Progressive Diasporas
Oct. 1-28, 2022
An artist residency
Curated by Sheetal Prajapati & Anna Harsanyi
10th Floor, Room 1005
Progressive Diasporas is a curatorial project series exploring the experiences and intersections of immigrant diasporas through a set of collaboratively developed, cumulative experiences and events. The project - formed in part through the exploration of the curators’ own ongoing creative and personal exchange over 7 years - aims to share and support collaboration between artists, non-artists, program participants, and the curators. With a focus on process as practice, Progressive Diasporas draws its shape from the immigrant experiences embedded in our everyday strategies for survival, amassing small networks, shifting forms and identities, seeking out resources, adjusting comfort, and other invisible forms of sustainability. The project hopes to create spaces for intersectionality around the shared experiences and connections one finds through the process of migration, movement and displacement of identities.
The first iteration in the series welcomes artists Umber Majeed and collective Adobo-Fish-Sauce (Ricky Orng and Febo Anthony) to explore the experience of diasporas through the development of ongoing and new work with others. Each artist invited a member of their own community outside of the arts to collaborate with, producing ideas, inspiration and work for this project.
About the Artists’ Projects and Collaborators
Adobo-Fish-Sauce will examine how the diaspora has affected their larger Puerto Rican and Khmer communities, then dive into how it has impacted their personal families and the ways it has manifested in them. With this new perspective, they will envision paths of joy and healing, moving forward through habits and rituals they wish to put in place. The project will showcase their process of discovering and writing new works, as well as featuring a final video piece and performance.
Adobo-Fish-Sauce will dive into the history of their family’s journey through collaborations with family members in interviews and research. Febo shares, “The Puerto Rican history I carry with me is the spirit of the Jíbaro: The classic image of the farmer, the mountain whisperer, the lineage of my father and his father and all my aunts and uncles in between. My father always said, “dejalo bruto” — leave them dumb — that no one expects the jíbaro to know much but we always have something up our sleeve…” Ricky adds, “I’ve been asking myself why it seems like my family and their history only began in America, as if the journey to make home here was just a consolation prize for an American Dream. I can imagine so much violence in a retelling, of a person’s erasure of childhood substituted with survival...”
Umber Majeed’s project is an iteration of an ongoing work, Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan), an interactive installation incorporating video, ceramic sculptures, postcards, and other elements to speculate on nostalgia, gentrification, and futurity of urbanization claims in Lahore, Pakistan. Combining familial archives, the apparatus of the screen, tools of leisure, context of gentrification in South Asia, the project seeks for viewers to loiter in the kitsch imaginary of corporate culture and critical analysis within a former failed tourism company of the artist’s uncle (a digitally revitalized “Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services”). This specific iteration includes an interactive booth, Overseas Enclave, directly addressing the accumulation of the ‘South Asian digital kitsch and labor.’ Through a collaboration with self-taught South Asian graphic designers, the artist has designed Trans-Pakistan logo postcards combining digital prints and screen printing processes. The available takeaways will be framed around a number of promotional videos on behalf of Trans-Pakistan.
Umber Majeed will be collaborating with Shakil Miah, owner of Graphics World in Jackson Heights, Queens. Shakil Miah, a Bangladeshi immigrant, opened Graphics World in 2012. His small scale company specifically caters to the South Asian local community and businesses in multicultural Jackson Heights, Queens. Graphic World's offices are in a central part of the diasporic South Asian community around Roosevelt Avenue in Queens and comprise of 4-5 graphic designers on staff. The designs from the company reflect the aesthetics and design of a displaced South Asian urban landscape.
Progressive Diasporas is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, a regrant program supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by LMCC. We’d also like to thank The Puffin Foundation for their support of this project.
This project is organized in partnership with The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.
Project Curators
Sheetal Prajapati is an educator, artist and advisor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Currently, she serves as the Executive Director at Common Field, a national arts organization supporting artists and art workers, and works as consultant through her agency Lohar Projects, focusing on public engagement, special projects, artist development and organizational planning. Sheetal also works with artists one-on-one for advising and mentorship through her agency and with places like Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Kresge Art in Detroit program. She also regularly advises and serves on review panels for grant, residency and fellowship programs at organizations like The Laundromat Project, Apex Art, The Joyce Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts amongst others.
