Between Material and Being: What Persists, What Emerges is curated by Atif F. Sheikh and the team at Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia.

Drawing from Julietta Singh's concept of "unthinking mastery," this exhibition explores how eight  artists challenge traditional hierarchies through queer desire, materiality, and pattern. The works embrace "vital ambivalence"—contradiction without resolution—investigating how desire manifests through textiles, paint, embroidery, and installation.

In this exhibition, Meena Hasan navigates heritage through exuberant psychosomatic surfaces drawn from personal and historical textiles. Pallavi Sen creates watercolor "stage sets" mapping dreams, domesticity, and New England geography through South Asian aesthetics. Vinay Hira produces sardonic self-mythologies through embroidery and digital culture. Omer Wasim's installations embody queer survival and haunted memory through ephemeral materials. Amra Khan transforms devotional objects into sites of queer desire. Sai Inácio, Joanna Booth, and Zainab Zulfiqar  nvestigate complex relationships between human-domestic spaces and other life forms, to create precarious ecosystems that reflect on their relationships to home, family, queerness, and memory.

These practices refuse singular readings, operating in liminal spaces between defined categories, questioning conventional hierarchies through material engagement and queered representation.