined to ignore into our most intimate spaces.

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Own Your Fantasies, or They Become Delusions Art is often thought about as a realm for exploring or exercising fantasies.

And while catering to such fancies might seem a superficial aspiration, the psychological operations of fantasy and projection greatly impact how individuals and societies experience and interact with the world

around them. Artists, far more than politicians, are willing to account for the ways in which personal desires and fears are always at work, driving and redefining one’s relation to “reality.” Through their work, they can indulge the urges of the unconscious—aspirations towards omnipotence, secret wishes for vengeance or adoration, and residual effects of turmoil and trauma—without mistaking them for statistical analysis or national interest.

Thinking of President Trump’s insistence on invisible inaugural crowds, unsubstantiated wiretapping, and tarring of opponents with the title “loser” (despite his own long record of losses), I could not help but think of what feminist psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose wrote in response to a crisis fomented by former President George W. Bush. Following the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Rose observed: It is a central tenet in psychoanalysis that if we can tolerate what is most disorienting—disillusioning—about our own unconscious, we are less likely to act on it, less inclined to strike out in a desperate attempt to assign the horrors of the world to someone, or somewhere, else. It is not […] the impulse that is dangerous but the ruthlessness of our attempts to be rid of it. [3] I think regularly about the “ruthlessness” of attempts to disavow fantasy and the imperfect self instead of reckoning with the practical implications of each seeing the world through a web of subjective, psychological, and social conditioning. The best response to these ruthless attempts is not to insist that we are perfectly rational beings, but to be attentive to when these illusions become delusions from which we insist on operating (or “deoperationalizing” operational things, à la Steve Bannon). [4] In the works in Archival Alchemy, artists clearly mark the moment when found sources become the springboard for emotional, speculative projection. They draw our attention to the desires and absences that inspire these flights of fancy, signaling how they may impact our interactions with others. In her work Troy Towers, Patience Rustomji gathers items that have been cast off by her unseen neighbors and carefully preserves them in colored cooking liquids. The effect is both sentimental and creepy, evidencing a longing for community that will not be satiated by this act of collecting or imagining a connection via these objects. Rustomji, however, very carefully presents this as her own constellation of issues and projections, rather than as a representation of a community she presumes to speak for, or demands be called into existence, or pretends is substantiated by this evidence. This is her fantasy, and she owns it. Likewise, in Amy Koshbin’s The Scheherazade Project video, we see a king wrestling with his desire to exert omnipotent power and indiscriminate violence, and his desire to be lost within the

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Installation view (detail): Patience Rustomji, Troy Towers, 40 Conger Street

world of stories being spun around him. This parable with ancient roots has frightening contemporary resonances, particularly as the US and Iranian governments continue to create narratives that “assign the horrors of the world to someone, or somewhere, else” in order to justify their own adversarial position. Saturated in hallucinatory colors, Koshbin’s work also amplifies artificiality and the digital doubling of experience to suggest the increasing impossibility of existing outside mediation and the importance of recognizing how this impacts our existence.

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Mark Power Relations When Making Evaluations It is helpful to remember that the conservative attack on evidenced-based thinking, which only now reaches its apogee in Donald Trump, is itself a response to the success of revolutionary movements in the 1960s in forcing self-reflexive critique within the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. As recognition of power relations in the production of knowledge challenged these fields to interrogate individual, cultural, and institutional biases accumulated over the course of centuries of scholarly work, the ability of white, Western, well-heeled men to control the dominant understanding on a given subject slowly started to wane. After centuries of having a near-monopoly on access to the institutions and evidentiary resources that allow one to present information with authority, they were forced to either accept that some of what they had known to be true in their area of expertise was, in fact, warped by the singularity of the perspectives brought to bear on it, or to actively disavow the authority of the information presented by these “others.” Ultimately, though, this second option required indiscriminately attacking the authority of information itself, as new scholarship amassed not just contrary opinions but evidence that the picture of reality as painted by the powerful was woefully incomplete and skewed.

Installation view (detail): Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani, 100 Days/16 Years

When conservatives adopt a posture of postmodernist relativism in the face of scholarly consensus against their worldview, arguing that they are entitled to their own set of “alternate facts,” it is critical to foreground the history of power relations in order to break this false equivalency. When people whose relatives were brought to the United States as slaves, suffered under colonial imperialism, or were compelled into domestic servitude argue that their history and culture has been misrepresented and offer correctives, logic demands that we listen to voices that have been systematically suppressed from dominant discourses in the past.

When the people who historically benefited from (and continue to benefit from) structural inequalities complain that narratives justifying these arrangements are being called into question, logic suggests there is ample reason to suspect their motives.

This is the logic that subtends the important, ongoing work of Index of the Disappeared, a collaboration between artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani. This growing archive traces the proliferating bureaucratic and legal mechanisms—as well as the human costs of and resistance to—US military, intelligence, and immigration policies since 9/11 and their connections to pre-9/11 conditions. In the installation configured for Archival Alchemy, visitors can compare competing narratives of mass detention, racial profiling, foreign policy fallout, and much more through carefully cited documentation. The Index brings to light the intentionally obscure maneuvers through which extraordinary violations of civil rights and international law can become state-sanctioned, business-as-usual. Large binders with labels such as “The Business of Detention,” “Family Detention Centers,” “Detainee Abuse and Death” appear alongside individual case folders with names on the front, sometimes with pictures of the deceased smiling

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Installation view: Blank Noise, I Never Ask for It

from behind the plastic cover, in which official stories of institutional innocence are challenged by family members and journalists. The reader knows who has the power in these standoffs and how infrequently justice is served. Gathering and disseminating these individuals’ names and their stories, however, offer a different kind of authoritative power—a body of evidence amassed from the commons, showing that those in power lie regularly and with impunity. By continuing to build and share this archive, the Index refuses to let world-shaping alliances between officials, government agencies, and private corporations continue to operate in secret, and literally lays out the proof that they cannot be trusted.

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Gathering together thousands of garments worn by those experiencing sexual harassment or violence, Blank Noise’s project, I Never Ask For It (2014­­–ongoing), counters the lie that women “ask for it” through cumulative, collectively-built testimonials reporting the truth of widespread, unchecked, unprovoked sexual aggression. While politicians, religious leaders, and other prominent figures continue to explain these incidences through victim-blaming or discrediting women’s assertions, the range of clothing submitted by “Action Heroes”—ordinary citizen-participants taking action to tackle sexual violence—patently refutes any response that would focus on what the target is wearing.

