welcome to what we took from is the state

March 12, 2016 4-6pm: Opening reception

April 2, 2016 2-4pm: Closing reception

Guest curated by Sadia Shirazi

Participating Artists:

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) formed in the late 1990’s, before 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the ongoing US-led “Global War on Terror.” Between the organization’s founding and the present moment, the ground of its community has shifted amid the geopolitics of endless war and the carceral politics of the state.

Operating in parallel to these wars waged by the state against those it deems terrorists, anti-nationals, and non-citizens, are the social, domestic, and commercial spaces—resistant “black sites”—that are the subjects of many of the artworks brought together in this exhibition. These other spaces are the resources referred to in the exhibition’s title—sites of nourishment, care, filial relation, and resistance. Through works that take many forms, including installation, photomontage, video, performance, and social sculpture, the artists in this exhibition ask how we might recalibrate our feelings in relation to one another under the pressure of forces that seek to weaken, diminish, and destroy the social bonds and debts that hold us together.

Taking its title from a passage in “The Feel Trio” by Fred Moten, “welcome to what we took from is the state” is interested in refusal more than representation, and gives a nod to all those hiding in plain sight, just out of view of the state.

Image credit: Chitra Ganesh, Her Nuclear Waters, 2013.