EXHIBITION
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: JOSE FERREIRA + ASMA KAZMI
September 10 - 28, 2018
Commons Gallery
Special Events: (all events are free and open to the public)
Monday, September 10
3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Gallery walk-through
4:00 – 5:00 Reception
Exhibition Summary
This exhibition project explores the exigencies of societal change that synchronously valorize technology over labor. The artists explore the demands of labor placed on us, as the demands of civic and social alienation threaten to overwhelm us. The project speaks about the building of borders—material and symbolic—giving rise to social exclusion and limiting the expression of local cultures. Jose Ferreira and Asma Kazmi both utilize different disciplines, processes, materials, ways of knowing, and experiencing, to make their work.
In Ferreira’s work he explores the demands of production—a relentless post-industrial labor effort that exacerbates the lack of sleep, accompanied by deep anxiety, which has become endemic to survival. He critically scrutinizes the way government, corporations and the military have focused their energies on developing a way to minimize the necessity for sleep, as part of an endless drive of production, without compromising efficiency, and the implications of these concepts for society at large. This installation distills some objects, photographs and texts to create a dystopian a landscape, a place where people can function, but are not heard.
For Kazmi, Cranes and Cube maps the radically changing sites and topographies of the urban landscape. The project surveys the political force fields of idealism and grandeur of the real estate boom in many cities, which is in dialogue with the tides of reconfiguration of historic structures and old neighborhoods. Thinking of the city as a palimpsest, Cranes and Cube is concerned with reading simultaneous strata of changes to the environment to make visible aspects of architecture that subsume and ambiguate each other. Using multiple media, this artwork reproduces construction sites, over-the-top building technologies, as well as ostentatious architectural forms to identify a middle-class/upper-middle-class desire to perpetuate de-historicized building vocabularies tied to a global rather than a local turn in architectural design.
Artist Bios
Born in Mozambique, Jose Ferreira moved to South Africa to study Fine Art at the Durban University of Technology. After living in Europe he returned to South Africa in 1998 to co-initiate The Trinity Session, a curatorial organization that develops projects in collaboration with artists and institutions. In early 2002 he began working in the Cultural Studies department at the University of East London, United Kingdom, later accepting a position as Research Fellow in Digital Media, at the University of Sunderland, United Kingdom. Before joining UH Manoa he was a faculty member at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Artistic Director of Sculpture at Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Asma Kazmi creates transdisciplinary, performative, relational works where people, media, and objects come together. She is the recipient of many awards including the Fulbright Research Award, (CIES) to India; the Faculty Research Grant, CalArts; the Great Rivers Biennial by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Rocket Grant, the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Spencer Museum of Art at Kansas University; At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago Award, the University of Illinois in Chicago; and the Creative Stimulus Award, Critical Mass for the Visual Arts, St. Louis.
Sponsors
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Department of Art + Art History and College of Arts + Humanities; Center for South Asian Studies, UHM; and supported by Waikiki Parc Hotel – Hospitality Sponsor for the Arts at UH Mānoa; and anonymous donors.
Gallery hours + admission:
Mon. – Fri. 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Sun. 12:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Closed Saturdays;
Free admission. Donations are appreciated.
Parking fees may apply.
Directions
Images:
(top) Asma Kazmi
Burqa Girls, 2015
Courtesy of the artist.
(bottom) José Ferreira
Courtesy of the artist.
Information may be subject to change.