Displaying children’s cartoon t-shirts, modest cardigans, beach dresses, sweatshirts, and pajama pants, the project makes clear that there is no outfit that women can wear that will stop what is ultimately a societal problem—an entrenched rape culture that extends from excusing “locker room talk,” ignoring street harassment, shaming assault victims, and failing to punish rapists, abusive spouses, and murderous partners to the full extent of the law. Next to the images and actual piles of clothes, audio testimonials of young girls and elderly widows—no longer

silent—answer back to millennia of male voices telling women that they are imagining things, are exaggerating, must have done something to provoke their abusers, or that they must have gone somewhere they did not belong. When born-millionaire, thrice-married Trump (accused of sexually assaulting over a dozen women) assures the nation that Fox News personality and primetime hate-monger Bill O’Reilly (after settling five women’s sexual harassment suits out of court) is “a good person” who “I don’t think […] did anything wrong,” [6] we can see power trying to protect itself by returning to what had been true—a world where none of this behavior was considered wrong. But now we can listen for the other stories bubbling up all around us—stories that will consign this outdated reality to the dustbin of history—if we do the work of listening, amplifying, and acting on these evolving constructions of knowledge through which new configurations of reality can become true.

Ultimately, that is why this show remains important; why the thematic text was slightly tweaked but not drastically altered. Because artists—and all of us—have the right and the responsibility to reckon with the archive. Not to burn it or bury it, but to work with and through it, so that the truths of the past can be paths for imagining the future we still hope to see.

Saisha Grayson is a curator, writer, art historian, and teacher focused on the intersections of contemporary art, feminist politics, and cultural activism. From 2011 to 2016, she was Assistant Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized the museum’s presentation of Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, curated Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time, and co-curated Agitprop!. Most recently, she co-organized I want a president… (a collective reading – DC), a socially-engaged public art project that culminated in an action at the White House during the 2016 Creative Time Summit in Washington, DC. Grayson is also a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY where she is finishing her dissertation, Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman. Her writing has appeared in print and online journals, including n.paradoxa, Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ), e-flux, and in museum and gallery publications.

[1] Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 86.

[2] Emma Stefansky, “Kellyanne Conway Introduces Concept of ‘Alternative Facts’ to Account for Sean Spicer’s Lies,” Vanity Fair, January 22, 2017, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts.

[3] Jacqueline Rose, “Freud and the People, or Freud goes to Abu Ghraib,” in The Last Resistance (New York: Verso, 2007), 166–167.

[4] Merriam-Webster Web site, s.v. “Bannon: ‘I Was Put on to Ensure that It Was De-Operationalized’,” April 5, 2017, https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/bannon-i-was-put-on-to-ensure-that-it-was-deoperationalized-20170405 (accessed April 12, 2017).

[5] Rose, “Freud and the People.”

[6] Michael M. Grynbaum and Jim Rutenberg, “Trump, Asked About Accusations Against Bill O’Reilly, Calls Him a ‘Good Person’,” New York Times, April 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/media/trumporeilly-fox-murdochs.html.

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Installation view: Priyanka Dasgupta, Where Straight Lines Fail

Curatorial Statement

Archives are often cast as places of nostalgia—institutions for anchoring flights of fancy with the hard reassurance of facts; repositories for reinforcing “History”: capital “H” singular “y.” But those who take issue with the historical narratives that these archives traditionally uphold also find them productive resources for contesting the very stability and authority that they seem to ensure.

Artists—especially those from diasporic and postcolonial perspectives—are critically positioned to work their magic on this archival fodder, rich with malleable material that can be remixed to new ends. T ​ hrough this process, conventional understandings of a given reality are put through the grinder of repressed narratives, alternate experiences and gaps filled in by desire, imagination, and intuition.

Along the way, artists confront the voids where evidence of individual lives, subversive strategies, and subaltern histories have been erased.

At a moment when South Asian communities, women, and immigrant neighborhoods like the Lower East Side are being targeted by an evidence-averse administration, Archival Alchemy offers an opportunity for nuanced reflection on the complex global and personal histories that shape conflicting views of our contemporary moment. Several works explore the role that archives play in creating official histories, papering over dissent, and managing the disappearance of noncitizens, while others present or produce counter-archives that resist such erasure and offer strategies for empowerment. Through the work of these artists, intersecting cultural and personal legacies open new avenues for thinking about where we have each come from and where we are all going.

Saisha Grayson New York, 2017

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Golnar Adili

This love letter, written by the artist’s father when in exile from his native Iran and found in his personal archive after his passing, becomes the basis for Adili’s affective engagement with language and longing.

Graphically extracting the Persian letter “ye” across eleven pages and then sculpturally distributing them across the room, these works literally measure the distance between the artist’s swooping pen marks and, by extension, her father’s expressive gestures.

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A Spatial Study of Ye Harvest From the Eleven-Page Letter, 2016 [installation view, detail] Transfer print on Japanese paper, corrugated paper, beeswax, wooden dowels, concrete blocks

A Spatial Study of Ye Harvest From the Eleven-Page Letter [installation view]

Ye Harvest From the Eleven-Page Letter, 2016 Transfer print on Japanese paper, tissue paper, beeswax

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Marium Agha

Using embroidery, recycled imagery, and found tapestries, Agha dissects myths of love that accumulate across cultures, obscuring real experiences that run counter to formulaic fairytales. She offers meticulously cataloged cuts of meat and an unraveling idyllic garden inhabited by Alice’s White Rabbit as alternative parables for human relationships. From the exposed threads to the stretched muscles, the works court sensuous responses that, like their subject, exceed rationality.

A Courtier in Love—A Two Dimensional Portrait, 2015 Yarn and rope on reclaimed tapestry and fabric Courtesy of Aicon Gallery

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Perfect Love and Other Stories (1-4), 2016 Thread and rope on Montvale acid free paper Courtesy of Aicon Gallery

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Blank Noise (Jasmeen Patheja and fellow Action Heroes: Sapna, Anon, Freshly Divorced, Unrelenting Furiosa)

Most women, girls, persons across the world can recall the clothes they wore when they experienced any form of sexual violence. Initiated in Bangalore, India, I Never Ask For It holds a mirror to the environment of victim blaming, which has long justified, excused, and perpetuated the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment.

Facilitated by Blank Noise and built and led by Action Heroes and allies in India and beyond, I Never Ask For It is a five-year public project directed at revealing, examining, and eradicating victim blame.

Participants, or “Action Heroes,” step in to co-create I Never Ask For It by bringing the garment they wore when they experienced sexual violence. The garment is witness, memory, and testimonial to the participant’s experience.

I Never Ask For It envisions gathering ten thousand garmenttestimonials, united in sites of public significance, through a process of global collaboration with individuals, communities, and organizations.

You are invited to step in.

Towards co-creating safe spaces: being heard, not judged.

