Twelve Gates: Between Material and Being Artist Panel w/Alpesh Patel

Join us to celebrate our current exhibition Between Material and Being: What Persists, What Emerges with an artist conversation moderated by art historian, Alpesh Patel. Artists Meena Hasan, Omer Wasim, and Zainab Zulfiqar will engage in conversation with Dr. Patel about their contributions to ths show.

6-8PM with a reception to follow the artist conversation.

Omer Wasim is an intermedial artist living and working between New York City and Karachi. Drawing from the urban vernacular of Karachi’s coastline, Wasim creates installations that resist historical erasure in the wake of violent aspirations to reconfigure power over land, water, and air. His practice makes visible ecological entanglements at the end of the world. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Critical Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His solo and collaborative projects have been shown at the National Museum of Qatar, the Yokohama Triennale, Sonsbeek 20→24, and the Dhaka Art Summit; at Jameel Arts Centre, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, and Centre A; and in artist-led and regional platforms including Colomboscope, Khoj Studios, the Cairo Video Festival, and the Karachi Biennale, among others.

Meena Hasan's artworks navigate the politics and aesthetics of heritage by drawing from processes and forms sourced from her index of personal and historical textiles, patterns and decorations. She uses paint, inks and a variety of papers to develop textured and exuberant psychosomatic surfaces. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. In 2024 she was selected for TNT's (Tiger Strikes Asteroid, NY and Transmitter Gallery) Winter 2025 Studio Residency. She has participated in many group exhibitions including at Deitch Projects, NYC, Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC and the 2022 New England Triennial at the deCordova Museum and has had recent solo and two person exhibitions with Deanna Evans Projects, Stowaway Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and at the Old Stone House of Brooklyn, NYC all in 2025. She is currently the Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in Painting at RISD, Providence while living and maintaining her studio in Brooklyn, NY. 

Zainab Zulfiqar (b. 1996, Lahore, Pakistan) earned their BFA at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan in 2021 and their MFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI in 2024. Recent group exhibitions include Liminal Spaces, Dastangoi Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2022); Liberating Arts in Guantanamo Bay, IVS Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; And so It Happened, T2F Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; among others. Zulfiqar is the recipient of the Roger and Gayle Mandle Presidential Fellowship, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s (they, he) art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect their queer, anti-racist, and transcultural approach to contemporary art. Author of  (2018), their book Multiple and One: global queer art histories is forthcoming in 2026. They are working on a book based on a series of exhibitions they organized under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity” at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where they were curator at large in 2023. Editor of Storytellers of Art Histories (2022), a special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor, and five exhibition catalogs, they recently contributed to the volumes Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History and A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (both, 2023). Grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Headlands, Arts Council England, NEH, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and New York University have supported their research. They chaired the Art in Public Places Committee in Miami Beach, Florida, where they were based for a decade before being appointed an associate professor of global contemporary art and LGBT*Q theory at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

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