Asma Kazmi
Instagram: asmakazmi
Website: http://www.asmakazmi.com
Bio: "Asma Kazmi is a new media artist and a professor of art at UC Berkeley. She creates art installations that blend physical and virtual spaces and objects. Using transgressive curatorial tactics, she combines visual and textual fragments from historical manuscripts, photographs, and archival material, and she mixes them with her own critical fabulation to tell stories about colonial and indigenous technologies, global flows of people and commodities, and interspecies entanglements. Asma Kazmi’s selected exhibitions include: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich; Gray Area, San Francisco; Goethe Institute, San Francisco; Galerie Cité internationale des arts, Paris, France; Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco; the Espacio Laraña, University of Seville, Spain; the Commons Gallery, University of Hawaii in Honolulu; Faraar Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Queens Museum of Art, NY; H&R Block Space, Kansas City; The Guild Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Gallery 210, University of Missouri St Louis; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago. "
Statement: Beyond the Seas Blue is a series of speculative digital prints that reimagine the Sar-i Sang lapis lazuli mine in northern Afghanistan as an experimental subterranean museum. Drawing on fabulism, the project symbolically returns dispersed lapis-based artifacts—both Western and non-Western—to their geological origin. In doing so, it traces the deep history, vitality, and knowledge embedded in this semi-precious stone, while also intervening in museological conventions that have long upheld extractive and colonial practices.
