UMBER MAJEED

Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program 2019-2020
Aesthetics and Pedagogy
Participant 

For 2019-2020, the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program will take up: “Aesthetics and Pedagogy.” we will explore the overlaps between aesthetics and pedagogy. Our interest will be to collectively understand how the aesthetic functions as a way of thinking, making, and being that both educates and requires an education. We will work across the history of the concept of “an aesthetic education” (from Friedrich Schiller to Gayatri Spivak) and then move to consider the rise of professional art education, the role of art institutions, and the place of pedagogic practice within artworks. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, we will explore these questions across philosophy, critical theory, history, and art history.

Long Live Trans-Pakistan: Lecture/Performance by Umber Majeed Trinity Square Video, August 3, 2019

In conjunction with the exhibition Networked Justice, Umber Majeed will be delivering a lecture/performance as part of her piece Long Live Trans-Pakistan — an ongoing investigation into current urbanization claims in Lahore, Pakistan. 

Open Studio: Umber Majeed Jameel Arts Centre, February 11, 2019

Umber is an artist-in-residence at Jameel Arts Centre in collaboration with the Digital Earth Fellowship 2019. She will be a resident at the Jameel from January 27 to February 16. Join artist Umber Majeed for a presentation and discussion on her research on her ongoing project Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan)

Field Meeting Take 6: Thinking Collections Alserkal Avenue, January 25, 2019

Truth-seeking Futurisms: A conversation with Umber Majeed Mantiq of the Mantis, December 29, 2018

'What's Your Mantiq?' is a series of conversations with artists, writers and creative practitioners at Mantiq of the Mantis, Lahore, Pakistan. Duurbeen: Moving Images presents: 'Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat' (The Atomically Explosive Love) 2017 by Umber Majeed, followed by a conversation about her multidisciplinary practice.

Virtual Museum, Digital Earth x Strelka Workshop, Moscow, Russia
December 17–21, 2018
Participant 

In Motion: Yoon Hwan Bae and Umber Majeed Animation Screening
November 20, 2018

Evolving over more than a century, the medium of animation now encompasses a wide spectrum of techniques that range from by-hand styles to experimental moving image, from screen-based films to VR installations. All of these forms, however, continue to capture and reconstruct our surroundings, simultaneously confirming and questioning our perception of reality.

Please join us for an evening of screenings and discussion, featuring two artists who use animation as part of their larger practice. Umber Majeed will present an excerpt from her The Atomically Explosive Love (2018) series and In The Name of Hypersurface of the Present (2018). Yoon Hwan Bae will show two stop-motion animations: Road to Studio B (2018) and Self-Portrait (2017). The conversation following the screenings will explore the possibilities inherent in animation’s transdisciplinary nature, as well as how this medium shapes the artists’ narrative impulse.

Atropelos (2018), http://atropelos.com/ Net Art Project by Luiza Prado and Daniel Rourke
Arebyte Gallery

In Portuguese, ‘atropelar’ is the act of running over something or someone; in Brazilian graffiti culture, the term is used to describe the act of running over someone else’s visual intervention by spraying on top of it. It is considered a sign of disrespect, an invitation to further conflict, in an ongoing battle of visual marks and linguistic encounters. In colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, the term can be used to describe the act of talking over someone – an act of silencing that is often gendered or racialized. 

Starting in July 2018, the public performance project went online; beginning from the first two billboards created on the island, we invited a sequence of artists to ‘atropelar’ their own responses and interventions on art and colonialism on the project’s website, atropelos.com. Each of these artists is asked to invite a further artist to intervene in their work, and onwards, with the sequence continuing every other week until December 2018. The list of participating artists includes Lucas Odahara, Jennifer Martin, Umber Majeed, Jaider Esbell, Sorawit Songsataya, Te-Ariki Alistair Taniwha, Rasha Kahil, and Flore Nové-Josserand.

Until the Thaw - Video Installation Screening
October 28, 2018

An evening of performances, readings and screenings at Firstdraft, Sunday 28 October 5-8pm. Featuring Holly Childs(NL/AU) and J. G. Biberkopf (NL/LT), Umber Majeed (US/PK), Enoch Mailangi, Autumn Royal (Narrm/Melb), Ivey Wawn (Syd) and Mark Mailer (Syd).

Publication Intensive 2018, New York City and Providence 
June 11–22, 2018
Participant 

Participants: Yasi Alipour, Maia Chao, Christopher Cole, Sean D. Henry-Smith, Willis Kingery, Anny Li, Lucy Siyao Liu, Umber Majeed, Austin Carder, Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Buzz Slutzky, June Yoon.

The Publication Intensive is a free two-week program in the history and contemporary practice of publication. Each year we invite applicants who are in the early stages of their careers (or enrolled in graduate programs) and have backgrounds in areas such as writing, art, literature, art history, new media, and design. During the Publication Intensive, Triple Canopy editors and invited artists, writers, scholars, designers, publishers, and technologists will lead discussions and workshops. Participants will research, analyze, and enact an approach to publication that hinges on today’s networked forms of production and circulation but also mines the history of print culture and artistic practice.

The 2018 Publication Intensive in New York and Providence is made possible through the generous support of The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston and 2x4.

