Twelve Gates Arts presents Sites of Ruin, a group exhibition featuring works by Tsohil Bhatia, Noormah Jamal, Ahmad Qais Munhazim, and Sam Samiee, to open on Friday November 4th, 2022.
Featuring Tsohil Bhatia, Noormah Jamal, Ahmad Qais Munhazim, and Sam Samiee. Sites of Ruin is on view from November 4th, 2022 to January 21st, 2023 at Twelve Gates Arts, 106 North 2nd St. Philadelphia, PA 19106. Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday 11 AM - 5 PM or by appointment.
Opening Reception: November 4th, 2022, 5:30-8pm, Walkthrough @ 7 pm
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. Working in installation, painting, photography, video, and sculpture, 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.
Love and pleasure persist in ruin. Ahmad Qais Munhazim’s photographs depict queer love, joy and friendships amidst the ruins of American warfare in Afganistan. The irrevocably global landscape grounds portraits of the artist’s friends and chosen family, who pose with flowers from his father’s once-bombed garden that still blooms. Sam Samiee’s portraits drape homoerotic nude figures along the traditional curves of Perso-Arabic script. His boldly pigmented bodies invoke Matisse, and pose at times in front of ornate handicraft, or in empty rooms. A delicate balance of indigenous and imperial references, Samiee contemplates the multidirectional tensions of Western masculinity on Queer Persian existence. Queer intimacy is not a luxury but a necessity; it takes root and thrives, regardless of its environs.
Violence, too, endures. Tsohil Bhatia’s video installation follows a photo of the artist being edited for a U.S. visa application, we watch as their wounds are erased from their face, modifying their image to adhere to the dehumanizing protocol of petitioning for migration. Noormah Jamal’s sculptures weigh the legacy of her people against their subjugation and misrepresentation. Noormah’s ceramic busts and heads bloom from flowers. Roses bud from the eyes and mouth, a symbol she associates with loss. Jamal visualizes the emotions behind stories that are repeatedly ignored or silenced, conjuring them into existence.
From Munhazim’s American-Afghan warscape, to Samiee’s rooms that are ambiguously here and there, or Jamal’s sculptures that grow from a space of constant mourning, the artists extricate the site from its physical location, exploring it instead as a transoceanic space and sensibility. Without the sterile casing of a memorial or museum that imperial power affords, they avow that ruin, like power, is transitive and dynamic. The site of ruin is inextricable from the life around it, and those who cause it.
Tsohil Bhatia (b.1992 New Delhi) is an artist and homemaker currently based in Lenapehoking now known as New York City. They received their MFA at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2020). Tsohil’s practice emerges from contemplations about the latencies of mundane objects, rituals, and images – bringing together the complexities of human existence and the body’s relationship with time and the space it inhabits. Through their performance practice, Tsohil explores and addresses paradoxes as well as represents unresolvable concepts and emotions. They utilize books as containers for preserving ephemera. Their work has been shown at the University of British Columbia, Orecomm Festival, Queer Arts Festival, Franconia Sculpture Park, Hair+Nails, Fowler Kellogg Art Center and the Warhol. They’re represented by Blueprint12 Gallery (India).
Noormah Jamal (b. 1992 Peshawar) is a Brooklyn/Peshawar based Visual Artist. She graduated with honors from the National College of Arts in 2016, majoring in Mughal miniature painting. Having grown up in many cities in Pakistan, her experiences of each are reflected in her practice. Her self-identity is deeply rooted in her Pukhtoon Heritage. Since graduating, she has had numerous shows in Pakistan, Dubai, China and Switzerland. Some of the shows include Tarhun The Beautiful the Bizarre at O Art Space, Lahore; Ustaad Shahgird exhibited at PNCA Islamabad and XIANG Polytechnic University, China; Space in Time at Reitberg Museum, Switzerland/Canvas Gallery Karachi and Drun; and The Insider, the Outsider at Sanat Initiative, Karachi. Her work has also appeared in various magazines and publications. She was an artist in residence at VASL Karachi, for the Taaza Tareen 2019 cycle, and was awarded the Imran Mir Art Prize for the most promising artist 2019. She is currently doing her MFA from Pratt Institute.
Ahmad Qais Munhazim (b. Kabul), a genderqueer Afghan, Muslim and perpetually displaced, is an assistant professor of global studies at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. As an interdisciplinary scholar, de/colonial ethnographer and artist, Munhazim’s work troubles borders of academia, art and activism while exploring everyday experiences of war and displacement in the lives of queer and trans Afghans. Munhazim’s previous collaborative art has been exhibited and shown at the Twin Cities Pride Art Festival, Minnesota Museum of American Art and Toronto Queer Film Festival Currently, Munhazim is preparing their book manuscript based on a de/colonial ethnography of queer and trans Afghans in Afghanistan and Afghan diaspora in the United States.
Sam Samiee (b. 1988, Tehran) is a painter, essayist, and psychoanalyst in training based in Berlin and Tehran. His primary education in arts began at the University of Arts in Tehran. He finished Rijksakademie residency in 2015 and ArtEZ University of Arts and Design in 2013, where he was a lecturer of painting until 2020. He synthesizes his heavy research on art history, Persian poetry, and psychoanalytic theories into studio practice that employs painting in multiple registers. The characteristic of his installations as extended paintings is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. In more conventional paintings he works with decorative aspects while using model drawing and questioning uncertainties in modes of relation to life models and still life.. He has exhibited his works at the 10th Berlin Biennale, at Kunstmuseum, the Hague, the Parasol unit Foundation, Manchester Art Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Liste Art Fair, among many other international presentations.