Offal

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
4800 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90027

August 15 – September 22, 2019
Opening: August 11, 2019, 2-5pm

This summer, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery will present a show conceived from the subject of offal (ˈôfəl,ˈäfəl), or the culture of consuming innards–a subject matter we hope will not be too awful to stomach. The work feeds into deeper issues involving food gentrification and insecurity, taboos, race, gender and class. Taken together, these issues form the beating heart of what and how Los Angeles is as a creative community today.

Every Woman Biennial

Bendix Building
1206 Maple Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90015

June 3-12th, 2019 1-7pm 
Opening: June 2, 2019, 4-7pm

The EVERY WOMAN BIENNIAL is the all women-identified art biennial to include over 600 artists in its two unique presentations in NY and LA, featuring expanded art exhibitions, a NY film festival, a Flash Mob in NY, and performances of Girl Bands in LA. Timing with The Whitney Museum’s Biennial, the aim is to extend the celebration of art and create even more positive opportunities for emerging women artists. The salon-style exhibition features painting, photography, installation, sculpture, video art, textile, and multimedia works, activated by performance, dance, music, poetry readings, theater and film.

Self-Center

Evidence Film Studios
2122 Aaron Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Fri, May 31, 2019
8:00 PM – 11:00 PM
RSVP

Taking place during Mental Health Awareness Month, the show makes explicit the exploration of self that so often underscores art-making. The artists use their bodies, interventions into their own creative processes, and contemplations of internal worlds and external factors to investigate the theme.

The one-night gallery show includes a bar, live performances, and a curated dialogue with some of the artists. Level Ground’s current resident artists will also present works-in-progress in anticipation of their solo exhibits during Level Ground’s 2019 Festival this fall.

Exile: The Land of Non-Belonging

California Museum of Photography
University of California-Riverside
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501

May 25 - September 8, 2019
Exile: The Land of Non-Belonging brings together six artists who visually explore, through photographs and videos, the experience of exile and the desire for identity and belonging. Although these artists cannot be grouped by geography, gender, or age, they each left their native countries, and most now reside in the United States. Coming from Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, the artists visually narrate their journeys navigating new environments where gender, ethnicity, and sexuality assume different connotations.

The exhibition draws on the words of the French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil, who wrote in 1943 that uprootedness is a universal condition that affects those who have experienced the rift from a place of origin, community, and the past. Exile presents the work of contemporary artists at a time when globalization is prevailing in our lives, and war, famine, and intolerance continue to drive thousands of people out of their homelands.

 This exhibition is curated by Camilla Querin, Curatorial Fellow at the California Museum of Photography.

FestFoto 2019

April 27-May 26, 2019
Photos from the project Bepar (Hop) received 5th place and will be exhibited at FestFoto, an international festival of photography:

FestFoto
Fundação Ibere Camargo
Porto Alegre, Brazil

Ibrida Festival

Bepar (Hop) is showing in the SEGNALI program as part of the Ibrida Festival:

La Fabbrica Delle Candele
Piazzetta Corbizzi, 9/30, 47121 Forlì, Italy

April 26-28, 2019

4 Hands 4 Walls: An Architecture of Remembrance

Excited to be presenting several works in conversation with my father in a solo exhibition sponsored by Zanbeel Art at:

Hangar Gallery
Santa Monica Art Studios
3026 Airport Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90405

March 9-April 6, 2019

Storefront Media Gallery

March 7-December 31, 2019

Bepar (Hop) is showing at:

Storefront Media Gallery
4Culture
101 Prefontaine Pl S
Seattle WA 98104

On view 7:00 am—10:00 pm daily

Women in Windows

'Ravel' has been included in the exhibit, Women in Windows, a multi-part video installation which focuses on the confluence of culture, religion and society in an exploration of female identity.

This exhibition subverts the societal notion of female-as-object and presents the experiences, feelings and intellects of six women artists of color in an unignorable public forum. Glass boxes, which so often frame their bodies, become windows into the souls and substance of these women, who show us that the multifaceted and deeply personal female perspective cannot be contained by, or simplified to, a skin-deep, male-gaze centric representation of what it means to be female.

