Please join us on Friday, March 21 at The New School for a showcase event featuring the work of five University in Exile for Afghan Artist Fellows. The showcase will include photographs by Fatimah Hossaini, a short film by Sahraa Karimi, a reading by Mujib Mehrdad, paintings by Kabir Mokamel, and a musical performance by Waheed Saghar.
This event will feature a keynote presentation with Shirin Neshat, an award winning artist, filmmaker, and activist.
Reception will follow presentation and performances.
Presented by the New University in Exile Consortium at The New School for Social Research and the College of the Performing Arts at The New School
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works and continues to experiment with the mediums of photography, video, film, and Opera, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between the past and present, East and West, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021). Neshat directed her first opera Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022, which will be restaged at the Paris Opera House in 2025.
Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006) and in 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo.
She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.
Fatimah Hossaini is an acclaimed Afghan-Tehran born artist, award-winning photographer, curator, and founder of the Mastooraat Organization. A recipient of the prestigious Hypatia International Award and honored by the Women’s Forum fellow in France as a rising talent and youth ambassador class of 2022. Fatimah holds a BA in Photography from the University of Tehran and a degree in Industrial Engineering. A tireless advocate for women’s and refugee rights, Fatimah’s work on national and international platforms has been instrumental in driving social change.
Fatimah is being hosted by the School of Arts, Media, & Technology at Parsons School of Design.
Sahraa Karimi is an acclaimed filmmaker who has enjoyed international success in her career as a groundbreaking screenwriter, director, and professor. She is the first woman ever to head Afghan Films as its Director-General. Karimi’s filmography includes works such as Afghan Women behind the Wheel (2009), and Hava, Maryam, Ayesha (2019).
Karimi was formerly hosted by the School of Media Studies at The New School during her fellowship and is now a lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at Yale University. She is currently working on her second feature-length film, Flight from Kabul.
Mujib Mehrdad is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose work spans the literary, academic, television, and journalistic fields. He has published many collections of essays and poetry, including “Gladiators Are Still Dying,” which won the 2007 Afghan Civil Society’s literature contest, and “Dolphin’s Alley,” which won the Ahmad Shamlou Poetry Award in 2021. Until 2022, Mehrdad served as Editor-in-Chief of the Afghan newspaper, Hasht-e Subh.
He is being hosted by the Creative Writing Program in the Schools of Public Engagement at The New School.
Kabir Mokamel is a visual artist and activist who has enjoyed international success in his career as a painter, graphic designer, creative director, and graffiti artist. In addition to his work as co-founder and creative director of the art activism organization ArtLords, Mokamel continues his independent art practice, which focuses on the experience of war, displacement, and the ensuing issues of diaspora, conflict, and trauma. Mokamel’s work with ArtLords has been featured in The Art Newspaper, NBC News, KUOW Seattle, Al Jazeera, The Los Angeles Times, and more.
Kabir was formerly hosted by The School of Art, Media, and Technology at The New School.
Waheed Saghar is an Afghan academic, vocalist, and the former head of the Music Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Kabul University, the only musical program of its kind in Afghanistan. Saghar earned his PhD in Vocal Music in 2017 and has published multiple articles on classical vocal music in Afghanistan and India. His international performances, both solo and as part of a group, include appearances at the Luxembourg Philharmonie, Melody from East Festival, Uzbekistan, as well as events in Finland, Germany, India, and Sweden.
Waheed is being hosted by the Mannes Faculty at the College of Performing Arts at The New School.
The Consortium is a globally expanding group of colleges and universities in the U.S., Bangladesh, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Each institutional member is committed to hosting at least one threatened scholar every year and these exiled hosted scholars constitute our scholar cohort. We work with them individually and together to try and lessen the profound sense of dislocation that exiled scholars suffer and which adversely impacts their intellectual and personal lives. Since 2021, the Consortium has expanded its mission to include finding placements for threatened Afghan and Ukrainian academics, students, and artists at Consortium member institutions.
Established in September 2018, the Consortium follows in the tradition of The New School’s original University in Exile created by The New School’s first President, Alvin Johnson, in 1933. The first University in Exile became the home of rescued, largely Jewish endangered scholars from Germany and France. Today, members of the New University in Exile Consortium are hosting nearly 300 exiled scholars from 30 countries.
In collaboration with the Artistic Freedom Initiative, the Consortium is committed to bringing 10 endangered Afghan artists on 1-year fellowships to the programs and divisions in the arts at The New School. When we succeed, the Consortium will have effectively created a second University in Exile at The New School, the first of which was founded by The New School’s first President, Alvin Johnson in 1933.
The University in Exile for Afghan Artists is made possible by generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and from individual donors.
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
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