Welcome listeners to 5 Questions: A Critical Mass for the Visual Arts Podcast in which we ask 5 questions of our interviewees aimed at positioning and contextualizing their respective bodies of work within the St. Louis artworld.This episode we’re talking with Asma Kazmi.
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 post-colonial contexts. Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixing them with her own fabulations, 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 was born in Quetta, a city in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. She works between the US, India, Pakistan, China, Europe, and the Middle East to create installations that are legible in various cultural contexts. Kazmi is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art Practice and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. Previously, she was permanent faculty and co-program director of the Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
5 Questions is a program by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts – a nonprofit, self-formed visual arts collaborative dedicated to promoting, enhancing and initiating contemporary visual art in the St. Louis region.
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Or at criticalmassart.org/fivequestions, on twitter @criticalmassSTL, and IG @criticalmassart
With Asma Kazmi and Joe Kohlburn
Editor – Sarah Hammond
Producer – Brett Williams
Critical Mass for the Visual Arts 