FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
12Gates is honored to present No Father–No Frontier, a two-person show curated by Protyasha Pandey and featuring work by Humaira Abid and Aiza Ahmed. No Father–No Frontier opens on Friday, March 7th, 2025, and will remain on view until Saturday, April 26th, 2025.
OPENING RECEPTION: March 7th, 2025, 5:30 – 7:30 PM
(Twelve Gates Arts is located at 106 N 3nd St, Philadelphia, PA 19106).
EXHIBITION INFORMATION:
No Father–No Frontier is an examination of the relationship between family and state, and their subversions by the female gaze in exile. All three of us, removed from our points of origin, in the tout-monde–the West is in us, we are in the West. Displacement affords us the luxury of viewing distance. Drawing on the feminist argument for family abolition, Humaira Abid and Aiza Ahmed deliver critiques of paterfamilial regimes, and lay claim to personhood made outside of the established paradigms of lineage and citizenship.
To the infant Gender is the first instrument of abstraction. Home, follows as a first threshold; and family, the first line-of-control. To the artist, family is formidable emotional terrain—the possibilities for kinship, love and care sit alongside the possibility of despotism, pain and violence, subject to an unpredictable lottery. Poised against society, state and capital, She continues to be at once in need of the meagre protections of family and yet marginalised by its legacies and prescriptions.
Home – Hometown – Homeland
This family, the cell of the social tissue, sees itself reflected in the national imagination. The natural endogamy of the nuclear family, its exacted allegiance to blood, gene, seed is reflected in the paternalistic state, that demands an obedient subject. Just as taxes, benefits, wills and deeds are technologies of the familial regime, of the home; the fabulations of Fatherland – watan, mother-tongue, birthright and descent are the scaffolds of the nation, of the home-land.
The classical notion of watan, like pind, is relatively localised, as a home-town, but rarely given geographical content, instead placing its emphasis on its subjective meaning as an essential place in the psyche of the individual–genius loci for the topography of the past, childhood, youthful loves, the site for the displaced self’s former plenitude. Although related, the modern register for watan is semantically different—politically defined and geographically bound; the modern ideal of patriotism demanding fraternal fealty to an ephemeral imagined community. Unity, faith and discipline are family values, after all.
A macrocosm of the family, the nation-state incubates chauvinism, and at the frontier, chauvinism is made its most camp–elaborately choreographed pantomime aggression, zealousness, plumages, pomp, and pageantry, strutting, kicking and grandstanding, and much machismo of mandated moustaches.
Aiza Ahmed’s works are acute observations on masculinity and oppositional gazes in this political theatre of the absurd. Drawing from, and drawing with the cartoon sensibilities and biting satire of Awadh Punch is her bold claim to a lineage of satire borne from the same moment that bore us our collective nation-making myths. High camp is a serious business, and humour and joy salve us so we may confront despair and rage.
Her drawings give back to these sparse individuals the self(s) that are erased in favour of the ostentatious theatrical performance of nation-state. In stripping away the colours, the regalia, and accoutrements of these costumed actors, she renders them virtually indistinguishable from the celebratory bandwālā and bājewālā at a union. Herein lies the humour, ke patā hee nā chale batwārā hai yā bārāt.
[The relic of a painful separation is virtually indistinguishable from the celebration of a union]
The smallest domestic apparatus is sometimes the most important, not because they were particularly useful in the home they once belonged to, or intrinsically beautiful, but on a long journey, or on hasty departure, they were all that we could bring. And all at once, what was once quotidian, is now imbued with meaning, a receptacle for all our nostalgias of youth and oedipal kinships, an anchor for one who has come away unmoored, memorial wreath for all the bodies it was once surrounded by. A reminder of home, and the fact that we are no longer in it, a longing that is as temporal as it is spatial.
Here, abroad, none of that is left, we have been catapulted out of history. In the alien city, the points of reference that once anchored our lives have been stripped away—no familiar streets, no history to better or resist, no village or country to remember our name. Humaira Abid’s work reminds us, in this abstract and uniform desert of meaning, our tokens and trinkets are dearer, like a mother-tongue, a promise of inspiration and a bulwark against sterility.
When we return, we are to find that, in our absence, the maps have been redrawn. What is left of that watan is a spectral presence of once-inhabited homes. Inheritance is a crime-scene, so we are breaking the house, burning the map. The aberrant space of exile affords us estrangement, and affords us pleasure, also, to rearrange our desires, to imagine a world beyond the family, to dismantle the architectures of belonging, to imagine an indeterminate abundance that we have not yet known and are yet to organize, such that the sovereign self sweats itself out of the porous skins of kin and nation.
Humaira Abid’s sculptural works equally incorporate contemporary, conceptual themes as they are rooted in craft traditions. She chooses woodworking as her primary medium; turning, chiseling, carving and sandblasting, to transform quotidian objects into exquisite and intricate symbols. They are often layered with South-Asian miniature painting, created painstakingly with brushes often as small as a single hair, to create surreal textures and details. Her works address stereotype, societal repression, and too-often censored facets of female life.
