Zamin Project | Panel 3: SWANA In The Bay Area: Teaching, Pedagogy, Mentors

Aggregate Space Gallery (ASG) presents Zamin Project, a virtual multi-faceted art project aiming to create a space for dialogue and connection between SWANA (South West Asia and North African) artists, curators, and art educators in the Bay Area and beyond. This series is initiated by Iranian-American artist Shaghayegh Cyrous, aiming to focus on the question of How can we create our own resources? by gathering SWANA artists, educators, and art leaders to develop a solution for enriching the community in the Bay area and beyond.

This is an online only event.

Zamin Project | Panel 3: SWANA in the BAY AREA: Teaching, Pedagogy, Mentors
Saturday, August 28, 2021, 2:00PM, Moderated by Roula Seikaly

Panelists: Taraneh Hemami, Kathy Zarur, Sholeh Asgary, Azin Seraj

Read about the Panelists:
Taraneh Hemami works with materials of history, collecting stories, organizing images, data and information, weaving complimentary and contradictory narratives that reveal complex relationships and connections across cultures and nations. Hemami has explored themes of displacement, preservation and representation in experimental collective research and curatorial projects that create conversation between artists, communities and the public. Her works of the past decade have focused on research and interpretations of archives of activism in the Bay Area and specifically of the local Iranian Diaspora affected and influenced by the experiences of surviving a revolution, war and migration (Hall of Reflections 2000).

She creates projects that offer opportunities for creative exchange between various communities, collaborating with artists and scholars through residencies and collective projects: Cross-Connections project at Center for Art and Public Life at CCA (2005-2006); Theory of Survival at The Lab (2008), and YBCA (2008); and Fabrications at Southern Exposure (2014). Her works of the past decade have focused on research and interpretations of archives of activism in the Bay Area, and parallel histories of protest and the quest for social change globally in publication Bulletin (2015); Print Public project People Power (2015); and Witness (2019). She has curated exhibitions \ focusing on showcasing often missing voices of artists from MENASA regions; including One Day: a Collective Narrative of Tehran (2009), and Part and Parcel (2019); Once at Present (2019, with Kevin Chen).

Kathy Zarur is Associate Professor of Art History at Skyline College and a curator and conference organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zarur’s exhibitions include Preoccupations: Palestinian Landscapes (Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco and Holding House, Detroit, 2019-2020); side by side/in the world (San Francisco Arts Commission, 2019), Betweenscapes (SOMArts for Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center and Kearny Street Workshop, 2018), and Where Is Here (Museum of the African Diaspora, 2016-2017). Conferences she has organized include Chinese Painting Here, Then and Now (San Francisco State University/Asian Art Museum, 2020), Teaching Art of the Middle East and Islamic World (San Francisco State University/de Young, 2017), and Zones of Representation (SF Camerawork, 2016). She has published articles in Art in America and Broadsheet. Her essay on Palestinian photographer Yazan Khalili appears in the edited volume Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus, published by the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press in 2021. Zarur holds a PhD in Art History and certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan.

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose practice is shaped by her early somatic experiences as a refugee. Situating the body as a site of knowledge, her immersive works, performances and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history, through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. She has exhibited and performed at various institutions including ARoS Kunstmuseum (DK), Sotheby’s Institute of Art (NY), Minnesota Street Project (SF), Charlotte Street Foundation (MO), and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (SF). A 2020 California Arts Council grantee for her participatory performance series “Majles,” she is also a recipient of a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation NEW Commissioning grant, and recipient of a 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant for curatorial initiatives as Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery, where she founded The Project Room. Asgary has participated in numerous residencies, current and most recently including Mass MoCA (2021), Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), Real Time & Space (2021), Wassaic Project (2020), ARoS Kunstmuseum (2021), and Kala Art Institute (2020). Currently residing in Oakland, CA, where she is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, teaching Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art, she received her MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University, and has lectured extensively on photography.

Azin Seraj is an Iranian native and Canadian citizen who currently lives in the United States. Her video, photography, and multimedia installations reflect the varied textures of her transnational experience of displacement and alienation but also of unexpected connections. She uses sounds and images to create visually and socially lush experiences, layering spaces and multiple time frames. With an interdisciplinary approach to marginalized experiences, Seraj explores connections between colonial histories, citizen journalism, activist networks and contemporary politics in South West Asia, South Asia and North Africa’s diaspora.

Seraj’s work has been featured internationally in exhibitions and festivals including SFMOMA, Open Space Arts Society in Canada, Tate Liverpool, (S8) Monstra De Cinema Periférico in Spain, Berkeley Art Museum, Minnesota Street Project, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Croatian Association of Artists. Most recently, she has been the recipient of the 2019 Kala Media Artist Award.

Read About the Moderator:
Roula Seikaly is an independent curator and writer, and Senior Editor + Co-Curatorial Director at Humble Arts Foundation. Roula has curated exhibitions at SF Camerawork and SOMArts (San Francisco), Axis Gallery (Sacramento), Filter Photo Festival (Chicago), CPAC (Denver), Blue Sky Gallery (Portland), and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Her writing is published virtually and in print at Hyperallergic, Photograph, BOMB, Afterimage, Aperture, Strange Fire Collective, and KQED Arts. She is the co-recipient of the 2019 Blue Sky curatorial prize for the exhibition "An Inward Gaze."

Panel Discussions | Artists Interviews | Online Archival Resources
August 14 - 25 September 25, 2021

https://aggregatespacegallery.org/project/zamin/
facebook.com/aggregatespace
info [at] aggregatespacegallery.org

Made possible by the California Arts Council.

Aggregate Space Gallery programs are generously supported by the Zellerbach family foundation, and have been previously supported by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment of the Arts, Creative Work Fund, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and others.