Three screenings of Return to Sender along with artist talks/PowerPoint presentations in three different community spaces in Islamabad and Lahore
All posts by maraahmedstudio
Excited that RMSC has created a map documenting their historic exhibition, Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World (in which I had the honor of being featured). This interactive map is now available as a digital interactive at RMSC on the second floor, Patricia Hale Gallery, but you can also access it online.
This is now a strange scene; to be at a funeral and see a shroud, inside which is a whole body with two hands, ten fingers, two feet, and a head. Nowadays, we Gazans are lucky if we even get to have a funeral, to bury an intact body, or to have our family and friends there to say goodbye and cry over us.
The Gaza Municipality provides water, sanitation and sewage management, waste collection, the removal of debris and reopening of key thoroughfares to facilitate movement, and aid to personnel doing heroic emergency work. They have started a fundraiser and are trying to raise a million dollars. They still have a long way to go. Let’s support them.
I will be coming to Rochester, NY, on March 28th to present a dialogue between my work on colonial postcards and the Visual Studies Workshop’s film and lantern slide archives. This will be an exciting conversation where we will see clips from my new film, about the aftershocks of colonialism, juxtaposed against film clips from Rochester in the 1970s that talk about police control and violence.
Dr. King called on the US to undergo a radical revolution of values. He believed that Jim Crow segregation and the war in Vietnam were rooted in the same ethic of race-based domination. By 1967, Dr King’s religious vision for nonviolence went beyond street protests, to include abolishing what he called the “triple evils” threatening American society. He defined them as racism, poverty, and militarism.
Today we launch the next phase of this project. In the midst of the gruesome genocide we are witnessing in Gaza, people from around the world are welcome to join us in reading, holding up, and sharing the voices and stories of Palestinian writers, poets, and activists. This is an open archive, so contact us if you would like to contribute a reading. Pls follow us on Instagram and listen to powerful poetry and stories from Palestine: @WarpAndWeftArchive
How we met in the lilt and nectary of the typed word
How air wove itself into spring around our screens and snapped time-
tables, and turned us from panic to song, spinning the counterfeit
back into gold, handing us to each other a filament at a time…
Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards & the Politics of Representation will be screened at Southampton Arts Center on Sunday November 19, 2:00 – 4:00 pm. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Jeremy Dennis, Minerva Perez, and Brenda Simmons. This event is free and open to the public but registration is needed.
Return to Sender is an art exhibition inspired by Mara Ahmed’s film of the same title, with Fatimah Arshad, Urvashi Bhattacharya and Sumayia Islam. The Exhibition Catalog by Mara Ahmed, Avina Mathias and Emelyn Pareja-Garcia aims to provide more historical context for the film and exhibition. It hopes to excavate layers of colonial history, gender relations, and power dynamics in order to deconstruct the male gaze (a concept rooted in the objectification and sexualization of women), and to clarify its intersection with colonialism and imperialism. Huntington’s History & Decorative Arts Museum, Huntington, New York, Fall 2023
This art exhibition will include photographic stills from the film of the same title and fabric-based digital collages that celebrate South Asian cities and architecture by Mara Ahmed. On display September 17th to October 15th, 2023, at Huntington Historical Society, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Building in Huntington, New York.
Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards & the Politics of Representation is a short, experimental film directed and produced by Mara Ahmed. It pushes the documentary medium in unexpected ways by opening with three contemporary South Asian American women who recreate British colonial postcards from the early 20th century. The film will open at Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington, NY, on Sunday October 1st, 2023. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion.
