Inspired by the 12th century Persian epic Conference of the Birds by Attar, Secrets of the Sun explores the poem’s core lesson: the soul’s search for divine enlightenment can come only by relinquishing worldly attachments and overcoming feelings that control us, such as greed, anger, envy and ego. The looping, allegorical tale follows the flock’s perilous journey over seven valleys led by the wise Hoopoe bird to the Valleys of Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Wonderment and Annihilation. Their goal is to reach the penultimate Mount Qaf, a mythical mountain wrapping around the Earth and thought to be home to the omnipotent Simurgh, a feature of Persian mythology. Chitra Ganesh, Rani Som, Saba Taj, and Maede Tafvizi utilize parables, structure and symbols found in the epic poem to collectively explore themes of ecological intimacy, self-discovery, community building, self-determination and liberation from static boundaries in images representing fluidity across geographical, diasporic, and gendered boundaries. 

Twelve Gates Arts (12G) is pleased to collaborate with the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to present its MFA Painting Thesis Show, a group exhibition featuring the works of ten graduating MFA artists. Aiza Ahmed, Ashley N. Bergner, Aaron Feltman, Christopher Huff, James Ming Johnson, Boluwatife Oyediran, Gonçalo Preto, Dylan Sheahan, Lily Taylor, and Zainab Zulfiqar will showcase their works with an opening on Friday, June 7th, 2024 at Twelve Gates Arts. This exhibition marks the culmination of artistic exploration for these graduating MFA students. The Thesis Show is on view until July 20th, 2024 at Twelve Gates Arts located at 106 N 2nd St, Philadelphia, PA 19106. 

Twelve Gates Arts (12G) is proud to present Power/Play a group exhibition featuring works by Jagdeep Raina, Noormah Jamal, Hardeep Pandhal, and Sophia Balagamwala, opening on Friday, March 15th, 2024 at Twelve Gates Arts.

Power/Play is on view from March 15th to May 18th, 2024 at Twelve Gates Arts located at 106 N 2nd St, Philadelphia, PA 19106.

Twelve Gates Arts is proud to present the immersive installation “The Mirage” from the ALHAMDU | MUSLIM FUTURISM exhibit created and curated by the Muslim arts and culture collective—MIPSTERZ,  opening on Friday, February 2nd, 2024.

It is on view from February 2, 2024, to February 24, 2024, at Twelve Gates Arts, 106 North 2nd St. Philadelphia, PA 19106.

What is Destined: Stories of Resistance and Memory is a group exhibition that explores how systems of power seek to control land and movement through space via avenues of occupation, apartheid, militarization, violence, and caste. Highlighting the history of protest movements as well as using motifs of vacancy and pattern design, artists acknowledge the histories of resistance to injustices within their own communities. Collectively, these artists use their work as a tool for self-actualization to combat erasure, assert their connection to the land, and declare the future existence of their communities.

We are very excited to announce the opening of our new exhibit, “Proposals for a Memorial to Partition,” curated by Murtaza Valli. Join us at the Twelve Gates Gallery on Friday, August 4th from 5:30 to 7:30P ET to explore the deeply thought-provoking artworks that reflect on the history and impact of Partition.

“Proposals for a Memorial to Partition” will be on view until October 28th.

Remnants of Another traces the contours of genealogical memory among Indo-Caribbean artists descended from indentured Indian laborers to Suriname, Trinidad, and Guyana (1838-1917) working in the Netherlands, Canada and the U.S. Juxtaposing historical and family archives, these artists visualize remembrance as a form of survival alongside the enduring inheritance of Indian indentureship. Featuring practices ranging from oil painting to film, quilting and printmaking to photography, this exhibit reimagines alternative visions of ancestral selves, kinship and diaspora.

Sites of Ruin unmoors the site of imperial violence from its fixed location in time and space. This multidisciplinary show expounds forms of queer resistance to the physical and cultural violence of occupation, war, and patriarchy. The artists create with urgency; their works demand a witness to the rituals of creation at the site of so-called ruin– the intimate and the meditative, the rageful and the joyous. Sites of Ruin shatters the static facade of the site, presenting instead ruins that breathe, transform, and resonate globally, with encroaching familiarity.

