Playing Gender
“Playing Gender” Asma Kazmi will create a performance/public event in Kansas City connected with current work that engages a subaltern section of modern Indian society—cross-dressed biological men, eunuchs, or hermaphrodites, who are known traditionally as hijras. The performance will consist of documentary and reconstructed audio/visual material, live performances, workshops and programmed discussions on issues of gender construction, sexuality and ritual.
Kazmi has gathered extensive footage revealing the contradictory world of the hijra community and her own self-conscious insertion into this environment – as both an outsider and an insider. She will draw from this wealth of audio/visual material to create a transdisciplinary event that celebrates the precarious fabrication of gender artifice and exaggeration. Kazmi will recruit/train local drag queens from Kansas City to appear with her for live performances, and the associated discussions will bring new faces and perspectives (scholars, drag queens, artists, community members) to issues as varied as contemporary art production, social engagement, gender politics and ritual. A website will archive the documentary and constructed materials and also be a place for discussions.
The hijras have an incessant, vibrant presence at a number of major traffic intersections in urban India. They can also be seen in drag, gathered for marriages and birth celebrations, singing and dancing to drums and claps. In spite of the hijras’ tumultuous visibility in the public realm, they remain a marginalized group, tolerated only in the specific roles of beggars, ritual performers, or homosexual prostitutes.
In the summer of 2009, Kazmi spent two months in New Delhi, working with four hijras, all clients of the Sahara House, an NGO that provides rehabilitation and advocacy for hijras with HIV/AIDS. She spent a few weeks building relationships and cultivating trust and the final month performing with the hijra community in staged settings and public spaces. She learned their way of dancing, which is a burlesque of female dance moves borrowed from Bollywood films. The relationship culminated in a performance event that challenged Kazmi’s voice as an artist and her own identity as a heterosexual female.
Kazmi: “I approach my art practice from the position that exposing oneself to a liminal space (a space in-between the familiar and the unfamiliar) is an aesthetic process, since it deconstructs habitual categories of apprehension, heightens one’s awareness of simultaneous realities, and places one in a position to reconstruct experience. My interest in exploring spaces suspended between binary oppositions is based on my personal experience of continuous relocation: much of my adult life has been shaped by my achievements and losses as an immigrant to the United States, as a person shifting between multiple languages, ethnicities, and identities.”
About the Artist
Asma Kazmi
Asma Kazmi approaches her art practice from a post installation/object centric position, which allows her to create transdisciplinary, relational works where people, media and objects come together. She is the recipient of At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago Award, given by the University of Illinois in Chicago and the Critical Mass Grant awarded by The Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis, MO. In 2008, Paul Ha, Director of The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, nominated her as one of St. Louis’ five most promising artists in a prominent St Louis arts and culture magazine. Her work has been performed and exhibited at Grand Arts, Kansas City; University of Missouri, St Louis, Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis; Webster University; Boots Contemporary Art Space, St Louis; The Guild Gallery, NYC; Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago; Boston Underground Film Festival; Balagan Film and Video Series, Boston; Women In Film & Video/New England; and the MassArt Film Society. Asma Kazmi received a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and an M.F.A. from the School of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan.
For more information, visit: http://asmakazmi.com
