The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) is pleased to present its annual visual arts exhibition, welcome to what we took from is the state, guest curated by Sadia Shirazi at the Queens Museum.

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective formed just a few years before 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the ongoing U.S. led “Global War on Terror.”  Between the organization’s foundation and the present moment, the ground of this community has shifted amid the geopolitics of endless war and the racialized carceral politics of the state. Operating in parallel to the geopolitics of the “Global War on Terror” are the unacknowledged social, domestic, and commercial spaces—resistant “black sites”—that are the subjects of many of the artworks brought together in welcome to what we took from is the state. Through works that take many forms, including installation, photomontage, video, performance, and social sculpture, artists in this exhibition ask how we might recalibrate our feelings in relation to one another under the pressure of antagonisms that seek to weaken, diminish, and destroy the social bonds and debts that hold us together. The works in this exhibition highlight multiple modes of artistic practice that engage with what precedes and persists beyond attempts at enclosure, through the entanglements in which it is given away.

Anushya Badrinath

Chitra Ganesh

Mariam Ghani

Sue Jeong Ka

Ayesha Kamal Khan

Raja’a Khalid

Ayqa Khan, Fariha Róisín, and Nafisa Kaptownwala

Gelare Khoshgozaran

Umber Majeed

Huma Mujli

Ayesha Sultana

About SAWCC

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the advancement, visibility, and development of emerging and established South Asian women artists and creative professionals by providing a physical and virtual space to profile their creative and intellectual work across disciplines.