Twelve Gates Arts presents ALTER, a group exhibition curated by Sadaf Padder that explores the material culture and physical spaces in religion, ritual and state. On view August 5th-October 12th, 2022.

a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. Kal

fragments from a collective archive organized by Aziz Sohail

with Arshia Fatima Haq, Ayesha Chaudhry, Chathuri Nissansala, Fiza Khatri, kal RITUALS, kal FICTIONS, Tehreem Mela, The Many Headed Hydra, Sa’dia Rehman, Sabeen Omar, Sophia-Layla Afsar, radio kal, Vasi Samudra Devi, Veenadari Lakshika and Vicky Shahjehan

a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. Kal was co-initiated by Aziz Sohail and The Many Headed Hydra in 2020. kal is curated and cared for collectively by Aziz Sohail, Fiza Khatri, Sandev Handy, The Many Headed Hydra, Promona Sengupta, Zahabia Khozema, Sakina Aliakbar, Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke, Momina Masood, and the teams of District*School Without Center, Archive Books and Zubaan Books.

fragments from a collective archive is organized by Aziz Sohail.

Twelve Gates Arts is pleased to present a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. Kal (kal) a retrospective of works produced by the eponymous trans*oceanic platform. kal traces decolonial and feminist futures and pasts that are connected through bodies of water lapping at different shorelines. kal brings together artists, writers, organizers and makers from South Asia, the South Asian diasporas and post-/migrant Europe. A queer feminist and decolonial infrastructure for transdiciplinary and collaborative art practices & alternative pedagogies, kal manifests online and in situ through Houses (spaces of togetherness, making, learning and rest) in Colombo, Karachi, and Berlin, a radio channel and a series of publications.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 1st, 5-8pm
Walkthrough, 7pm, Yasi Alipour, Maryam Ghoreishi, and Leeza Ahmady
On view from March 29th to April 23rd

Public programs:
Performative Workshop : Saturday, April 23rd, 3-5pm

Twelve Gates Arts is pleased to present The Pleasure of Futile Cycles, a solo exhibition by Yasi Alipour, curated by Maryam Ghoreishi in collaboration with the acclaimed New York platform Asia Contemporary Art Forum (ACAF). The exhibition features recent and new tactile works by Yasi Alipour made on a variety of papers merely through the artist’s act of folding and unfolding paper, or its combination with the cyanotype process.

Twelve Gates Arts is pleased to present Excavation Paths, the first solo exhibition of Philadelphia-based artist Shwarga Bhattacharjee, curated by Tausif Noor. Featuring new and recent works on paper and canvas that showcase Bhattacharjee’s nuanced engagement with abstract painting and collage, the exhibition centers on the densely layered narratives—personal, political, and social—that teem below the geographies and spaces that define our lives.

Slavs and Tatars: The Bacteria Bar is on view at Twelve Gates Arts from October 15th through December 18th 2021. Taking the process of fermentation as a point of entry to challenging our assumptions about identity, reason, and history. Combining installation, printmaking, and performance, The Bacteria Bar generates constructive conversations among diverse communities at a time when exclusivist claims to national heritage rage in the United States and abroad.

Hasteem is an exhibition produced by the Collective for Black Iranians to raise awareness on the intersection of being Black, African/of African descent and Iranian. An exhibition that powerfully brings together Black, non-Black, Afro-Iranian, Black American and African artists for the first time in the Iranian community, Hasteem tells the history and stories of an erased reality. On view at Twelve Gates Arts September 3rd-24th, 2021.

The Beetroot Robe, Qasim Riza Shaheen's second solo show at 12G, is a journey through colors, characters and codes. Its works are ceremonious, part imagined future, part remembrance of past. While its shard-like visual narratives seek to unite ambiguity and mystique, its posed portraits look back at the viewer, invoking the power of retrospect to elucidate the process of longing and aging.

