Friday, July 21, 2023, 11:30 am ET
@ online and viewable for 24 hours
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Join us for a virtual event celebrating the closing of hiba ali’s solo exhibition, oceans we carry: rough as silk. hiba ali will be joined by Beheroze Shroff and Zavier Wingham to have a conversation on the histories, themes of their exhibition, followed by a brief Q&A. The exhibition utilizes videos, music, textiles, amongst other media. Through storytelling, oceans we carry: rough as silk explores the figure of the silk worm through visualizing the history and continued presence of African-descent communities from the Swahili-Indian ocean. They map the relationships between the Swahili coast of East Africa, South India and the Arab world.

Audiences are invited to join live, or can view the event for 24 hours. Squeaky Wheel members will receive a code to view the event for 72 hours.

You will see the Zoom link after you checkout and receive it in your email inbox within 24 hours. If you have issues registering, please email ekrem@squeaky.org

Read more about hiba ali’s exhibition at Squeaky Wheel here.

Biographies

hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they reside in many time zones: chicago, toronto and eugene. born in karachi, pakistan, they belong to east african, south asian and arab diasporas. they are a practitioner and (re)learner of swahili, urdu, arabic and spanish languages. they work on two long term art and publication projects: the first being an art-based phd project that examines womyn of colour’s labour, and architecture of surveillance as it exists within the monopoly of amazon (corp.) and the second being a series of works that addresses music, cloth and ritual practices that connect east africa, south asia and the arabian peninsula in the swahili-indian ocean region.

they are an assistant professor at the college of design in the art & technology program at the university of oregon in eugene and they teach on decolonial, feminist, anti-racist frameworks in digital art pedagogies. currently, they are a phd candidate in cultural studies at queens university in kingston, ontario. their work has been presented in chicago, stockholm, vienna, berlin, toronto, new york, istanbul, são paulo, detroit, windsor, dubai, austin, vancouver, and portland. they have written for the following magazines: “c”, the seen, newcity chicago, art chicago, art dubai, the state, medium’s zora, rtv, and topical cream.

note: the profile picture indicates the need to not be perceived by all carceral, surveillant and monitoring systems including the corporeal, digital and virtual. the use of lowercase on this site denotes a turn away from egotism embedded in the english language (danah michele boyd) and towards ideas of the collective (bell hooks) and reminds us of the many realities, names and glyphs that cannot be said in such a colonial language.

Beheroze Shroff teaches in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. A long-time scholar of Siddis, Indians of African descent in Gujarat, Shroff has published widely in several journals and anthologies, and documented on film different aspects of contemporary Siddi life, in Gujarat. Most recently, in 2020, Shroff co-edited a three-volume publication titled Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora, which explores the ways in which Africans and people of African descent have shaped and have been shaped by histories, cultures, and societies of South Asia. Her documentaries have been shown in public and academic venues: at Monsoons and Migrations: Unleashing Dhow Synergies– Conference in Association with the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF); The African Diaspora in Asia conference (TADIA) Goa; Samosa Arts and Culture Festival (Nairobi);  Max Planck Institute (Halle); School of Oriental and African Studies and Institute of Commonwealth Studies University of London; Schomburg Library and Museum of Black Culture (New York); Malcolm X Library (San Diego, California) and Pan African Film Festivals (Los Angeles), among others.  

Zavier Wingham (he/they) is a writer, editor, and PhD candidate in the joint program for History and Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University, with an additional concentration in the history of the African Diaspora. Their dissertation research explores how changing Ottoman elite conceptions of race, slavery, and blackness in the Ottoman Empire contributed to new forms of racialization of enslaved and manumitted Africans between the 1840s and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, as well as how Africans in the Ottoman empire experienced these processes of racialization and sought to create new kinds of community and ways of living. Their work has been supported by Fulbright, ARIT, and Koç University’s ANAMED. More of their work can be found at zavierwingham.com

This project was made possible through support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Banner image: documentation of hiba ali, oceans we carry: rough as silk. The video in the cyclone (rough as silk) is projected on a wall; a green wavelike video is projected on a canvas on the floor. There are two green chairs facing the wall.