Gazelle Samizay joins as WRAG Director
Photo of Gazelle
In December, Art Practice’s Worth Ryder Gallery was tremendously fortunate to welcome a new Gallery Director, Gazelle Samizay. Gazelle’s supported the recent installation of WRAG’s upcoming show, OPTIMAL CONDITIONS (first year MFA show, Jan 26-Feb 17), and will be working with faculty and students to mount exhibitions, as well as curating exhibitions of art from outside our academic community. Here is a brief Q/A with Gazelle by Professor Anne Walsh.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan and raised in rural Washington state, Gazelle Samizay’s artistic practice often expresses and interrogates the complexities and contradictions of culture, nationality and gender through the lens of her bicultural identity. She works in the media of photography, video and mixed materials, and has exhibited across the US and internationally, including at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; the California Museum of Photography, Riverside; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and the Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, UT. In addition to her studio practice, Samizay’s writing has been published in One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature and she is a founding member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association. She received her MFA in photography at the University of Arizona and currently lives in San Francisco.
Gazelle was generous enough to answer several questions about her current and upcoming work, and we share her answers here:
Welcome Gazelle! We are so lucky to have you as a colleague. Could you tell me a little about what you're working on in your own film/art work right now - both individually, in collaboration, or in activist practice?
I just finished With/Draw, which is now showing at LA Art Core in Los Angeles. It’s a multimedia installation: 2-channel video, audio, telephone, and acrylic marker.
With/Draw is the first chapter in the project Chelah: 40 Years Later, which unpacks the cyclical, complex experience of evacuating at-risk Afghans almost exactly 40 years after my family's own departure from Afghanistan.
The installation uses text and audio messages exchanged between myself and an Afghan artist who requested help to escape from Afghanistan in anticipation of the U.S. withdrawal and a Taliban takeover. These are layered with screenshots of information the artist and others shared with me during this period in an effort to find a way out.
Text message transcripts between myself and the artist were written on the gallery walls, but will be erased at the end of the exhibition, reflecting on the invisible labor of so many in the Afghan diaspora who have been working tirelessly to evacuate at-risk Afghans in spite of a negligent and purposely inaccessible state apparatus, illuminating the mundane and tedious brutalities of the US immigration system.
Could you tell me one or two takeaways from the Bi-Lingering project you have been working on? Has that project spawned new ideas that you look forward to working with?
Bi-Lingering is an ongoing project in collaboration with artist Labkhand Olfatmanesh. We invite bilingual people (of any proficiency) to discuss their experiences of expressing themselves in more than one language in exchange for a limited edition art card created by us. Through submitted letters and workshops, we have learned that people across many language backgrounds experience shame around their bilingual expression and identity, but that sharing these stories with others has been healing. Through the process I have also become more comfortable with my own bilingual identity. You can see examples of submitted letters on our Instagram page. We are still taking letter submissions–feel free to sign up!
What made you want to come to work as the Exhibitions Manager of WRAG?
I really enjoy working on projects that engage the community and also elevate the voices of artists. As someone who has taught for over ten years, I also enjoy working with students and learning from them. The Art Practice community has been very warm and welcoming, and I look forward to our future creative collaborations!
Do you have any sense of curatorial projects you'd like to undertake next - either at WRAG or elsewhere?
For Fall 2022 I am planning an exhibit of Afghan artists at WRAG. This exhibit will center the artistry and voices of Afghans who have lived through the recent withdrawal of the US. It asks how the uncertainty of life becomes felt in new ways when empire redraws its boundaries. We seek to show how art is being used as a tool for reclaiming one's humanity and identity in contexts where maintaining hope in the future is a political act. How do Afghans, both those who remain and those displaced waiting in limbo, make sense of twenty years of both prolonged intervention and sudden abandonment? What historical traditions of art, poetry, and advocacy are being resurrected in this moment where recent political ideologies have failed to capture the kinds of futures and senses of belonging people imagine for themselves?
As part of this exhibit, I will be researching whether participating artists can mint their work as NFTs so that they can derive income from their work. I welcome anyone with experience in this area to collaborate on this aspect. I’m also looking forward to working with other departments at UCB to create programming for the exhibit, such as panel discussions and literary readings.
Gazelle can be reached at gsamizay@berkeley.edu or at her
Office: Anthropology and Art Practice Building 347A.