Prior to opening Lohar Projects, Sheetal spent 17 years working in arts organizations including The Museum of Modern Art and Pioneer Works in New York as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Block Museum of Art (Illinois). From 2016-2021, she taught in MFA programs for the School of Visual Arts (New York), Montclair State Univeristy (New Jersey), and Moore College of Art and Design (Pennsylvania) and regularly speaks on topics including public engagement, creative pracitce and identity. Sheetal received an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Northwestern University in History and Gender Studies.
sheetalprajapati.com
Loharprojects.com
@sdp80
@loharprojects
Anna Harsanyi is a curator, educator, and arts manager. She is dedicated to presenting art in a non-art context and creating sites that invite participation from audiences outside of the art community.
She has organized projects presenting artist engagements within the historic Essex Street Market in New York's Lower East Side; developed cross-cultural projects about friendship and dreams in Saint Petersburg, Russia and Seoul, South Korea, respectively; commissioned projects exploring the often hidden or dormant histories for The New School Centennial; and collaborated with Sheetal Prajapati on a series of events centered around play. In 2014, she co-curated with Roxana Bedrule Hot & Cold: Revolution in the Present Tense, a public art project in Timișoara and Cluj, Romania which presented three artist projects responding to the 25th anniversary of the Revolution that ended Communism.
Anna has worked in education and public engagement roles at the Art Encounters Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, New York Arts Practicum, A Blade of Grass, and the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She teaches at The New School.
annaharsanyi.com
@anna1harsanyi
Artist Biographies
Adobo-Fish-Sauce
A Puerto Rican and a Cambodian walk into a kitchen. The kitchen is your heart. The food is made with food. The food is sometimes poems. Either way you are fed.
Adobo-Fish-Sauce is an active choice to celebrate in the face of bitterness. It is responding to “Go back to where you come from!” by bringing where they are from right to you. The duo fuses spoken word, cooking, intentionality, vulnerability, and joy to create a one of a kind experience that can’t be found in any kitchen or open mic.
Adobo-Fish Sauce is Anthony Febo, a Puerto Rican poet, teaching artist, and new dad living in Arlington, MA and Ricky Orng, a Cambodian-American organizer, designer and storyteller.
https://adobo-fish-sauce.com/
@adobofishsauce
Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens.
Majeed has had two solo exhibitions: In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present, Rubber Factory, New York (2018) and Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Facts about the Earth), 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virgina (2021), and an upcoming solo presentation, Made in Trans-Pakistan (2022), Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. The artist has also shown in venues across Pakistan, North America, and Europe. Recent group exhibitions include; The Divided Self, The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (2012); The Museum: Within and Without, The State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg, Russia (2015); Promises to Keep, apexart, New York (2017); Witness-Karachi Biennale, Karachi, Pakistan (2017); and Volumes-Queens International, Queens Museum, New York (2018). She is a recipient of numerous fellowships including the HWP Fellowship, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017); Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018); the Digital Earth Fellowship, Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-19); and the Technology Residency, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2020). Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.
Her current solo exhibition,” Umber Majeed: Made in Trans-Pakistan”, is on view at Pioneer Works through December 11, 2022 in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Events & Programs
This series will include an installation presenting the artist’s work alongside a reading resource space hosting events and open hours for visitors and program participants. We welcome participants and attendees to join us for any of these programs and hope you’ll be able to attend more than one event in the series to experience the progression of ideas and work. All programs in the series are free and open to the public but may require RSVP if capacity is limited.
Opening Event
Saturday, October 22, 2pm - 6pm
The project will launch during The Elizabeth Foundation’s Open Studios on October 22, featuring installations and video work by both artists, and a zine-making workshop led by Adobo-Fish-Sauce.
Bring Your Own Diasporas
Tuesday, October 25, 6:30-8:30pm
Limited capacity, please RSVP here
Co-curators Anna Harsanyi & Sheetal Prajapati will host a sharing session inviting participants to bring and share stories and artifacts expressing their experience of intersectionality in diaspora, in a small group dialog. Prompts for discussion for this session will be drawn in part from Adobo-Fish-Sauce.
Closing Performances and Gathering
Friday, October 28, 7-9pm
Limited capacity, please RSVP here
This final event will present the artists’ work over the course of their projects, including a lecture performance by Umber Majeed and a cooking and poetry performance by Adobo-Fish-Sauce.
