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 fifth event in this series features a conversation between Pakistani artist Naiza Khan and Assistant Professor of Performance Art at UC Berkeley, Asma Kazmi.

March 31, 2021 9:00 AM 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, Department of Art Practice

Speaker Bios:

Naiza Khan trained at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her early concerns with the politics and aesthetics of the female body are now rooted to the embodied experience of geography, exploring the continuity and disjuncture between different terrains and their entanglements. Khan’s practice encompasses teaching, curation and writing. In 2000, she co-founded the Vasl Artists’ Collective, Pakistan, affiliated with the Triangle Network and is currently a Senior Advisor in the Visual Studies Department, University of Karachi. Khan has curated several exhibitions of contemporary Pakistani art, notably The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan, 1990–2010 (Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, 2010). Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including the Lahore Biennale 02 (2020), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), the Shanghai Biennale (2012) Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan at Asia Society, New York, USA (2009). In 2019, Khan represented Pakistan at the inaugural Pavilion of Pakistan at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2013 she received the Prince Claus Award in recognition of her initiatives in the fields of art and culture. The artist has been awarded residencies at the Institute for Comparative Modernities, (ICM) Cornell University (2017); the Rybon Art Center, Tehran and Gasworks, London.

Asma Kazmi’s art practice is research based and trans disciplinary where she unearths invisible, forgotten, and ignored histories linked to the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial contexts. She combines material as well as virtual objects to create complex visual, aural, and haptic relations. As a person shifting between multiple languages and cultural contexts, Kazmi’s process allows her to create works in the US, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Asma Kazmi teaches video, performance art, new media, drawing, and graduate seminars. Kazmi holds a join appointment at the Berkeley Center for New Media.