Women In Windows is produced and curated by Zehra Ahmed and is supported by Automata Arts, Chungking Studio, General Lee’s, Imprint Projects, The Institute for Art and Olfaction, Lisa Derrick Fine Arts, Poetic Research Bureau Preen Inc. and Press Friends.

Windows along Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012

February 26 - March 17, 2019

In Search of Baba Singh

In Search of Baba Singh is the first iteration of an ongoing research project with Aziz Sohail that takes as its jumping off point the arrest record of Baba Singh, a laborer from Punjab, India in California at the turn of the twentieth century. Baba Singh was arrested in 1914 for 'infamous crimes against nature'; a statute that at the time would criminalize a range of sexual behaviors including homosexuality. 

Within the exhibition, the viewer encounters a range of works of art as well as archival and textual ephemera that become a means to reveal complex stories of forgotten lives. Through this exhibition, Baba Singh is thus a protagonist whose journey and destiny is unknown and potentially fictional, but through whom various possibilities of writing and recovering a lost queer history can be imagined.

UAG / ROOM Gallery, UC Irvine 
February 13, 2019
6.30 - 7 PM: Screening of Rex Vs Singh
7 - 8.00 PM: Lecture performance and conversation with Gazelle Samizay

ONE Archives, USC
909 W Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA
27 February, 2019: 6 - 8 PM
6.30 - 7 PM: Screening of Rex V Singh 
7 - 8 PM: Lecture performance and conversation in collaboration with Aziz Sohail

Focus Iran 3

January 27-May 12th

Bepar (Hop), created in collaboration with Labkhand Olfatmanesh won 2nd place prize and will be exhibited at:

Craft Contemporary
5814 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036

<Light Paradise>

im/pure will show at the opening of <Light Paradise>, commemorating the Yangpyeong Art Museum’s 7th anniversary in South Korea. The exhibition is consists of high-tech media art dealing with provincialization and globalization. 

There is a Portal

I have been working with the writer, Kayhan Irani and director, Rania Lee Khalil, to create video art for this performance, which uses public storytelling, participatory theater and humor to create spaces of healing around themes of migration, assimilation, and racism. Attendees are invited to tell their own stories to unearth the power of shared histories. More info...

Thursday, November 29th
6:30 PM- 8 PM
The James Gallery
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, First Floor
New York, NY 10016

Free - please RSVP

Storefront Media gallery

'My shadow is a word writing itself across time' is currently screening at 4culture gallery's Storefront Media gallery for the duration of 2018. It was recommended by both The Stranger and International Examiner

101 Prefontaine Pl S
Seattle WA 98101

Surrogate

View photos from the performance

Surrogate is a curated afternoon of performance, readings, and images that explore replacements for the physical body. I will be showing the model of the house my father built in Afghanistan and read the letter he wrote when he visited the house for the first time after 24 years. 

Sunday, August 26th at 1:00pm
Pieter Space
420 W Avenue 33, Los Angeles

paraspace

View photos from the screening.

My shadow is a word writing itself across time will be screening at the Echo Park Film Center as part of amwa's program, paraspace. It will be followed by a short Q & A with myself and the other directors. Hope to see you there!

"amwa film series 02: paraspace presents short films by pan-asian filmmakers based in los angeles. here, borders collapse. we engage with parallel and alternate realities as a method for survival — to pave new ways for reaching equilibrium via a reimagining of our collective potential and a transcendence of our physical time-space and bodies." 

August 22, 7:30pm
1200 N Alvarado St, Los Angeles 90026
$5 admission

Separation

View photos from the opening.

My shadow is a word writing itself across time is part of the exhibit Separation, which looks at the ways in which separation has been wielded by authorities to continually suppress and divide our nation by gender, class, and ethnicity. 
Opening: August 10, 6-9 pm
August 10-26 by appointment
Tin Flats, 1989 Blake Ave, Los Angeles.