Turning toward the abstract, A Space for Monsters yanks at the esoteric threads that entangle identity, resistance, and belonging, and wittingly awaits the unravelling.

Twelve Gates Arts presents " It is the Sea that Connects Us ", Shiraz Bayjoo’s solo show, curated by Anna Arabindan Kesson. Shiraz Bayjoo’s practice is animated by the legacies of the plantation and unfree labor in Mauritius. He explores the entangled movement of people and commodities that shaped the island’s landscape and located it within an imperial geography. Working between photography, painting and film, he assembles alternate archives of remembrance that imagine futures beyond the ruins, and the limits, of these colonial histories.

Twelve Gates Arts presents "Undisciplined Pleasures, Vigilant Defiance", Sarah Khan’s solo show, curated by Anna Arabindan Kesson. Inspired by the Sultanate miniature paintings in the 16th-century Central Indian cookbook The Book of Delights written for Sultan Ghiyath Shah (1469-1500), Sarah Khan has radically reimagined the Sultan’s harem comprised of African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women in the recouped “City of Joy." In a series of 10 editioned prints, Khan offers an alternative universe where assertive, empowered women, no longer in positions of servitude, engage and care for each other. Three historical female figures from the Indian Ocean’s East African, Arab, and South Asian worlds—Queen Bilqis, Razia Sultan, and Freedom Fighter Weyzero - participate in “undisciplined pleasures”, pleasures ignited and sustained through intimate gestures, court architecture and foods and medicines in all types of vessels. And when called to arms, the women brandish an array of weapons, defiant in their stand against injustice. Creating her own pantheon, Khan defies erasure, inscribes lost narratives, and revises histories.

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION - CLICK HERE

Twelve Gates Arts is proud to present this solo exhibition of the art of illumination by Iranian-American artist, Behnaz Karjoo. Immanence refers to the divine presence in the material world, as explored in Sufi literature. This theme is reflected in Karjoo's works on paper within the exhibtion. Islamic Illumination, known as tazhib, is an art form that has been practiced in many parts of the Muslim world for over a millennium. Tazhib is derived from the Arabic word zahab, which means gold. Tazhib was primarily used to decorate manuscripts, a practice which still continues today. Today, tazhib is usually practiced in conjunction with calligraphy. Illuminators use small brushes to create a wide variety of motifs from crushed gold, gouache, watercolor, and natural pigments. In the accompanying workshop, students will be introduced to the material and techniques of this traditional art.

Tehran born artist Behnaz Karjoo began studying Illumination (tazhib) under Mujgan Baskoylu, a master of Turkish illumination, miniature painting, and paper cutting. Her works have been exhibited in various venues in the U.S. and the Middle East. The exhibition Immanence: Tazhib in America will be on view through the 22nd of February.

Twelve Gates Arts is proud to present this solo exhibition of artwork from Mohammad Omar Khalil. Drawn from different series, the works share themes of postcolonial displacement and placemaking - a collection of black prints and color collages of movement across borders. Born in Sudan, Khalil is a master painter and printmaker who has traveled and worked mainly between New York, Italy and North Africa; he attended the Khartoum Technical Institute and went on to obtain his MFA from Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. From there he moved to New York City, where he began working in the studio of Robert Blackburn, and it was there that Khalil made a strong and lasting connection with Krishna Reddy. He is an embodiment of a rare quality of steady and strong but quiet perseverance and leadership, a visual voice for those whose existence stands between ‘defined’ worlds. Khalil is an extraordinarily influential artist who has, over the course of half a century, been able to work in conversation with an extended network of international artists - mentors, peers and students - all the while notably mastering the techniques of dominant traditions without being overpowered by that experience.

Clear-Hold-Build

September 6 – October 23, 2019

Opening reception: September 13, 2019 7-9pm

Twelve Gates Arts and HEKLER present Clear-Hold-Build,
a group exhibition and public programs that examine the lasting trauma of global counterinsurgency featuring works by:

Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Dena Al-Adeeb, Shabir Ahmed Baloch, Samia Henni, Khaled Jarrar, Vladimir Miladinović, The Propeller Group, Farideh Sakhaeifar, and Hồng- Ân Trương.

