FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Twelve Gates Arts is thrilled to present Between Material and Being: What Persists, What Emerges, a group exhibition curated by Atif Sheikh and the Twelve Gates Arts Team in Philadelphia. The exhibition features works by Omer Wasim, Vinay Hira, Pallavi Sen, Meena Hasan, Amra Khan, Sai Inácio, Joanna Booth, and Zainab Zulfiqar. Between Material and Being opens on Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

Drawing from Julietta Singh's concept of "unthinking mastery," this exhibition examines how artists challenge traditional hierarchies between material and being, craft and art, nature and artifice. Central to the exhibition is an exploration of queer desire as a force that defies containment and categorization. The works investigate how desire—in its inherently fluid, malleable, and non-normative forms—manifests through pattern and materiality, suggesting possibilities beyond conventional frameworks of control and binary thinking.

The exhibition brings together artists whose practices actively confront expectations of mastery, instead embracing vulnerability and transformation. These works refuse singular readings, operating in the liminal spaces between defined categories, embracing contradiction and fluidity through what Singh calls "vital ambivalence"—a practice that emphasizes contradiction rather than resolving it.

Meena Hasan's work navigates the politics and aesthetics of heritage through processes and forms sourced from her index of personal and historical textiles, patterns and decorations. Using paint, inks and various papers, she develops textured and exuberant psychosomatic surfaces that explore the subversive potential of the decorative. Her compositions present a synthetic selfhood shaped by perpetual search for belonging, positioned in relation to ongoing colonial, global and immigrant histories, examining issues of inheritance, legacy, desire, and alienation.

Pallavi Sen's handmade quilts belong to a larger installation where she imagines a greenhouse or hothouse, as a home and studio. The quilts make up the floors of the space, and now in their second life beyond the gallery, have travelled to various homes and beds as most quilts do. Rooted in South Asian aesthetics and the sixty-four kalā (arts/skills) of Hindustani tradition, her broader work is born of her life in India, histories of women’s work; quilting, something she learned in the United States, became a way to find a similar ethos of making abroad. Her practice also functions pedagogically: each year, Pallavi teaches a hand-quilting class with a single assignment—starting and completing a queen-sized quilt, using only needle and thread, over the course of thirteen weeks.

Vinay Hira's performance and visual art applies a cultural-capitalist lens to questions of identity through irreverent, sardonic self-branding. His work exists in "the liminal space between eccentricity and instability where both our deepest desires and greatest insecurities threaten to spill from our mouths." Through embroidery and digital mythology, he questions how desire becomes commodified and how queerness disrupts the coherence of consumption-based identity, creating tangible artifacts of his own existence filtered through algorithms and market testing.

Omer Wasim's installations embody the haunted persistence of memory and the fluid force of queer survival—bearing witness to what is erased, what resists forgetting, and what continues to live on through ruin. Through ephemeral materials, architectural thresholds, and more-than-human traces, the work speaks to how desire—especially under conditions of state violence—manifests as a sensorial subversion, a refusal to be contained or silenced.

Amra Khan explores the intersection of devotional objects and queer desire through altars and embroidered works that transform sacred spaces into sites of personal and political questioning. This body of work reimagines devotional objects and intimate heirlooms as vessels of memory, longing, and relation. She draws from South-Asian textile and craft traditions, salvaged materials, and once-cherished items like brass surmadani, tracing how histories are inscribed in what is left behind. Through processes that embrace difficulty and imperfection, she resists mastery and celebrates making as a labor of love: both remembrance and refusal, honoring erased lineages while envisioning new forms of care and connection.

Sai Inácio, Joanna Booth, and Zainab Zulfiqar, previously known as Rat Island Press, create collaborative work that relies on the conceptual and material form of the rat; they investigate 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. Their process of archiving through visual space and character building takes form in various kinds of prints and sculptures. Using block printing, a collographed dead rat, and the material memory of the artists' own domestic spaces, they invite others into the chaos of “Nightmare Dream Home” - an imaginative space which heightens the nostalgia of coming home with its humor and discomfort.

Together, these works examine how mastery over materials and desire can be "unthought" through artistic practice that acknowledges vulnerability, interdependence, and resistance to categorization. The exhibition does not resolve questions about the nature of desire or material agency, but rather opens up spaces where conventional hierarchies can be questioned through material engagement, pattern disruption, and queered relationships to representation.

About Twelve Gates Arts:

Founded in 2011, Twelve Gates Arts (12G) is an arts gallery located in Old City, Philadelphia that uplifts South & West Asian diasporic artistic voices within the local cultural landscape. 12G quarterly visual exhibition and community events focus on an emerging art landscape that maps culture of migration, inclusive of the systems that influence it: race, gender, creed, empire, and economy. A nod to the archetypal fortified walls that surround Imperial medieval cities worldwide, our namesake underlies our exhibitions and events, which celebrate the melange of cultural identity that foments as peoples move and settle.

GALLERY HOURS: Thursday – Saturday, 11 AM – 5 PM or by appointment. (Twelve Gates Arts is located at 106 N 2nd St, Philadelphia, PA 19106).

Meena Hasan's artworks navigate the politics and aesthetics of heritage by drawing from processes and forms sourced from her index of personal and historical textiles, patterns and decorations. She uses paint, inks and a variety of papers to develop textured and exuberant psychosomatic surfaces. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. In 2024 she was selected for TNT's (Tiger Strikes Asteroid, NY and Transmitter Gallery) Winter 2025 Studio Residency. She has participated in many group exhibitions including at Deitch Projects, NYC, Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC and the 2022 New England Triennial at the deCordova Museum and has had recent solo and two person exhibitions with Deanna Evans Projects, Stowaway Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and at the Old Stone House of Brooklyn, NYC all in 2025. She is currently the Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in Painting at RISD, Providence while living and maintaining her studio in Brooklyn, NY.