Towards healing: both personal and collective.

Towards resonating, inside out: No Excuse For Sexual Violence: I Never Ask For It

—Blank Noise

Be an Action Hero! Become part of this growing archive by contributing to I Never Ask For It. Audio testimonials and photographed garments can be submitted directly via the project website: ineveraskforit.org

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I NEVER ASK FOR IT

I NEVER ASK FOR IT

আমার ইচ্ছা আমার অিধকার আিম পর্ব

Clockwise from top: Unrelenting Furiosa, Freshly Divorced, Sapna I Never Ask for It, 2014–ongoing Mixed media installation

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Priyanka Dasgupta

Where Straight Lines Fail complicates assumptions around the social practice and histories of "passing," bringing contradictory experiences to the fore. The central constellation invokes recently recovered evidence of Bengali sailors who evaded US laws restricting Asian immigration at the turn of the 20th century. By jumping ship in New York, they were able to live as Black and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem. Other stories woven through the installation include a Bengali sailor’s son who passed as a Black jazz musician, a light-skinned African American who found success as an Indian mystic, and a Modernist Indian sculpture masquerading as a planter on Antiques Roadshow.

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Where Straight Lines Fail, 2016 [installation view and video details] Video projection and monitors, wooden box, metal box, documents, projection

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Sabba Elahi

In her works, Elahi questions the precision of drone warfare and what collateral damage looks like. As enacted by CIA-led attacks in Pakistan, this can look like a swirling layering of names, sourced from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s “Naming the Dead” archive, rendered

by Elahi calligraphically. As documented, the aerial view of this performed memorialization echoes the perspective that flattens women, children, civilians, and alleged combatants into disposable lives. In the series everyday suspects, the lost ordinariness of these lives is brought home though a cataloging of quotidian scenes, delicately outlined in embroidery yet framed through the scope and crosshairs of a targeting weapon.

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identified suspects, CIA/Pakistan Drone Strikes, 2014 Digital print on canvas

writing the unknown: identified suspects, CIA/Pakistan Drone Strikes, 2014 Stop-motion video, silent

everyday suspects #4, 2014 Hand embroidery on cotton

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Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani

Index of the Disappeared, 2004–present Since its inception, Index of the Disappeared has documented post9/11 US policies, their roots in pre-9/11 conditions, their impact on both immigrant and dissenting communities at home and military and intelligence targets abroad, and the various forms of resistance that have arisen. The archive is continually expanding to reflect the proliferating bureaucratic and legal mechanisms, and to oppose the shift towards secrecy surveillance, and censorship, that have accompanied an unprecedented escalation of disappearances, deportations, renditions, and detentions since 2001. In this first installation since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Index brings together documents associated with the laws and actions targeting immigrants, particularly from Muslimmajority countries, that were rolled out by the Bush administration in the immediate wake of 9/11, with the rapidly accumulating paper trail resulting from Trump’s “100 Day” blitz of executive orders targeting those from Muslim-majority communities and countries. (In both cases, as the documents show, the wave of immigration enforcement quickly swelled to encompass everyone potentially out of status, not only those initially designated as targets.) The Index also presents documents tracing the connections between increased immigration enforcement and chilled speech, racial profiling, media representations of people of color, prison labor, the private prison industry, abuse in detention, corruption in ICE, militarization of the US–Mexico border, and the xenophobic histories of the 96 Laws, Japanese internment, and the Asian Exclusion Act.

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100 Days/16 Years, 2017 [detail] Installation with document binders, postcards

An evolving archive that documents the human costs of US military, intelligence, and immigration policies since 9/11, Index of the Disappeared always engages with the particular site and context in which it is being presented. The Index is also responsive to, and built through, ongoing connections with allied groups and individuals working to dismantle these policies. This installation amplifies the campaign “We Will Not Be Silent,� instigated in 2006 by the artist-led group The Critical Voice, which disseminates black-and-white signage and t-shirts featuring this slogan, itself borrowed from anti-Nazi resistance, in English, Arabic, and Spanish. Presented here in Arabic via the LED signboards made popular by Light Brigade groups at protests across the country, this call for courageous collectivity is accompanied by a reminder in English that inaction is no longer a reasonable option.

We Will Not Be Silent/Your Silence Will Not Protect You, 2017 LED lights, corrugated plastic

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Amy Khoshbin

Khoshbin’s ongoing multimedia project merges live performance and an original score with animated Persian illustrations, images from the Iranian Revolution, found and newly created film footage, and immersive video game tropes to explore the power of storytelling, past and present. Like the murderous king seduced by Scheherazade’s one thousand and one tales, the contemporary audience is invited to lose themselves in the mediated screen world being spun around them.

The Scheherazade Project, 2016 (In collaboration with Jannina Norpoth, PUBLIQuartet, and The Hollands) Video, sound, acrylic paint, fabric sculpture Audio is a live recording from this project’s debut at National Sawdust on June 6, 2016

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The Scheherazade Project, 2016 [video detail]

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Maya Mackrandilal

First produced in response to the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, Mackrandilal’s cards reclaim both the visual of “hands up” and the term “thug” for her own ends. Her series returns the word to its Hindi root, meaning “bandit,” against its euphemistic cooption by white supremacist rhetoric. This resistant postcolonial stance is exemplified on each card by archival images and information on revolutionary women of color raising their fists, voices, and even firearms against global racism and patriarchy.

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THUG/LIFE: Phoolan, Angela, Yuri, 2014 Printed postcards Set of 3, open edition

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Zinnia Naqvi

Naqvi’s Past & Present series uses family albums as dynamic archives through which intergenerational identity construction and legacies of migration can be more precisely understood. Restaging photographs taken of migrant parents in their countries of origin, the children work with Naqvi to mirror the poses, outfits, and settings as best they can in their Canadian locale. This process reveals resonances that derive not only from familial resemblance, but from the children’s tendency to be drawn towards or to create environments that offer points of connectivity between distant lands.