The beauty and seductive virtuosity of her work offset her political, ironic, provocative, and even scandalous objects and installations, and in doing so, she boldly pushes the boundaries of these traditionally male-dominated craft traditions.
Humaira Abid was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. She now lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Abid received her BFA in Sculpture and Miniature painting from the National College of Arts, Lahore (2000).
Her works have been exhibited at the Tacoma Art Museum; Seattle Asian Art Museum; Museum of Art and Culture, Spokane; Contemporary Craft Pittsburgh; Museum for Art in Wood, Philadelphia; Bellevue Arts Museum; START Saatchi Gallery, London; Khaas Art Gallery, Islamabad; Lahore Biennale 02; Islamabad Art Fair; India Art Fair, New Delhi; Sharjah Art Museum, and Civic Museum of Palazzo della Penna, Perugia, Italy among others.
Her works feature in the permanent collections of Tacoma Art Museum; SeaTac International Airport; Pennsylvania Academy of Art (PAFA); National Art Gallery and Museum, Islamabad; Sarawak Living Museum; Partage Contemporary Artists Association, Mauritius; Daetz Centre (Museum of Sculpture in Wood), Lichtenstein; Kuona Trust International, Nairobi; Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Washington; Tweed Museum of Art, Minnesota, as well as several public and private art collections worldwide.
Abid is the recipient of numerous honors including, most recently, the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award, The Bob Stocksdale International Excellence in Wood Award, and the Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award from Seattle Art Museum.
She lectures widely and participates in teaching residencies and symposia around the world. The artist is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle.
Aiza Ahmed is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and writing, to contend with notions of borders, migrations, public histories, and private archives, within diasporic identities originating from the Indian Subcontinent. Ahmed's work keenly observes relationships, both real and imagined, exploring their performative nature, spectacle, and theatricality. Aiza approaches difficult terrains with kind-hearted humour.
Aiza Ahmed was born in Lahore, Pakistan and raised across Pakistan, the UK, and the UAE. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Ahmed received her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (2020) and her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island (2024).
Her works have been exhibited at the RISD Museum, Providence; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Christie’s, New York; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca; Rajiv Menon Contemporary; Los Angeles; New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), New York; Aicon Gallery; New York; Franklin Parrasch; New York; VM Art Gallery, Karachi; and Dominion Gallery, Lahore. Among others.
Ahmed is the recipient of several awards, including the RISD Graduate Commons Grant Fellowship and RISD Fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design; The Edith Stone and Walter King Memorial Prize, and the David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts, Cornell University. She was selected for the William Kentridge & The Centre for the Less Good Idea residency at the Brown Arts Institute in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, New York.
Protyasha Pandey was born and raised in Hyderabad, India. She now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. Pandey received her BArch from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi (2017) and her MA in Global Arts and Cultures from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island (2024), with the thesis titled “Urban as Oeuvre : Créolité as urban cultural artefact,” addressing the processes of urban identity-making and transformation at the intersection of architecture, linguistics and sociology.
Protyasha is a hybrid practitioner – curator, archivist, provenance researcher, scenographer and urbanist. Her artistic practice uses a combination of glassmaking, darkroom processes, and printmaking to construct narrative environments.
She has curated the photography and new media exhibition, Home/World, at the Rhode Island School of Design Department of Photography Graduate Biennial. Titled after Tagore’s 1916 novel ঘরে বাইরে [Ghôre Baire], the exhibition Home/World recognises geography as the essential substrate that receives the artists’ internal landscapes; the legitimization of logocentrist hierarchies and xenophobic nationalisms within naïve domesticity; and the conciliatory hopefulness in the Glissantian Tout-Monde.
She is a recipient of the RISD Fellowship, and has worked on multimedia projects including Libraries Of Rhode Island (LORI) Grant Funded Digital Preservation Project, Magnetic Media at Risk; Providence Public Library Nicholson Whaling Collection; India Foundation of the Arts (IFA) Arts Research Grant winner Deco in Delhi; EYEBEAM Institute Futura Tropica Network Grant; Berklee College of Music Sounds of the City; and Stuart Fowkes’ Cities and Memory.
About Twelve Gates Arts
Founded in 2009, Twelve Gates Arts (12G) is an arts gallery located in Old City, Philadelphia that uplifts South & West Asian diasporic artistic voices within the local cultural landscape.
12G quarterly visual exhibition and community events focus on an emerging art landscape that maps culture of migration, inclusive of the systems that influence it: race, gender, creed, empire, and economy. A nod to the archetypal fortified walls that surround Imperial medieval cities worldwide, our namesake underlies our exhibitions and events, which celebrate the melange of cultural identity that foments as peoples move and settle.
GALLERY HOURS: Thursday – Saturday, 11 AM – 5 PM or by appointment.