Join us on Saturday August 14th on Zoom, Facebook, and Youtube for the Closing Event for THE BEETROOT ROBE. Read more about the exhibition here.
Qasim Riza Shaheen (b. 1971) is a British artist and writer based in Manchester. Working across participatory performance, installation, film and photography, Shaheen's practice explores memory, notions of beauty, sexuality, love and, more broadly, fundamental concerns about human nature.
"In films, video performances, photographs and mixed-media drawings, Qasim Riza Shaheen presents his affecting reflections on love and loss...For him, self-portraiture is more a matter of imaginative self-creation than any pretence of authentic self-definition...His enactments of queer romance, straight social alienation, and the universal melodramas of unrequited desire are choreographed with painful sensitivity."
Shaheen's work was part of the group show Text Embodied at 12G in May 2013. His solo show “In a world where there are five women I am the seventh” was on view in May 2012. Qasim Riza Shaheen's performance work titled Misplaced Memoirs was part of “perform[art]ive,” 12G’s pilot performance art biennial for Philadelphia in 2015.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel is associate professor of contemporary art and visual culture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, and a lead faculty member of Chautauqua School of Art’s summer residency program in New York. His art historical scholarship, curation and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art.
His first monograph Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2017) mobilizes “affirmative criticality" and "productive failure" as conceptual frameworks to produce a more ethical, entangled, and transparent practice of writing (art) history. In 2022, he will be a residential fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, England, where he will work on his new monograph, tentatively titled Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories.
He received his bachelor’s from Yale University and his doctorate from the University of Manchester.