Huma Mulji
welcome to what we took from is the state
Curated by Sadia Shirazi
Queens Museum, New York
The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective formed in the late 1990s, before 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the ongoing US-led Global War on Terror. Between the organization’s founding and today, the ground of this 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, non-citizens and anti-nationals, are the social, domestic, and commercial spaces of our gathering—other resistant “black sites”—that are the subjects of many of the artworks brought together in this exhibition. These spaces are the resources referred to in the exhibition’s title—sites of nourishment, care, kinship, and celebration that come into existence through the entanglements in which they are given away. Through works that take many forms, including installation, photomontage, video, performance, and social sculpture, artists in the exhibition ask how we might recalibrate our feelings in relation to one another under the pressure of antagonisms that seek to 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 highlights multiple modes of artistic practice that engage with what precedes and persists beyond the call to order, just out of view of the state.