Past & Present II, 2013 Chromogenic prints Top row, L-R: Hilary Roche. Dublin, Ireland: 1985 Daire Roche. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: 2013 Humza Hussain. Ajax, Ontario, Canada: 2012 Nassir Husain. Chicago, Illinois, USA: 1974 Second row, L-R: George Anthony Weekes. Port of Spain, Trinidad: 1972 Jabbari Weekes. Pickering, Ontario, Canada: 2013 Caroline Chan. Pickering Ontario, Canada: 2012 Linda Eng. Hong Kong: 1957 Third row, L-R: Philomena Quaye. Accra, Ghana: 1987 Cassie Quaye, Ajax, Ontario, Canada: 2012 Vanaja Ganeshan. Kondavil, Jaffna, Sri Lanka: 1977 Byra Dineshkumar. Pickering, Ontario, Canada: 2012 Bottom row, L-R: Tonya Campbell. Pickering, Ontario, Canada: 2012 Andrea Farrell. Fontabelle, Barbados: 1973 Ana Belen Pautassi. Ajax, Ontario, Canada: 2012 Carolina Batica. Villa Allende, Cordoba, Argentina: 1978

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Yamini Nayar

Produced by layering found images, paint, sculptural materials, and other three-dimensional elements that are photographed and then destroyed, Nayar’s large prints often function as the sole record of her ephemeral assemblages. Drawn from archives, but also archives of their own, these final works are presaged by a long period of gathering, shaping, studying, and reconstructing. These imagined spaces echo the structure of memory itself, where accumulated associations and recognized fragments are called upon to orient and navigate encounters with the new.

Past Present, 2013 [detail] Lightjet print

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Nirmal Raja

Raja’s scroll works engage in a kind of duet, her visuals harmonizing across temporal and cultural distances with the sentimental lyrics and antiquated technology of found piano player rolls. Themes first explored on the punctuated scrolls carry over to large looping watercolors, such as the chimes of Cha Cha Cha unfurling across Untitled #2 (Experiments in Time and Music). Allowing inaudible melodies to evoke personal associations, these sculptural works on paper recall the cyclical rhythms of life that repeat with each generation, even as the tenor and tempo of the world rapidly changes.

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Right: Cha Cha Cha, 2010 [detail] Image transfer, watercolor, screen prints on player piano roll mounted on fabric

Exhibited works not pictured: Silver Threads Among the Gold, 2010 Image transfer, mixed media embellishment, silver thread on player piano roll mounted on fabric

Bottom: The Procession, 2010 Screen prints and watercolor on player piano roll mounted on fabric

Untitled #1 (Experiments in Time and Music), 2011 Water color, graphite, and screen prints on paper

Untitled #2 (Experiments in Time and Music), 2011 Water color, graphite, and screen prints on paper

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Patience Rustomji

In Troy Towers, discarded objects collected from the basement of the artist’s large apartment complex are suspended in cooking oil and spices traditionally used to preserve food, repurposed from her late mother’s kitchen. Through this surprising alchemic process, Rustomji attempts to create an “eternal present” for this imagined but invisible community by transforming detritus redolent of urban dislocation and alienation into a “personal archive of desire, longing, and fantasy.”

Troy Towers, 40 Conger Street, 2015–16 Installation with found objects, cooking oils, spices, glassware, Mulmul cloth, table, linoleum tile

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Himali Singh Soin

Considering Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves as both colonialist literature and a feminist masterpiece, Singh Soin’s video, The Particle and The Wave, scrolls through the entire book, tracing the intervals between its 1,265 semicolons. The aural accompaniment, created in collaboration with composer Dario Villanueva, algorithmically translates these distances into sound waves. For the artist, this operation is “about an insistence on life, about the odd and invisible control of algorithms over our everyday lives, and about the act of reading.”

The Particle and The Wave, 2014 [detail] (In collaboration with Dario Villanueva) Video, sound

Set in “the world’s last geological minutes,” two portals open up onto the ancient terrain of Namibia and Mongolia, archival photographs depicting space travel before the space age, and the Alien Woman preparing for an end that is also a beginning. Like the palindrome of the title, Radar Level, the portals reverse, and the moments before and after the Anthropocene are mirrored in this technological imagining of the world without human technology.

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Radar Level, 2016 Video, sound

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Archives, Algorithms, and Resistance: Documenting SAWCC Uzma Z. Rizvi and Jaret Vadera

There is a stickiness, even a messiness to this business of archiving.

Ephemera, scribbled notes, invitations, and photographs travel through time, far beyond their original worlds, transcending their material boundaries. They become part of our memories, layered traces of lived moments that map out where we have been. As extensions of our bodies that bear witness, that say we were here, in all of our nuanced glory. Our archives stand in when our memories age, when details fall away, and when heritages are being passed from one generation to the next. These collections are personal, yet inform community histories. With different contributors, participants, and users over time, archives are multivalent, layered, and complex, but never haphazard. Sometimes created by chance or as the result of resilient material, they are curated, and thus, archives are always potentially violent. The politics of each archive is clearly evidenced by who is written in or written out, by whose authority, and by who is dismissed and invisibilized.

In this time of tectonic uncertainty, when time itself has given up, memory-making is both urgent and contemporary. Making the archive is not just an act of history-making but a way of strategizing for the future. In our earlier, arguably colonial and masculinist anxieties, one might have only worried about electric sheep and dystopic landscapes. [1] In this moment, we endeavor to decolonize our futures and remember queer and feminist discourses on self-care that help us to recognize and appreciate change and trust it as emancipatory. [2] Archiving need not be tinged with the anxiety of erasure; it can also be an act of celebration and remembering, building solidarity and collective movement. Such appreciation and engagement does not erase dystopia or its attendant concerns; rather, the making of an archive within such a landscape recenters it as a critical space engendering new discourses of lateral power.

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This becomes all the more timely as the shiny new car smell of the Internet has faded. Smart phones, tablets, and laptops have now become extensions of our bodies. Google and social media algorithms have become extensions of our perception, shaping how we move through the world, how we see, and how make sense of everything.

Each new generation is embedded a little deeper. The Internet is its own archive; it reflects the culture/s of its time, but it also reinscribes inequity.

It is within the overlapping layers of algorithms that new systems of hegemonic control are being enacted, reinforced, and then re-amplified back out into the real, physical world. For example, we see Wikipedia,

in its global scope and free access, as serving a dual purpose: the first, through its encyclopedic claim; and the second, by opening up access to knowledge-sharing so that the world can document its information for itself in real time. It has becomes a living archive of the now.

This essay rests on the desire to resist the algorithmic-hegemonic [3] control that has become entangled into our de facto contemporary archive. The Internet—and more specifically, Wikipedia—aspires to cleanse the archive of the murkiness of authority through a process that diffuses accountability. And that is precisely what this essay seeks to excavate by unflattening the claims of neutrality and notability, providing nuance to the seemingly benign methodologies of data collection and processing. In parallel, we believe in celebrating the organizations and communities of resistance that embody our desires for change in hopes of a better future, projected through more complex representations of our stories within the archive, and that extend into the critical practices of pedagogy. [4] Decolonizing Algorithms As with all systems of hegemonic control, there is a benign facade that holds up our false consciousness. If algorithms collect and process data, and if that data is accessible to all, it is easy to be seduced and is difficult, at first, to launch a critique against “democratic” online archives.

