Global Art Dialogues: Intimacy and Empire in Contemporary Practices

How has the intersection of family histories, power structures, and artistic expressions shaped visual culture throughout Asia and its diasporas? Asma Kazmi, assistant professor of art practice at the University of California, Berkeley, and artists Zeina Barakeh and Maia Cruz Palileo join in a conversation about sites of these interactions—archives, family lore, architecture, manuscripts—informed by their own practices. The goal of this conversation is to support the efforts of museums, universities, and communities in highlighting the connections between visual art and political and personal histories. We’ll also consider the relationship between state power and the discipline of art history itself. Moderated by Kathy Zarur, associate professor of art history at Skyline College.

About Global Art Dialogues

This series began in 2020 to connect artists around the world to explore the pertinent issues of our time. Amid shifting social landscapes, the museum is committed to investing in emerging and established artists, elevating marginalized voices, and curating through a global lens of equity, justice, and collaboration. We aim to create spaces to challenge and transcend physical, sociopolitical, and imaginary borders to empower change. By bringing together creatives from Bay Area and global communities, we are exploring the possibilities of what can be and what we can accomplish through a spirit of radical collaboration. 

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Zeina Barakeh’s work deconstructs war and is rooted in her experiences of growing up in Beirut, Lebanon, during conflict. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and film festivals in the U.S. and internationally. Her recent work has been featured on Day for Night, Jim Campbell’s Salesforce Tower Top electronic sculpture, San Francisco; ZAZ Corner Billboard, Times Square, New York; Yinchuan MOCA, China; Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; The Center for Book Arts, New York; and Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Maia Cruz Palileo is a multidisciplinary Brooklyn-based artist. Migration and the permeable concept of home are constant themes in their paintings, installations, sculptures, and drawings. Influenced by familial oral histories about migrating to the U.S. from the Philippines and the troubling colonial history between these countries, Palileo infuses these narratives with both memory and imagination. With retelling, these narratives become unstable, straddling the line between fact and fiction, while remaining cloaked in the convincingly familiar. Palileo received an M.F.A. in sculpture from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a B.A. in studio art from Mount Holyoke College.

Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity — a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long-term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial contexts. Kazmi tells intertwining stories about Islam, Muslim culture, complex trade routes, global flows of people and commodities, labor, colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, and interspecies entanglements. Kazmi is an assistant professor in the Department of Art Practice and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley.  

Kathy Zarur is a curator and an associate professor of art history at Skyline College in San Bruno, California. Zarur’s exhibitions consider topics that relate to land and place, such as belonging, indigeneity, diaspora, migration, and alliance-building. Her recent exhibitions include Preoccupations: Palestinian Landscapes (Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, and Holding House, Detroit, 2019–2020); side by side/in the world (San Francisco Arts Commission, 2019), Betweenscapes (SOMArts for Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center and Kearny Street Workshop, 2018), and Where Is Here (Museum of the African Diaspora, 2016–2017). Zarur holds a Ph.D. in art history and certificate in museum studies from the University of Michigan.