Twelve Gates Arts is honored to present A Space for Monsters, a group exhibition curated by Ambika Trasi, featuring works by Maryam Hoseini, Kaveri Raina, and Anjuli Rathod. The exhibition draws its inspiration from Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, wherein she writes, “the monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.”
Through painting, sculpture, and drawing, the artists work between abstraction and figuration to depict monsters: shapeless, fragmented beings who are part-human and part- animal, cyborg, or shadow; who roam freely between and across normative boundaries of being and simultaneously exist in states of liminality and opacity. The works in A Space for Monsters map the emotional landscapes of these non-subjects to illustrate how internal hierarchies, inner-turmoil, and self-intimacy play into processing grief, anxiety, dislocation, and precariousness. For these beings, monstrosity is a poetic voice and means to work through the incomprehensible, counter rigid notions of expression and understanding, and resist projected identities. On the other side of this period of incubation lies the promise of radical transformation.
In Maryam Hoseini’s paintings, female figures are flattened and pieced together from ruins. They stretch across narrative and historical boundaries, pushing against the violences and vocabularies that have long been projected onto them to give way to new possibilities of representation. Her works extend beyond the boundaries of her boards into the gallery space, underscoring the notion that one has the potential to overcome internal hierarchies and exceed perceived limitations. Kaveri Raina’s new series of graphite drawings on board, Untitled (No Lacks), considers the relationship between the self and shadow while in isolation and through the distorting lenses of mirrors, windows, and screens. In these works, the shadow is examined as both part-of and separate-from the self, familiar yet dangerous. Anjuli Rathod’s paintings utilize color and abstraction to depict the disorienting and transformative experience of grief. Evoking the atmosphere of Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Rathod’s paintings follow the cyclical journey of a character that she calls “Red.” In the paintings on view in A Space for Monsters, Red finds herself in a state of crisis, then cocooned in a period of stasis, after which she becomes a transcendent being who exists between the physical and spiritual worlds. Meanwhile, Rathod’s ceramic sculptures, which are glazed in elemental colors, resemble intestines. To the artist, processing is like digestion: slow, fundamental, and winding.
Twelve Gates Arts is pleased to welcome back guest curator Ambika Trasi. Trasi first partnered with Twelve Gates as the managing director and curatorial assistant at Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW). Trasi is an artist, arts organizer, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her multidisciplinary practice reveals the coloniality of power within images and sites. Trasi is currently a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of the American Art, where she co-curated the exhibition, Salman Toor: How Will I Know (November 13, 2020 - April 4, 2021). As a curator, Trasi shares Twelve Gates’s passion for engaging emerging voices as artistic exponents in our ever-changing cultural and political landscape.
About the artists
Maryam Hoseini (b. 1988; Tehran, Iran) earned a BA from Sooreh Art University in Tehran, Iran and dual MFA degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College, NY, simultaneously (2016). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: After You, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2020); Yes Sky, Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY (2020); Body Armor, MoMA PS1, NY (2018) and Of Strangers and Parrots, Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY (2017). She has participated in group exhibitions at Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany (2020); The Shed, New York (2019); Ca’ del Duca, Venice, Italy (2019); 56 Henry, NY (2019); The Arts Club, London, UK, (2018) among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Kaveri Raina (b. 1990; Delhi, India) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India and moved to the United States at the age of eleven. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011, her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017. Raina has received various awards and fellowships including the James Nelson Raymond fellowship, Fred and Joanna Lazarus Scholarship, and was recently nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant. Raina’s work has been exhibited in the US, India, and Germany. She had her first international solo exhibition in March 2019 at Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy, and had a solo show at Assembly Room, New York, NY this past spring, 2019. Summer 2019 she exhibited at Luhring Augustine, in New York. She opened a solo exhibition at Patron Gallery, March 2020 and currently has a solo exhibition up at M+B gallery in LA.
Anjuli Rathod (b. 1987; Norristown, PA) lives and works in New York. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has participated in residencies at The Millay Colony of the Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and the Shandaken Project. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Y2K Group, New York and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, two-person exhibitions at Projet Pangeé, QC and Safe Gallery, NY, and group exhibitions at Kristen Lorello Gallery, New York; Rubber Factory, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn; Selenas Mountain, Brooklyn; Knockdown Center, Queens.
A Space for Monsters will be on view from February 5th until April 11th, 2021 in the gallery at Twelve Gates Arts, located in Old City at 106 N. 2nd St Philadelphia, PA 19106. The Gallery is open to the public Wednesday-Saturday at a limited capacity, with respect to city guidelines. Please direct inquiries to Aisha Khan at info@twelvegatesarts.com