Yet, time and time again, we have found that algorithms re-embed the cultural, racial, and gender biases of their programmers. [5] We are also drawing attention to the ghosts of open-source meritocracies that still may be haunting these networks; the methods by which data is collected and processed; as well as the manner by which ideas of neutrality are heralded and notability are prescribed.

The criteria of neutrality have a quasi-science feel to them, when in fact, we have long known that objectivity is the very illusion that continues to reinforce privilege and epistemic hierarchy within systems of knowledge. [6] To decolonize the algorithm is to launch a clear critique with the goal of epistemic resistance. [7] Wikipedia has very specific criteria through which the world has access to contribute to the global encyclopedia. [8] One of the keystones for an article’s inclusion is the concept of “notability.” How to prove an entry to be notable has been an issue of concern for those who occupy spaces of alterity. But those lauding the neutral and notable argue that in a democratic space of information-sharing, as long as you show up to write, you can make an impact. [9] The fallacy of this argument has been demonstrated by many, including Leigh Gruwell’s study on the politics of exclusion (2015), the pedagogical project conducted

by Noe Montez in the Latina/o Theatre Wikiturgy Project (2017), and

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the experiences of the authors in a pedagogical edit-a-thon entitled ART+COMMUNITY. Beyond Just Showing Up: Questions of Notability and Editorship The practice of adding and editing pages on Wikipedia draws attention to the structural ways in which the invisibility of the traditionally disenfranchised are instantiated. Wikipedia articles “must include no new research” and the sources must be deemed “credible” in order for the subject to be considered as “notable” and for the article to be approved and remain online. One needs to frankenstein or collage together articles, entirely from secondary sources, that must be deemed of note.

But what if nobody has written about artists or activists whose work we find notable? Or what if existing writings about them can only be found on blogs? Or what if information is in a person’s own words? Or there are no other pages on Wikipedia that a new page can link to? All of these factors become reasons to flag an article. This continues to reinforce the stories of the overrepresented, those who already have the privilege and access to nuanced representation. It is re-rewarding subjects that the mainstream press and institutions have already signed off on. During the research phase of our edit-a-thon, we found that many successful artists and activists occupying spaces of alterity (by virtue of race/class/ gender/language/etc.) generally had surprisingly insubstantial coverage in publications “of note.”

How then, do we re-represent our already underrepresented communities?

Beyond the fact that not everyone has access to the technology (or the Internet for that matter) and that women and diverse communities are represented at significantly lower rates in Wikipedia’s editorial pool, we also need to factor in the fact that Wikipedia’s model relies on volunteer labor. [10] This underlines one of the challenges for already underserved populations: not everyone has the same privileges to take the time to research, write, edit, and defend articles.

Most artists, activists, and organizations are stretched thin from day one and often do not have the time or resources to archive their work. Many are struggling to stay afloat as they resist and fight through a host of social and political inequities. The impact of inequity compounds itself and is reinforced, making it nearly impossible for smaller cultural organizations to keep up with contemporary forms of notation. The burden of proof once again falls upon those struggling to keep up. This is illustrated as the proof of “notability” becomes a major roadblock. [11]

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The process of archiving is ongoing and is mired in technological change.

Finding time to edit also includes translating information from analog to

digital. Each of these editorial steps requires time, energy, resources, and an understanding of technology to maintain itself within an archive of the now. Wikipedia, like many archives, is a semi-transparent system where one can see how “history” is in a state of constant negotiation, which can be seen through the “View history” tab on the top right of the page. It is through checking on those tabs that editorial questions about “notability” become clear. To a certain degree, our desire to engage that discourse is what inspired us to develop the ART+COMMUNITY project. [12] How much, then, is on us? The underlying algorithm is theoretically open to whoever shows up.

Is the quick solution to just get more of us to show up? Yes and no, and yes.

The Project: Algorithmic Resistance and Critical Pedagogy We decided to start ART+COMMUNITY, an ongoing series of edit-athons, out of our shared belief that our stories are important and must be remembered, celebrated, and written in where they have been written out or are not included. The project was launched in a course that we co-taught in Spring 2016 at Pratt Institute of Art and Design called “Art, Culture, and Community Development.” [13] Part of our goal was to build literacy, to think through how archives work, and then to look at ways that new interfaces and technologies were allowing for new forms of resistance and community building. As with other such pedagogical projects, we invited students to choose whom they would write about using a guided list of artists, activists, and organizations.

We had dynamic discussions about who to include and why. We collectively decided our first priority, which was to add articles about trans, queer, WOCs, and AOCs with a sustained commitment to cultural production in Brooklyn, New York.

When you start this kind of work you are immediately overwhelmed by the immensity of invisibility. The hole in the archive is a recursive and reflexive vacuum of omissions. For every one page you add, you discover at least ten more that aren’t there. The scope creep [14] can be debilitating. The work grows exponentially at every turn, equaled in parallel with the burden of responsibility. During the process, without any prompting, students volunteered to add additional individuals and organizations that they felt were necessary.

During our first two initial edit-a-thons we added twenty-four new articles to the Wikipedia archive. Among those, SAWCC’s entry was one of the pages that made us the most proud. The impact that SAWCC has had on shaping and building cultural leaders has been immeasurable.

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Most South Asian cultural producers in New York, including ourselves, have either worked directly with, been promoted by, or grown in relation to SAWCC. As one of the largest feminist collectives focused on cultural creativity, SAWCC is arguably one of the most significant virtual communities (via the listserv) related to the South Asian diasporas.

It was a uniquely satisfying feeling as we watched the SAWCC Wikipedia page go live. Our smiles widened. It was a public articulation, a declaration, a statement of resistance: we were here, we are here, and we are here to stay.

Acknowledgements We wanted to thank SAWCC for the opportunities, sisterhood, friendships, and community that it has created of like-minded people of all genders and sexualities. Some of our deepest thanks and gratitude for the many hours of unmarked labor that so many people have put into the organization, in particular founder Jaishri Abichandani and the board members over these past twenty years. We have both been a part of SAWCC’s community in a variety of different ways, all significant to us and our practices. We have grown alongside this organization and consider it to be akin to family. SAWCC created and has always been a much needed intersectional feminist space for all of us—and for that, we are grateful.

Uzma Z. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at the Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Brooklyn, and a Visiting Scholar at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Recent publications include Decolonization as Care (2016), Crafting Resonance: Empathy and Belonging in Ancient Rajasthan (2015), Decolonizing Archaeology: On the Global Heritage of Epistemic Laziness (2015), and the World Archaeological Congress Research Handbook on Postcolonial Archaeology (2010).

