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. 

Kushboo Kataria Gulati | Negine Jasmine Sekandari | Paradise Khanmalek | Niqabae

Curated by Sepideah Mohsenian-Rahman

June 22nd - August 12, 2018

Opening reception: Friday, June 22nd, 6 - 8:30 pm - featuring DJ Cardigan and Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Husnaa Hashim

A collective exhibit featuring diaspora artists from Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, NAZAR is a love letter to oneself. A study on identity, power, pleasure, and protection - and the vulnerabilities inherent with each. The artists contribute pieces that decolonize perceptions of beauty, femininity, wisdom, and strength. Each artist peels away layers of neocolonial impositions  rooted in proximity to whiteness, and centralizes an authentic self in resistance to trans-generational trauma, patriarchal paranoia, and intertwined imperialism.  From nudes to niqabs, NAZAR showcases the present and future of radical brown imaginations.  

Twelve Gates Arts presents a collection of works examining aspects of the contemporary experience of immigrants in the United States. The artists included have all studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and have all emigrated from the Middle East. Feelings of being alienated, controversies surrounding political views, identity conflicts, cultural traditions, and religious conflicts are all themes present in the works. The pieces in the show can be seen as a discussion of how the artists express cultural issues through their subjective experiences. Some of those issues are manipulated by either media or politics, and the artists have noticed instances when even the current art market has reshaped and distorted artistic narratives to suit a geographical audience and political climate. 

Abdullah Qureshi | Aziz Sohail | Zulfikar Ali Bhutt

Opening Reception: Friday, March 2nd, 6 - 8:30pm

Twelve Gates Arts presents an original set of collaborative works by contemporary artists Abdullah Qureshi, Aziz Sohail & Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Qureshi, founder of Gallery 39K in Lahore and Bhutto, have previously collaborated as curators of a five-show series titled Is Saye Kay Parcham Talay (“The Shadow Over Our Flag”), 2015-2016, which aimed to create inclusive conversations around minority rights and marginalization in Pakistan. Bhutto is also currently co-curator of The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience, which has instigated a national conversation around the politics of self-representation in the arts. In 2017, Sohail was a South Asian Studies Fellow at Cornell University and was the curator of Islam Contemporary, 2013.

Opening Reception with artist talk: Tuesday, February 13th, 6 -7:30pm
Book Launch and signing with music by Al-Bustan Ensemble: Friday, February 16th, 6 - 9pm

12G and Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture co-present a series of works by acclaimed graphic
designer, photographer and sculptural assemblage artist, Rajie Cook. Cook is the founder of
the graphic design firm Cook and Shanosky Associates, Inc. In 1984, Cook and his
colleagues were recipients of the Presidential Award for Design Excellence, and around that
time Cook took his first journey to Palestine. The trip catalysed his practice of peace activism
and activist art, which seems to have been incubated by his father’s deep emotional
connection to the ongoing suffering in the Middle East. After nearly half a century as a
graphic designer, Cook began exploring sculptural assemblage in 1999 to express his feelings
on a range of issues as visual statements.

Diaspora Letters is Beeta Baghoolizadeh’s first solo exhibition. Baghoolizadeh uses new media to illustrate her memories and the passage of time through black and white digital illustrations and gifs that invite viewers to visualize themselves in foreign-yet-familiar spaces. 

As a historian of modern Iran, Baghoolizadeh’s work examines the past and the present, exploring banal environments that have been politicized in the current hostile political atmosphere. Her “letters” are purely visual, stripped of legibly written text to mimic the diasporic feeling of exclusion in different languages.

Beeta Baghoolizadeh is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is completing her dissertation on the history of abolition, race, and visual media in Iran. Born in Los Angeles to Iranian immigrant parents, she regularly returns to Iran to conduct research and visit family. She began drawing Diaspora Letters during her most recent trip to Isfahan and Tehran in the summer of 2017.

This group exhibition considers the work of artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia that address the enduring presence of the past. History is not something that is simply from long ago, safely tucked away like a box of old things in a storage room. It does not remain hidden until we decide to look through those objects and pictures containing so many memories. Instead it is all around us, cluttering our daily existence. In formerly colonized or occupied areas of the world, the previous rulers continue to impact life there albeit in transformed ways. They carry on like ghosts in the machine. Oftentimes they are given more significance than the current residents. Neocolonialism shapes global dynamics today in similar ways to the power relationships that existed before. By acknowledging the past, the artists in Back to the Future offer new images of a bygone era in order to shed light on contemporary times.   

Opening reception: Wednesday, June 28th, 6 - 8:30pm Philadelphia, PA

12G is pleased to present this series of photographs from Mumbai-based artist Amol K. Patil. Patil is a performance and visual artist who graduated from Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Art in 2009. The series of 13 photographs holds references to Dalit (”untouchable” caste) social justice movements and also Black Liberation movements, which partly inspired the Dalit movement. “Traditionally, the Dalits had practiced trades, working as leather tanners, cobblers, blacksmiths, funeral attendants, and musicians and folk performers. Patil’s family came from a long history of folk performers called ‘Powada.’” (from “Where Does That Put You?”: Artists’ Stories in Global Curatorial Practice, Sharma, March 2017)

Some of Patil’s performance pieces include adaptions of his father’s avant-garde unpublished plays, which deal with “issues like migrant labor and the city's textile industry...If [Amol’s] works are reminiscent of postwar European and American performance—Bruce Nauman's studio-bound walks of the late '60s and Samuel Beckett's movement piece Quad (1981) come to mind—it is not due to direct knowledge, [he] claims, but rather to the mediating influence of his father.” (Ryan Holmberg, Art in America, February 2014)

Sharma is an independent curator who co-founded the Clark House Initiative in Mumbai. His curatorial practice seeks to “help choreograph” a “role of scripting history” by showcasing the work of artists who have otherwise been excluded from traditional art history, which remains “quintessentially European and North American” as well as a contemporary art scene that operates through “infrastructures of privilege.” (Sharma, March 2017)

This group show is the culmination of a series of monthly workshops, which have taken place at 12G to encourage collaboration and live performance. Inspired by Yolanda Wisher's poem From Imhotep's Kundalini, the artists participating in this Art Intervention explore from diverse angles and mediums the devastating American landscape strewn with the detritus of Black lives. It is the same landscape of systematic yet coolly indifferent state violence against Black people that generations of South Asian Americans also call home, immigrant and non-immigrant. #BLM@12G hopes to unflinchingly  explore the concrete difference in "context, experience and oppression" in the various Black and Desi lives at stake by examining the ways in which  we collectively participate in [anti-Black racism], even unintentionally" and by exploring the interplay between Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements in the South Asian context. Opening to feature poetry performances.  Works by:

Amina Ahmed | Komail Aijazuddin | Chuck Alston | Sarah Bloom & Mir Masud-Elias | Charles Burwell | Bryan DeProspero | Lynda Grace| Farha Najah | Amol K. Patil | Sean Plaskett | Maryanne Pollock | Daisy Rockwell | Fabian Rush | Sumesh Sharma | Saba Taj

Murad Khan Mumtaz, In the Cave, gouache on vasli, 2016