Storylines: Art + Remote Conflict | Sabina Haque

October 7 - 26, 2015 | Littman Gallery

Reception: Wednesday, October 7, 2015 | 5 - 8pm

Curated by Cass Ray

Sabina Haque's work draws on South Asian folk rituals, oral histories, video performance and hand-drawn animation to explore the turbulent transformations of identity and place. “Storylines” is a three part, multi-sensory installation exploring loss, memory and renewal.

Remembrance, is a stop-motion video performance bearing witness to the emotional and material destruction wrought by the US military’s drone warfare carried out in eight countries, including Haque’s native Pakistan.

Reclamation is a 10’ diameter circle made of Rangoli chalk powder on the gallery floor and serves a projection screen. This hand-drawn animated installation examines and reclaims the narrative of conflict and the ever-changing identity of place.

Under the same blue sky, are lattice windows that form a protected alcove. The back lit, translucent screens are covered with hand written stories and earphones allow the participant to hear an immigrant’s life story from Portland’s Somali Muslim community. This installation offers a space to witness a powerful and intimate storyline, one that reclaims the narrative experience of individual immigrants as they share their lives through art.

Sabina Haque is an artist of South Asian descent raised in Karachi by her American mother and Pakistani father. In 2015 Haque was a TEDxPortland speaker and TEDx artist-in-residence and awarded the 2014 Oregon Art Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. Noteworthy exhibits include solo and group shows at Avampato Museum of Art, Virginia, Bowery Gallery in New York, the Boston Contemporary Art Center, the Los Angeles Arts and Cultural Center, the South Asian Visual Arts Center, in Toronto, Canada and Koel Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan

The panel includes art curator Namita Gupta Wiggers, cultural theorist Anne-Marie Oliver, former director of PSU’s Middle East Studies Center Dr. Peter Bechtold, and Somali social and political activist Kayse Jama of Portland’s Center for Intercultural Organizing.

Project is supported in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.