She is a member of the collective for the anthropology blog savageminds.org. Rizvi also recently directed (with Amal Khalaf) the Global Art Forum-10 at Art Dubai: The Future Was____, and has written for e-flux, the New Inquiry, the Con, and LEAP, among other online art/culture/politics magazines. She is currently based in Sharjah and Brooklyn.

Jaret Vadera is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer whose work explores how different social, technological, and cognitive processes shape and control the ways that we see the world around and within us. Vadera has worked as a curator, researcher, writer, editor, educator, and designer on projects that focus on art as a catalyst for social change.

He has organized a number of exhibitions, events, and collaborative experiments. He currently teaches at the Yale School of Art, Pratt Institute, and Montclair State University.

Jaret Vadera lives and works between New York, Toronto, and India. He is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

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[1] Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Doubleday, 1968).

[2] Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (Earthseed) (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1983).

[3] Our use of algorithmic-hegemonies are loosely related to the idea of “algocractic” governance by Aneesh (see A. Aneesh, “Global Labor: Algocratic Modes of Organization,” Sociological Theory 27 (2009): 347–370). We are focused on a layered critique of how economic, racial, cultural, and gender inequities are reinforced through a number of contemporary systems like Wikipedia.

[4] See also Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Bloomsbury, 1970); bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

[5] Laura Sydell, “Can Computers Be Racist? The Human-Like Bias Of Algorithms,” National Public Radio (March 14, 2016), http://www.npr.org/2016/03/14/470427605/can-computers-be-racist-the-human-like-bias-of-algorithms.

[6] See also Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[7] See also José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[8] Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. "Wikipedia:Your First Article," (accessed April 14, 2017), https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article.

[9] See also Mostafa Mesgari et al., “‘The Sum of All Human Knowledge’: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on the Content of Wikipedia,” Journal for the Association for Information Science and Technology 66.2 (February 2015): 219–45. For excellent rebuttals of the quasi-scientific, see Leigh Gruwell, “Wikipedia’s Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In) Action,” Computers in Composition 37 (September 2015): 117–31; and Julia Bear and Benjamin Collier, “Where Are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 74.5 (March 2016): 254–65.

[10] During our first two ART+COMMUNITY edit-a-thons, students were our built-in researcher-writers. In subsequent edit-a-thons, this would prove to be more of a challenge. In “The Rise of the Voluntariat,” Geoff Shullenberger expands on this form of unpaid work, describing the “voluntariat” as a skilled worker working without pay for the sake of the perceived public good, while simultaneously contributing to the profitability of an organization. See Geoff Shullenberger, “The Rise of the Voluntariat,” Jacobin, May 15, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-riseof-the-voluntariat.

[11] In their defense, a handful of Wikipedia editors, edit-a-thon editors, and the head of Wikimedia NYC have been very supportive of ART+COMMUNITY, as well as other similar projects, and have openly acknowledged this.

[12] See Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. "Wikipedia: Meetup/ArtAndCommunity/Brooklyn2016," (accessed April 14, 2017), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndCommunity/Brooklyn2016; and continuing the series of edit-a-thons by Jaret Vadera, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndCommunity.

[13] This class was first designed and taught in 2006 by Uzma Rizvi and Ayse Yonder at Pratt, and since then has collaborated with many community partners, including SAWCC. The ART+COMMUNITY project was remarkably similar to the classroom project described by Noe Montez, “Decolonizing Wikipedia through Advocacy and Activism: The Latina/o Theatre Wikiturgy Project,” Theatre Topics (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) 27.1 (March 2017): E1–E9.

[14] The continuous and uncontrolled growth of a project after it begins.

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Artist Biographies

Golnar Adili Golnar Adili was born in Virginia and grew up in Tehran. She moved to the US to pursue higher education and holds a master’s degree in architecture. As an Iranian growing up in post–1979 Tehran, her work as a multimedia artist is informed by her experience with separation and uprooting in its different manifestations. She decodes the ways in which these events have marked her through processing and appropriating her late father’s archive of writings, photos, correspondences, and family immigration travel documents.

The sole inheritor of this marginal history, Adili works with this material both in homage to her father, who was a prolific intellectual and activist, and in an attempt to complicate the narrative of the Iranian struggle for social justice as presented by the West. Residencies include the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; Smack Mellon; the Fine Arts Work Center; the MacDowell Colony; Ucross Foundation; Lower East Side Printshop; and Women’s Studio Workshop. Adili has shown her work in exhibitions at Craft and Folk Art Museum LA, Cue Art Foundation, International Print Center NY, and the Lower East Side Printshop. She has received grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Urban Artist Initiative.

Marium Agha Practicing in mix media, Marium Agha’s work explores how visual imagery, concepts, and theories are interpreted across various trajectories and are influenced by borrowed cultures and ideas of oneself and others. Often using yarn as her primary medium, she tries to make sense between the given real and supposed representations of everyday living. Agha completed her bachelor’s degree from the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture in 2006 and a Master in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London– Central Saint Martins in 2009. Recent select exhibitions include: No Honor In Killing: Making Visible Buried Truth (Karachi 2010); Tea House at Poppy Seed (Karachi 2010); Screaming Whispers at Rohtas Gallery (Islamabad 2011); Parrhesia at IVS Gallery, Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture (Karachi 2011); Faiz Art Prize at Bagh-e-Jinnah, Frere Hall (Karachi 2011); Barcelona Showcase at Casa Battlo (Barcelona 2011); Attaining Heights at VM ART Gallery (Karachi 2012); Amsterdam Showcase at De Oude Kerk (Amsterdam 2012). She was nominated for the Abraaj Capital Art prize in 2012–2013.

In 2010, she curated her first show in her hometown, entitled Home-page, showcasing artists from India, China, Taiwan, and Pakistan at Art Chowk Gallery (Karachi).

Blank Noise Jasmeen Patheja is the founder and facilitator of Blank Noise, a growing global community of individuals/Action Heroes mobilized to tackle sexual violence. She designs and facilitates participatory projects through Blank Noise to investigate fear, vulnerability, blame, empathy, and trust. Her work ranges across media, including performance, video, live action, sound, photography, installation, t-shirts, posters, and stencil-graffiti. Patheja’s practice is built by people and has triggered public discourse on sexual/gender-based violence since 2003. Her work has been published in the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, the Hindu, the Telegraph, CNN, and IBN. She is based in Bangalore.

