The South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley is delighted to launch Crisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series, a new speaker series that addresses provocative and generative intersections between creative processes and societal, cultural, and environmental crises. The Series features conversations among artists, art professionals, curators, and scholars. The fourth event in this series features a conversation between writer and filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen and Yasufumi Nakamori, Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at the Tate Modern, London.

Feb 18, 2021 09:00 AM in Pacific Time (US and Canada).

This event will also be live streamed on the South Asia Art Initiative Facebook page.

Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, South Asia Art Initiative, Department of History of Art, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, Department of Art Practice

Speaker Bios:

Naeem Mohaiemen imagines rhizomatic families, malleable borders, and socialist utopias– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to unlikely transnational alliances. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); and co-editor w/ Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit, forthcoming) and w/ Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). His work has exhibited at Vasas Metalworkers’ Union (Budapest), Mahmoud Darwish Museum (Ramallah), Bengal Foundation (Dhaka), SALT (Istanbul), Kiran Nadar (Delhi), Tate Britain (London), MoMA PS1 (New York), Documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel), Sharjah and Venice Biennial, and the 2020 Yokohama Triennale. Naeem was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow (video) and a 2018 finalist for the Turner Prize.

Yasufumi Nakamori is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at the Tate Modern, London. Originally from Osaka, Nakamori initially studied law at the University of Wisconsin and practiced in New York City before undertaking a second career in art history following 9/11, going on to obtain his PhD in art history from Cornell University. Prior to joining Tate Modern, Nakamori was head of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2008-2016 he was curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where his exhibitions included Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010) and For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 (2015). His award-winning catalogue Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, which documented the collaboration between photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Pritzker prize-winning architect Kenzo Tange.