AN4AA Talks 2024 | Aziz Sohail | Stranger Intimacy: Queer Curating in/of/with Empire, Settler Colonies, and Its ‘Others’

This talk will be held online only as part of the Australasian Network for Asian Art program in 2024

In this lecture-presentation, curator Aziz Sohail will consider three projects: How to Gently Unpack an Empire (Orange County, US, 2021), The World that Belongs to Us (Walsall, UK, 2023), and To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer Time/Migrant Time (Caulfield, Australia, 2024). Each of these projects brought queer diasporic artists into dialogue with each other and were activated through a robust public program, with each taking into account the particular context of the institution and location and the ways in which one navigates one’s own position within it. The presentation will consider what solidarities, alliances, and community building are possible under these conditions – and how we may curate queerly, and with responsibility, as cultural workers situated and implicated within the context of empire and settler-colony.

Aziz Sohail is a Pakistani-passport holding curator and writer whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory, and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy, and wayward encounter and unfold through slowness, collaboration, and tentacularity. From 2020-2024, with The Many Headed Hydra, they co-led a language where yesterday are the same word. Kal., a trans-oceanic platform supporting practices enacting queer pasts/futures and de-colonial ecologies in South Asia and post-migrant Europe. The platform had residencies and presentations in Berlin, Karachi, Colombo and Philadelphia as well as a radio channel and a series of workshops and publications.

Aziz’s other projects include Archival Intimacies: Queering South/East Asian Diasporas (2022), at the ONE Archives/USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, co-organised with Alexis Bard Johnson; Very Very Sweet Medina: Artistic Innovation in 1990s Karachi (2019) at the Sharjah Art Foundation, co-organised with Bani Abidi; and The World that Belongs to Us (2023), at The New Art Gallery Walsall, England. They serve on the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Advisory Committee. Aziz was on the advisory committee for the 2024 Creative Time Summit and the 2024 Monash University Curator-in-Residence, researching and presenting the project To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer Time/Migrant Time. They are currently a PhD Candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Australia working on 'We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other: Queer Curating as Making Kin in South Asia and its diaspora(s)'

Those attending the talk are invited to make a sliding scale donation of $5-10 AUD to the Manaya Pride Program of the Iceberg Foundation. MPP is a volunteer-run program that offers no-cost and ongoing counselling, social work support, and community building services to honour and meet the needs of queer-identified, forcibly displaced people currently in Australia.

Donations can be made directly by bank transfer using the following details:

BSB: 083004

Account Number: 851471767

Image: Install shot of Constellation at The New Art Gallery Walsall, site-specific work by the artist Chitra Ganesh for the exhibition The World that Belongs to Us; Photograph: Jonathan Shaw.

The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a group of researchers including academics and curators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated listserv serve as a platform to share research, promote events and exhibitions, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.