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Priyanka Dasgupta Priyanka Dasgupta is an artist and educator born in India, living in New York City. Her installations employ digital and physical media to trespass boundaries between aesthetics and politics. Dasgupta’s current work, developed in collaboration with artist Chad Marshall, confronts the historical notion of "passing" through tracing the lost history of Bengali sailors who married into Black and Latino communities in the US to escape the harsh laws against Asians in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She is a recipient of an

NEA grant (2004) and has participated in residencies, including Transparent Studio at Bose Pacia (2012), Aljira Emerge (2007), and the Bronx Museum AIM program (2005) in New York. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Changjiang Museum of Contemporary Art (China); Shirin Gallery and Queens Museum, New York; Galleria di Piazza San Marco, Italy; British Film Institute, London; and Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.

She has given artist talks at universities and institutions including Montclair University, New Jersey and the Asian American Arts Council, New York. She is currently completing her MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice at City College while teaching at New York University and City College.

Sabba Elahi Sabba Elahi grew up in a traditional Pakistani household in the Midwest, where she experienced the rupture of being raised in a collectivist and modest culture during a growing climate of xenophobia and Islamophobia. Working with thematic and personal historical archives, her work confronts the racialization, surveillance, and dehumanization of brown and Muslim bodies; in her work, she subverts textile, drawing, and embroidery to renegotiate with history, as well as to portray cultural representations and Western distance from warfare—in particular the War on Terror. A current artist-in-residence in the Chicago Artist Coalition's Field/Work program, Elahi recently exhibited work at Woman Made Gallery. Past residencies include Ragdale and Chicago Artist Coalition’s Bolt program. Elahi works at Marwen, an arts education nonprofit, providing portfolio and professional development to young Chicago-based artists. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Chitra Ganesh Chitra Ganesh is widely recognized for her experimental use of visual and textual material to uncover moments of absence and submerged desire, and to excavate buried narratives typically absent from official canons of history, literature, and art. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations draw from a broad range of material, including the iconography of Hindu, Greek, and Buddhist mythologies; archival photography; psychedelic posters; song lyrics; science fiction; anime; and comic books.

Ganesh received her BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia University in 2002. She is the recipient numerous awards including a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts. She has been exhibited internationally at the Asia Society, New York (2005); Fondazione Sandretto (2006); Kunsthalle Exnergrasse (2011); Queens Museum (2013); Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai (2009–10); Gallery Espace, New Delhi (2013); Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai (2014); as well as the India Art Fair’s curated exhibition (2015) and the Dhaka Art Summit (2016). Her solo exhibitions and special projects have been held at PS1/MOMA (2009­–10), Andy Warhol Museum (2011), Gothenberg Kunsthalle (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2014), and Rutgers University (2015). Ganesh’s artwork is included in public collections at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, San Jose Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Saatchi Collection (London), and the Devi Art Foundation (New Delhi). In 2016, she was a visiting critic at U Penn's MFA program, as well as a visiting artist at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. She is a 2017 Hodder Fellow at the Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts.

Mariam Ghani Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and teacher whose practice spans video, installation, photography, performance, and text. She is informed by her interest in understanding both how we recreate the past in the present and the present for the future, through shifting private and public narratives. Her research into places, spaces, and moments where social, political, and cultural structures take on visible and tangible forms leads her to construct fictions and reconstruct speculative histories. Exhibitions and screenings include the Rotterdam and CPH:DOX film festivals; Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials; dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul and Kassel; the National Gallery in DC; St. Louis Art Museum; CCCB in Barcelona; and the Guggenheim, Met Breuer, Queens Museum,

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MoMA, and Ryan Lee Gallery in New York. Recent texts have been published by Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, and the Manifesta Journal. Curatorial projects include the international symposium Radical Archives, the traveling film program History of Histories, and the collaborative exhibition Utopian Pulse. Ghani’s other ongoing collaborative projects include the video series Performed Places with choreographer Erin Kelly and composer Qasim Naqvi (since 2006) and the Afghan Films online archive with media archive collective Pad.ma (since 2012). Awards include NYFA and Soros fellowships; and grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, Graham Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, NYSCA, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Experimental Television Center.

She has held residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, Akademie Schloss Solitude, NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Ghani holds a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from School of Visual Arts. She currently teaches at Cooper Union and in the Social Practice MFA program at Queens College.

Amy Khoshbin Iranian-American artist Amy Khoshbin merges video, performance, collage, costume, and sound to examine our individual and collective compulsion to create and transform the stories of who we are and who we think we should be. Her work uses humor to throw a counterpunch at the high-definition, profit-generating codes and signals that American audiences are trained and accustomed to consuming. Working with a collage-style multidisciplinary approach, she appropriates language, symbols, and gestures found in Western media, while weaving in alternative aesthetics such as Persian miniature painting and Afrofuturist science fiction to build a new cultural whole. Khoshbin has shown her solo and collaborative work at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Abrons Arts Center, Mana Contemporary, NURTUREart, National Sawdust, The Invisible Dog Arts Center, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She is currently in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Residency 2014–17, and has completed residencies at the Watermill Center, Mana Contemporary, Banff Centre for the Arts, Team Effort! in Glasgow, and at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She received a Rema Hort Mann Community Engagement Grant and has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and poet Anne Carson, among others.

Maya Mackrandilal Maya Mackrandilal is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles. Her artwork strives to imagine radical futures for women of color solidarity and liberation and has been exhibited at venues including the Chicago Artists Coalition, THE MISSION, and Monique Meloche gallery in Chicago; and Smack Mellon and Aljira Contemporary Art Center in New York. Her critical essays, which focus on issues of gender, diversity, and labor within the art world, have appeared in Sixty Inches from Center, The New Inquiry, contemporary, Drunken Boat, and MICE Magazine, among others. Her creative writing has appeared in Skin Deep, Drunken Boat, and is forthcoming in a currently untitled collection of women authors and artists from Guyana reflecting on migration. Mackrandilal holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a BA from the University of Virginia. She is a founding member of FEMelanin, a woman of color identified theater collective based in Chicago, and has an ongoing collaborative project entitled #NewGlobalMatriarchy with the Chicago-based artist Stephanie Graham. Mackrandilal is the fine arts coordinator for the city of Buena Park, where she facilitates a variety of programming to engage local communities.

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Zinnia Naqvi Zinnia Naqvi is a visual artist based in Toronto and Montreal. Her work is based in documentary practices and uses a combination of photography, video, archival footage, and installation. Naqvi’s practice often questions the relationship between authenticity and narrative, while dealing with larger themes of post-colonialism, cultural translation, language, and gender. Naqvi’s work has been exhibited at the Ryerson Image Centre, Gallery 44, and the Koffler Gallery in Toronto; Articule in Montreal; and has shown

internationally at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, and the International Institute of Contemporary Art and Theory in Mangalia, Romania. Naqvi received a BFA in Photography from Ryerson University in Toronto, and is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal.

