Punk Orientalism

10 November 2018 – 15 February 2019

About the Exhibition

Curated By

Sara Raza

Organized & Circulated By

MacKenzie Art Gallery

Galleries

RHW, Hill, Ipsco, University of Regina Galleries

Rooted in the conceptual capacity of “punk”, Punk Orientalism centres on the contemporary theme of resistance and highlights the practices of artists who have questioned changing and divided societies from a variety of different historical and conceptual vantage points. Featuring a spectrum of recent artwork, projects, text based art (zines) and new media Punk Orientalism presents a forum for diverse artistic voices from a complex and multifaceted part of the globe, where artists have actively challenged draconian state and academic policies, mapped new territories and formed new artistic movements. Overall the exhibition aims to present overlooked models of artistic reality, which cross-circulate between different societal, cultural and political systems and provide alternative contexts from which globalism and other modernisms can be accessed from a non Eurocentric perspective. By adopting an ideas driven narrative Punk Orientalism offers proposals that solicit a redefinition of fixed geographical rubrics and instead offers a nuanced survey of recent artistic thinking.

Punk Orientalism focuses on the theme of non-conformity as a tool for investigating contemporary art and critical enquiry on the spaces and places that identify with Central Asia and the Caucasus from a post-Soviet perspective.

Works in the Exhibition

Installation view,

Installation view, "Punk Orientalism", MacKenzie Art Gallery, 2018. Photo: Don Hall.

 
Installation view,

Installation view, "Punk Orientalism", MacKenzie Art Gallery, 2018. Photo: Don Hall.

 
Mustafa Hulusi,

Mustafa Hulusi, "Pomegranate No.1", 2014, installed on off-site billboard at the corner of Albert Street and 12th Avenue, Regina, SK

 
Installation view,

Installation view, "Punk Orientalism", MacKenzie Art Gallery, 2018. Photo: Don Hall.

 
Shahpour Pouyan, Sara Raza, and Babi Badalov, 2018. Photo courtesy MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Shahpour Pouyan, Sara Raza, and Babi Badalov, 2018. Photo courtesy MacKenzie Art Gallery.

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

ABOUT SARA RAZA

Sara Raza is an independent curator and writer on global art, and was the winner of the ArtTable New Leadership Award for Women in the Arts (2016). Sara was the Guggenheim UBS MAP curator for the Middle East and North Africa and curated But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, (2016), which travelled to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan in 2018. Sara is the West and Central Asia editor for ArtAsiaPacific.

PUNK ORIENTALISM ARTISTS

  • Aikaterini Gegisian
  • Ala Younis
  • Ali Cherri
  • Babi Badalov
  • Erbossyn Meldibekov
  • Ergin Cavusoglu
  • Farhad Ahrarnia
  • Inci Eviner
  • Mustafa Hulusi
  • Nazgol Ansarinia
  • Rokni Haerizadeh
  • Shahpour Pouyan
  • Slavs and Tatars
  • Taus Makhacheva
  • Vyacheslav Akhunov