Undoing the Border Fantasy
October 16, 2024 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery, Chemistry Building, 1st Floor, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
Reception: Wednesday, October 16, 2024 5-7PM. Click here to RSVP.
On view: October 17–December 7, Monday–Saturday, 11:00 AM–5:00 PM
The Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Vivian D’Andrade, is proud to present Undoing the Border Fantasy, co-curated by Swati Piparsania and Jess Saldaña. In collaboration with the Pratt Department of Exhibitions, Undoing the Border Fantasy will be on view from October 16 – December 7, 2024. This exhibition engages with the idea of traversing conceptual borders as a means of creating a collaborative Pratt staff and faculty showcase that features the works of thirty-one artists spanning art, sculpture, photography, digital media, archives and research.
This exhibition is part of Critical Conversations: creating space for and educating one another about our multiple cultural contexts, activism, civil discourse, and academic engagement.
Undoing the Border Fantasy
Introduction by Swati Piparsania and Jess Saldaña
Undoing the Border Fantasy weaves identities, memories, and imaginaries of subcultures through the emotional and material dimensions of borders. As curators, we— Swati Piparsania and Jess Saldaña— bring our lived experiences with crossing borders into the space, using them to foster dialogue through and between the exhibited artworks.
The exhibition serves as both a rejection and an investigation of human-designed borders. Power structures are entangled in the colonial fantasy that suggest that the complexities of our world can be neatly divided. Borders can be viewed as abstractions that arise when various layers of identity intersect with these dividing systems. The exhibition scrutinizes geographical, racial, cultural, disciplinary, and scholarly boundaries— societal constructs maintained for political and economic ends. These constructs create frameworks through which rights, access, and violence are unevenly divided and distributed. The artworks featured by thirty-one artists in this exhibition challenge these systemic frameworks by redefining borders as fragmented, porous, hybrid, unoccupied, transitional, and otherworldly. By bringing together narratives and expressions, we aim to explore the dialectical relationships and contradictions that these borders create, through which subjectivity is often articulated.
Utilizing this critical framework, our objective for this exhibition engages with the idea of traversing conceptual borders as a means of creating a collaborative Pratt staff and faculty showcase. We recognize the myriad experiences borders can evoke, while giving attention to what is unseen, unheld, undone, and unmade. We hope Undoing the Border Fantasy both constructs and deconstructs perceptions of boundaries, by imbuing and enriching the viewer with a world of many perspectives.
Danah Abdulla, speaking through Arturo Escobar, states, “decoloniality crosses borders of thought to craft another space for the production of knowledge.”1 Here, crossing borders represents a moment of crafting—as a way of acknowledging space and place in different ways. The generative movement between borders serves as a point of departure for artistic creation. By holding the tension of multiple sides and slipping under and outside of established lines, the artists selected for this exhibition illuminate the multiplicity inherent in these constrictions. Our approach to decolonizing the ideology of the border recognizes that these structures are inventions, and vehicles for power and control. This understanding provides a space for artists to intervene with agential crafting, introducing another imaginary that challenges these divisions. Ranging from the playfully absurd to the technically serious, these works consider border-thinking as a concept constantly in flux, creating space for multiple ideas to coalesce.
The artists in this exhibition provoke and complicate personal knowledge, poetic representations, and shared cultural experiences to deepen the viewer’s understanding. Yasmeen Abdallah, Natalie Moore, and Kimi Hanauer extend the meaning of familiar artifacts through materiality and abstraction. Shari Diamond and Neen Lamontagne use photography as a medium for archival memory, composing layered, hidden, and in-between universes. Lipika Bhargava and Adam Milner’s sculptural works reframe the body through senses, biopolitics, and agency. Zahra’a Nasralla’s2 and Nida Abdullah’s respective works, through textile, ornamentation, and domesticity, create space for shared histories and material relationships. Alex Strada’s3 video investigates systemic othering and oppression of marginalized communities. Cathryn Dwyre and Chris Perry showcase architectural texture and video landscapes of time, geographic intimacy, and environmental fragility. Digital works by Bahareh Khoshooee and Umber Majeed bring moving water into dialogue with the journeys of the subaltern subject. These are just a few of the artists featured in this exhibition, alongside many others whose work further deepen and expand the thematic explorations presented here.
Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s seminal work The Location of Culture, this exhibition introduces the concept of boundaries as a “third space.” This challenges the conventional binaries that borders uphold and fosters a nuanced understanding of emerging intersections and the construction of identities therein.4 Undoing the Border Fantasy features works that transform traditional frameworks, emphasizing themes of splitting, breaking, and probing borders as survival strategies. Through art, sculpture, photography, digital media, archives and research, the exhibition aims to deepen understandings of borders, emphasizing interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative inquiry. Rejecting the rigid binaries of “theory” versus “practice” and “scholar” versus “activist,” our curatorial approach fosters a dialogue that transcends disciplines, engaging viewers with cultural hybridity, radical resistance, and liminal spaces, ultimately proposing new speculative spaces for knowledge and creativity.
Swati Piparsania, Assistant Professor, Industrial Design
Jess Saldaña, Visual & Multimedia Resources Manager, Pratt Libraries
REFERENCES
1 Escobar Arturo, 2007. “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise” Cultural Studies 21 nos. 2-3. p187.
Abdulla Danah, 2021. “DISCIPLINARY DISOBEDIENCE A Border-Thinking Approach to Design” in DESIGN STRUGGLES Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives. PLURAL Valiz, Amsterdam. p335.
2 Zahra’a Nasralla, Ridha Jawad Al Hayudi, & Salman Fadhil Abbas, Sofreh Supperclub, 2024.
3 Alex Strada & Tali Keren, On Borders, Sovereignty, and the Limitations of “We the People”, 2022.
4 Homi Bhabha, 1994. “The Location of Culture” Routledge London and New York
Swati (b. Bhilai, India) is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design and an interdisciplinary designer and educator specializing in critical spatial objects. She utilizes elements of spectacle, absurdity, and sovereignty to design unfamiliar experiences in public spaces. Her expanded practice explores the complex relationship between the social body, the spatial body, and the surveilled body, surveying embodied oppression and resistance.
Jess Saldaña (they/them) is an nb/chicane artist, activist, and psychoanalyst in training currently working as the Visual & Multimedia Resources Manager at the Pratt Institute Libraries. They have published fiction and nonfiction on platforms like Hyperallergic and the Brooklyn Rail, and have shown/spoken at the New Museum and Tisch NYU. Teaching, facilitating, and creative work engage with studies of disability justice, racial capitalism, ecology, and queer aesthetics. They have a longstanding interest in the protean nature of identity, perception, and environment.