Curated and organized by Shimrit Lee, Joshua Nierodzinski and Nataša Prljević of HEKLER, an artist-run collaborative platform that fosters the critical examination of hospitality and conflict.

Swarthmore College presents Friends at Twelve Gates Arts. Friends includes works by fifteen unique artists that explore the relationships between personal experiences, culture, and history.

Driven by questions about displacement and refuge, history and experience, Swarthmore Colleges Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary, explores art’s capacity to build empathy and create deeper senses of belonging. Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary is supported by The Pew Center For Arts & Heritage.

Plucked From The Womb Like Something Tart brings together the work of two Bangladeshi- American artists who share the experience of being first-generation immigrants since childhood. Visual artist and writer, Riya Hamid was raised in East New York, Brooklyn and now lives in Berlin. Her work seeks to augment the dialogue of class in relation to opportunity and livelihood from the feminine Bengali diasporic experience. She embodies and reflects her contemplation of the world in all aspects of her work with presence. Asif Hoque left his South Florida home to earn his degree from Pratt Institute and now lives and works in Brooklyn. His body of work is a reflection of the plurality of his identity. Through the use of mixed media, he builds friction through application of layers and texture in order to facilitate a conversation. Both have gracefully transformed what was a heightened experience of childhood alienation into an evolved existential exploration.

The show, curated by Twelve Gates’ Atif Sheikh, brings together a group of artists whose work responds to and explores the many aspects of violence in contemporary society.  By referencing the aesthetics of the past, each in their own way, the tradition of depicting violence in art becomes evident; as applied to contemporary issues, the aesthetics call into question the tradition itself.  As we as a global society become increasingly aware of the destructive, divisive outcomes and less convinced by the narrative in favor of the necessity of engaging in conflict, the tradition of depicting violence in art reflects this almost traumatized, fragmented reckoning.  The pieces seem to seek to slow down the process of conflict enough to understand it and perhaps choose a different conclusion.

Twelve Gates Arts will showcase a series of mixed-media pieces from North Carolina-based artist Saba Taj. The works visualize the inhabitants of a fictional, but relevantly apocalyptic ideation of the future - with an empowering twist. The delicacy with which Taj treats the “strange” manifestations leaves one with a sense that they are nurturing the visualized forms into the present.

Co-hosted by JACL Philadelphia & PAAFF

A series of 60+ original printed works connecting four distinct periods and the complex history of Anti-Asian racism in the United States - Chinese Exclusion Era in mid 1800’s, WWII Anti-Japanese Propaganda, the Auto Industry’s Japan Bashing in the 1970’s - 1980’s, and Post 9/11 Islamophobia in relationship to contemporary political rhetoric. By framing highly amplified contemporary issues such as Islamophobia as part of the larger historic trend, the show encourages viewers to consider historical precedents and their effects, and to think more critically about today’s (21st century) xenophobia.

Works come from the Collections of Rob Buscher and Cathy Matos, and Jamal J. Elias

STORIES OF REFUGE

TANIA EL KHOURY

September 6 - 28, 2018

Presented in partnership with FringeArts and Bryn Mawr College as part of ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury, an extensive survey of the artist's work

12Gates is proud to present Stories of Refuge, an immersive video installation that invites audiences to lay down on metal bunk beds and watch videos shot by Syrian asylum seekers in Munich, Germany. Tania El Khoury and Petra Serhal from Beirut-based Dictaphone Group collaborated with a group of Syrian refugees who had recently arrived in Munich. They provided each person with a discreet camera for a day, the only instructions being to film their lives in Munich and their favorite spots in the city. Tania El Khoury is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and is concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is an active collaborator. Tania’s work has been shown in five continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She works between the United Kingdom and Lebanon.

Major support for ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury has been provided to Bryn Mawr College by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.