Sadia Shirazi will write a series of essays and profiles that highlight the connections between contemporary art and activist practices and ongoing processes of decolonization across the world. Shirazi’s writing addresses the myriad lacunae in dominant art historical discourses by considering artists engaging the legacies of anticolonial, Non-Aligned, Black, and Third World feminist and gay liberation movements. She will look at exhibitions and interdisciplinary work, including architecture, sculpture, installation, film, video, and performance produced across south-south and north-south points of contact to assert and constellate their promiscuous inheritances while remaining attentive to questions of form. Shirazi will attend to a renewed internationalism emerging in the midst of the collision of multiple crises—from the ongoing pandemic to resistance movements—foregrounding principles of care, collectivity, desire, and humor.
Sadia Shirazi is a writer, independent curator, and architect based in New York. Shirazi is interested in transnational histories of art, architecture, and decolonization, and in diasporic artists working across regions, languages, disciplines, and media. She has published in Artforum, Bidoun, Movement Research Performance Journal, C Magazine, and The Funambulist in addition to contributing to various exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed journals. Shirazi has curated exhibitions internationally, including “Soft and Wet” (2019) at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; “welcome to what we took from is the state” (2016), at the Queens Museum, New York; and “Exhibition Without Objects (EwO)” (2013) at the Drawing Room Gallery, New York and Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi. Her work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale and the Devi Art Foundation. She has taught at the Whitney Independent Study Program, Cooper Union, The New School, and the National College of the Arts. Shirazi is currently an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American, Pacific Rim, and Transnational Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University.