Photo Requests from Solitary (PRFS)
Participatory Project

Photo Requests from Solitary (PRFS) is a participatory project that invites men and women held in long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons to request a photograph of anything at all, real or imagined, and then finds a volunteer to make the image. The astonishing range of requests, taken together, provide an archive of the hopes, memories, and interests of people who live in extreme isolation.

On any given day, at least 80,000 people are held in solitary in the United States, most placed there not by a judge or jury, but by prison staff. Some will remain for months, years, or even decades in conditions that have been shown to cause deep and lasting psychological and physiological harm.

The goal of PFRS is to fulfill each request to exact specifications for the person who requested it, with images that—through some combination of form, content, composition, design, and/or sheer commitment—are compelling enough that someone would want to return to them for repeated viewing. (People in solitary are sharply limited in the numbers of photographs they can have, so every image is important.)

Launch of HHH Office in collaboration with ABC No Rio
Artist Collective
2018- ongoing

H.H.H Collective consists of Umber Majeed, Rehan Miskci and Lara Nasser. Respectively Pakistani-American, Turkish-Armenian, and Lebanese, the collective operates in the space between over here and back home. Their practices offer up a wealth of critical considerations—particularly in the domain of 'unfamiliar territory.' Rather than dramatize an imprisonment in one’s own ethno-geographic history, they address it with a wink and a smile.
H.H.H Collective is a poetic and earnest attempt to assimilate; the soft failure of which delivers an awkward sense of humor.

Publishing Process in collaboration with MotM at IAIA
Presentation
2018

Publishing Process is a series of talks by and conversations with artists, editors and publishers to explore publishing as artistic practice and to shed light on some current experimental publishing and editorial models from the region.

"...multidisciplinary artist Umber Majeed will present a talk about the Lahore-based experimental publishing house and community-sustained library, Mantiq of the Mantis, and its multifaceted programming on behalf of its founders Mehreen Murtaza and Sabeen Jamil."

Digital Diaspora in collaboration with BUFU
Curatorial Project/ Video Screening
2017

Living between the space of representation and reality…

As artists of Muslim descent both practicing and secular, we are presenting works, which consider the body politic through the digital-self as it relates to the displaced body. Asking the questions how do we under the guise of “global citizen” granted by the internet and globalization-exist and communicate as online personalities, consumer selves, and political beings? We are particularly concerned with honoring the contributions of the Black Power Movement and Black Muslims while thinking about liberation work and the dichotomy between East and West. We are also concerned with re-organizing the language around “Middle-East” as middle and east of Europe and replacing this signifier with West Asian. While honoring the South Asian community, and its struggle to be recognized and given space to create and flourish. Within the shifting space of identity we are hosting works that both use traditional signifiers of the Diaspora and ones, which present this visual and cultural exploration in more abstract terms.

Artists: 

Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Yunique A. Saafir
Amal Khan
Shireen Ahmed
Farideh Sakhaeifar
Hana Mire
Adam Setton
Shirin Mazdeyasna
Lara Nasser

Video Artists/Film Makers:

Ruqayyah Albaari
Razan Al Salah
Simo Ezoubeiri
Mohamed A Berro
Bahar Noorizadeh
Sholeh Dalai
Shireen Ahmed
Azzah Sultan
Hilda Moucharrafieh
Amadu Haruna
Hana Mire
Ladin Awad

Curated by Sahar Sepahdari (Sailor Noom) & Umber Majeed

Paradise in Progress
Curatorial Project
2016

Paradise In Progress is a group exhibition that engages the utopian project of thinking about what the future will look like. Inherent in each of the artists’ works is the struggle to mine, identify, and recuperate certain remnants of so-called failed historical aspirations and to reassemble new models of a tomorrow. Against the postmodern malaise brought on by the “end of history,” this exhibition proposes both an argument against and counterlogic to the ways in which historicity has been practiced and produced in the first place. Thus, paradise illuminated in this new light is not a infinite-sameness, but an infinite-change. An ongoing project fueled by the Promethean desire of non-centralized human progress, which is not necessarily linear nor easily commensurable to humanity. Several art historical tropes which have assembled the utopian and paradise imaginary, natural flora, working class struggle, emancipatory narratives, etc. are disassembled and reconstituted as new forms and schemas for alternate futures.

Artists:

Daniel Llaria, Fernando do Campo, Ingrid (Yuan Zhuang), Marija Markovic, Oscar Gracida, Ryota Sato, Umber Majeed, Will Lee, Yue Sun, Alex Sheriff + Weston Frazor (DJ Lasagna)

Curators:
Umber Majeed
Will Lee

Beyond the Obvious
Curatorial Project
2015

Beyond the Obvious is an exhibition expanding the ways of seeing and contemplating the processes’ of artwork; the relations between the artist’s intent, the artwork, the viewer, and underlying discourses beyond the art experience. We are not only engaging the viewer to look beyond the surface of the art presented and also invite the artists participating in the show, to look beyond the spiel in their own art practices.

Artists:

Alex Sheriff, Amal Khan, American Artist, Andy Wentz, Keith Tilford, Leonie Cicirello, Liona Nyariri, Luciana Pinchiero, Maika’i Tubbs, Oscar Gracida, Saul Sanchez, Sofia Quirno, Umber Majeed, Vered Snear, William Lee


Curators:
Liona Nyariri
Umber Majeed