Squeaky Wheel announces Hiba Ali as Artist & Mentor in Residence

October 5, 2020
Contact: ekrem@squeaky.org

Squeaky Wheel is excited to announce Hiba Ali as our Artist & Mentor in Residence for Fall 2020. The Artist & Mentor in Residence serves as an artistic and technical mentor for our advanced-track youth media program Saturday Cafe, and are provided with equipment access, a stipend, artist fees, and curatorial support to work on their projects. Interconnecting our youth education and artist residency programs, the program deepens the cross-pollination of ideas and energies between our artists and youth. Due to the pandemic, the programs will take place virtually, and equipment access is being provided to the artist through mailing service. 

As part of their residency, the artist will work on On the language of anti-Blackness and the Indian Ocean, a digital project which uses Mozilla Hubs and Spoke with Blender to re-imagine linguistic and historical connections between South Asia, the Arab world and the Swahili coast of East Africa. Ali’s research focuses on the history of the Indian Ocean slave trade, commonly misidentified as ‘the Arab slave trade,’ and its manifestation in the present as anti-Black racism, caste-class, and kafala system of the Indian Ocean region. Utilizing the digital interface of Mozilla hubs, live-recorded 360 video, and music, the artist will create an interactive space to name the roots of anti-Blackness and structural oppression as a means to eradicate it.

The public will have the opportunity to engage with the artist at a panel discussion focusing on Afro-descent communities, the Indian Ocean and migration which will take place in December. See more information at squeaky.org

A brown-skinned person, with green eyeliner on their eyes and a curious facial expression and two curly hair strands frame their face, stands in the middle of a Mimosa flower tree as they fall in the foreground of the person. They are wearing deep brown glasses and an open collar light grass green shirt.

Hiba Ali (they/she) is a digital artist, educator, scholar, DJ, experimental music producer and curator based across Chicago, IL, Austin, TX, and Toronto, ON. Their performances and videos concern surveillance, womxn/ womyn of colour, and labour. She studies the geographies of Afro-descent and Indo-Arab communities across the Indian Ocean through music, cloth and ritual. They conduct reading groups addressing digital media and workshops with open-source technology. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University, Kingston, Canada. They are an Assistant Professor of Art, New Media Artist/Feminist Art Discourse, College of Design, Art & Techology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. She has presented their work in Chicago, Stockholm, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland. They have written for C Magazine, THE SEEN Magazine, Newcity Chicago, Art Dubai, The State, VAM Magazine, ZORA: Medium, RTV Magazine, and Topical Cream Magazine.

This program is made possible thanks to the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Adobe TakingITGlobal, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and individual members, businesses, and supporters.