2023 Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant grantee: Asma Kazmi
Asma Kazmi’s large scale installations blend physical and virtual spaces. Her sculptures, connoting materiality, cultural lineage, and craft are juxtaposed with virtual and augmented reality models of art historical objects and particular geographies. Taking an expansive approach to installation art, she researches and reassesses the intertwining histories of Western colonialism and her diasporic Muslim culture. Using transgressive curatorial tactics, she combines visual and textual detritus from historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixes them with her own “critical fabulation.” Drawing on her own history as a third generation émigré, migrating across continents, Kazmi’s installations are experimental museums that make use of Islamic display devices and strategies to address colonial and indigenous technologies and knowledge systems, global flows of people and commodities, and interspecies entanglements.