Yamini Nayar Brooklyn-based artist Yamini Nayar works with installation and architecture by creating imagined, psychologically laden interiors from found and discarded materials and photographing them before destroying the tableaux. Drawing inspiration from cinema, the environments that Nayar constructs loosely reference both specific landmarks as well as generic spaces, absent of people and often with distorted perspectives that may disorient viewers. She describes her works as “spaces that question the iconic in photographic memory, where found images are pivot points for imagined, alternate structures.” Nayar has exhibited her work internationally at venues including the Museum of Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queensland Art Gallery (Australia), Kiran Nadar Museum (New Delhi), Sharjah Biennial (UAE), Saatchi Gallery (UK), and recently a solo presentation at Art Cologne (Germany). Her work is included in public and private collections such as the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum, Saatchi Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, and US Arts in Embassies.

Publications include Chandigarh is in India, edited by Shanay Jhaveri; Passages: Indian Art Today; Lines of Control, Partition as a Productive Space; Unfixed: Postcolonial Photography in Contemporary Art; and Manual for Treason: Sharjah Biennial, edited

by Murtaza Vali. Residencies and grants include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Aaron Siskind Foundation, Art Matters Foundation, and visiting artist scholar at Art Academy of Cincinnati and NYU. Nayar is a thesis advisor in the MFA Photography Department of the School of Visual Arts and currently teaches photography at John Jay University in New York. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Nirmal Raja Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist born in India and living and working in Milwaukee, WI. Her work typically deals with concepts of displacement, cultural negotiation, and memory. Raja received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature in India, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is a mentoring resident at RedLine Milwaukee, an urban arts incubator. Occasionally, she curates exhibitions and organizes artistic collaborations. She has participated in solo and group shows in the Midwest, nationally, and internationally and has received grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, Milwaukee Arts Board, and Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Export Fund.

Patience Rustomji Patience Rustomji’s work stems from her sense of urgency for preservation of the Zoroastrian community on the brink of extinction. Her practice conflates polar desires for preservation and longing with disintegration and absence. The system at the heart of her work is an alienated one where missed connections and could-have-been interactions are transformed into fictionalized mementos for moments never been. Rustomji’s process of collecting found objects in her apartment building and then preserving them through “pickling” or in plaster evokes the fleetingness of memory and the impossibility of human interaction in a highly mediated world. Patience’s work has been shown at the Kitchen (New York); Gallery MC (New York); Index Art Center (Newark); 25 East Gallery, Parsons School of Design at the New School (New York); Ars Electronica: Festival of Digital Art (Linz, Austria). Patience received an MFA from Parsons School of Design at the New School and a BA in studio art from Montclair State University (New Jersey), and a diploma in fine arts from Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (Bangalore, India). She currently teaches at Caldwell University (New Jersey).

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Himali Singh Soin Himali Singh Soin is a poet and explorer. Her work is inspired by nonlinear time, light, water, meteors, and earthly entanglements. Her poetry has been published in journals worldwide, she has curated word-based art in rustic and radiant spaces alike, and she currently works in a studio in a Victorian swimming pool in London, plotting the distance to the moon or waiting for the past that is yet to arrive. Soin performed at Performa 13 with the Raqs Media Collective (NYC) and has shown her text-based art on Eclectica and Hoax Journal (online), Kona and Devi Art Foundation (Delhi), and forthcoming at Latitude Festival, Ha Ha Gallery (London), Sector 2337 (Chicago), and Bucharest Art Week (Bucharest). She received her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015. She will be at a residency at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow in 2017.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Christopher Watkins, Carolyn Sickles, Steven Paneccasio, and the staff at Abrons Arts Center for making this exhibition possible.

We are grateful to curator Saisha Grayson and the artists in Archival Alchemy for contributing their work and time, and to the SAWCC board and community for their continued support.

This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Special thanks to Brand Bean, Brooklyn Brewery, Endless Editions, and iEat Green.

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About

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the advancement, visibility, and development of emerging and established South Asian women and gender nonconforming artists and creative professionals by providing a physical and virtual space to profile their creative and intellectual work across disciplines.

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SAWCC has served South Asian women since 1997 and has earned a reputation for showcasing cutting-edge work that deals intelligently with issues of gender and cultural representation, as well as for connecting and sustaining a growing network of artists, educators, community workers, and organizers.

20 Years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective Sarah Burney and Ambika Trasi

We live in the age of the archive. We have the luxury (and burden) of seemingly infinite streams of information available to us through the mere touch of our fingertips and, at a moment’s notice, have access to innumerable articles and resources. Google, the most widely known and used online search engine, has become an official verb for seeking out an answer to a question, a fact, or any article on the web.

Wikipedia, which defines itself as “a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” is a website we now almost unquestionably accept as a reliable source. Anyone with an email account or a presence on social media has the ability to archive a conversation or post, making anyone who possesses such an account an archivist of their own material.

This is in stark contrast with how archives have been considered traditionally—stockpiles of records and historical accounts, written and stored by scholars and academics, which remained unattainable to those outside of privileged networks. Yet while the advent of the Internet promised a democratization of knowledge-building and accessibility, with new avenues for telling and disseminating the untold stories and buried histories of marginalized people, it did not take long for capitalism, increased privatization, government surveillance, and supremacism to enter and establish virtual hierarchies and enclosures and to practice exploitation and policing in the same ways it is exercised offline.

With current manipulation tactics ranging from “clickbait” articles to algorithms that influence and control what we see—based on our own biases—navigating the web is a much murkier experience than it has ever been before. What’s more, the gatekeepers operating from behind the screens belong to privileged groups, intending to influence not just which narratives get exposed and gain traction over others, but also what we share and consume—even how we vote and think about our neighbors and fellow citizens.

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For South Asians and othered communities—particularly those who have grown up in the diaspora—questioning and doubting the knowledge and propaganda that we receive and are asked to absorb everyday is not an unfamiliar task. With some exception, nearly all of us at some point in our lives became imbued with the understanding that history has always been narrated and circulated through one dominant (white, male) perspective. Upon this realization, we learned to look at the world through suspicious lenses, to unlearn lessons we were taught in our schools and universities, and to let go of certain absurd

Exhibition Managers Sarah Burney Ambika Trasi Catalog Designer Samuel Chun Catalog Editor Anjali Goyal SAWCC Board of Directors Shruti Chalamani Brijeet Dhaliwal Ambika Samarthya-Howard Ambika Trasi Installation photography/documentation by Steven Paneccasio.

All images of artworks courtesy of the artists unless otherwise noted. Š 2017 South Asian Women’s Creative Collective 110-112 West 27th Street #601 New York, NY 10001 info@sawcc.org