Born in 1989, Pallavi Sen is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, Instagram, and intuitive movement. Current interests include planting meadows, inner lives of birds and animals, the grief of the anthropocene, South Asian costumes, domestic architecture, altars, deities, atheism and magical thinking, style, pattern history, masculinity, friendship + love, her future lover, farming and the artist as farmer, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, walking, seeds, and cooking. She received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University and has been a fellow + artist in residence at Shandaken Projects: Storm King, Mildred's Lane, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Ox-Bow School of Art, Byrdcliffe at Woodstock, Wormfarm Institute, Yale Norfolk School of Art, Hambidge Center, and ACRE. She is an Assistant Professor of Multiples + Distributed Art at Williams College, and lives/walks in the Berkshires.

Suburban-New-Zealand raised bodega-boy Vinay Hira [left] is a marine and wine scientist and performance and visual artist based in Manhattan. An obsession with postmodernism and intersectional identity politics, he puts a cultural-capitalist leaning on his irreverent, sardonic branding of his own existence.

Omer Wasim [not pictured] is an intermedial artist living and working between New York City and Karachi. Drawing from the urban vernacular of Karachi’s coastline, Wasim creates installations that resist historical erasure in the wake of violent aspirations to reconfigure power over land, water, and air. His practice makes visible ecological entanglements at the end of the world. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Critical Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His solo and collaborative projects have been shown at the National Museum of Qatar, the Yokohama Triennale, Sonsbeek 20→24, and the Dhaka Art Summit; at Jameel Arts Centre, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, and Centre A; and in artist-led and regional platforms including Colomboscope, Khoj Studios, the Cairo Video Festival, and the Karachi Biennale, among others.

Born in 1984 in Islamabad, Pakistan, Amra Khan is an interdisciplinary visual artist, research, and educator based in Lahore. She graduated with distinction in Painting from the National College of Arts in 2008 and completed her Masters in Visual Arts at NCA in 2011, with a semester at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), Paris. Her practice draws from South-Asian traditions and incorporates painting, textiles, repurposed wood, and mixed media to create objects and environments of devotion. Exploring gender, sexuality, intimacy, and social conditioning within the framework of religion, her work examines the queer body and the alpha male archetype in the Pakistani Muslim context. Through contemporary interpretations of alters and symbolic forms, she navigates divine longing, iconography, and humanity’s pursuit of spiritual connection. Her practice reflects on modern faith, desire for the divine, and the relentless search for Eden, a pursuit that often erases both personal and collective memory. Khan has held four solo exhibitions: Gender Nectar at Galerie Sauvaget, Paris (2011); Ecce Homo – Behold the Man at Sanat Initiative, Karachi (2015); Kacha Gosht at O Art Space, Lahore (2018); and Zakhmi Dil at Khaas Contemporary, Islamabad (2024). Her work has been shown widely in Pakistan and abroad, including at the Lahore Biennale 01, 02, and 03; ARTROOMS International Contemporary Art Fair, London (2018, 2019); and exhibitions in Paris, Basel, and Norway. She has co-curated projects such as Stet (LLF, 2014), is represented in prominent collections, and has received the Visiting Artist Fellowship at Harvard University’s Mittal Institute (2024) and the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation Residency (2024). She currently serves as Assistant Professor at Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore.

Sai (Sara) Inácio is a Brazilian artist and educator based in Providence, RI. They hold an MFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design (‘24) and a BFA in Printmaking and Public Engagement from Maine College of Art (17’). As a queer person who immigrated to the U.S. at a young age, Sai is drawn to make and think with ecosystems and communities that flourish in spite of human-built environments and societal structures that push against their existence. Their work explores complex coexistence, seeks a rejection of the here and now, and hopes to imagine another world. Sai is a professor teaching printmaking, foundations, and book arts across UMass Amherst, Community College of Rhode Island, and Brown University. They have participated in exhibitions, collaborations, and curatorial projects across New England, and attended artist residencies at Queer Archive Work (Providence, RI), Art Farm (Marquette, NE), and Green Olive Arts (Tetouan, Morocco).

Joanna Booth is a multi-media printmaker and textile artist from Philadelphia, PA. Currently based in Providence, her work explores themes of home, social narrative, memory and identity. She received her BFA in Studio Art and Black Studies from Amherst College (‘19) and completed a MFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design (‘24). She has exhibited work across New England and Philadelphia and attended the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) Post Graduate Apprenticeship, the Wassaic Project Artist Residency and the Hambidge Center for Art and Science Residency. Joanna currently is an Adjunct Lecturer at Brown University and is preparing for her first solo show at the AS220 Aborn Gallery.

Zainab Zulfiqar (b. 1996, Lahore, Pakistan) earned their BFA at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan in 2021 and their MFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI in 2024. Recent group exhibitions include Liminal Spaces, Dastangoi Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2022); Liberating Arts in Guantanamo Bay, IVS Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; And so It Happened, T2F Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; among others. Zulfiqar is the recipient of the Roger and Gayle Mandle Presidential Fellowship, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

Curator:

Atif Sheikh is the co-founder of 12Gates and serves as a resident curator. Sheikh has curated several art exhibitions at 12Gates since 2010, the latest being "Sites of Ruin" (2023). He has also co-curated exhibitions like "New Asian Futurisms" at Asian Arts Initiative in 2019 and "Breathing Room" at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery in 2020. In addition to his curatorial work, he has twice served on the jury for the Women’s Voices Now Film Festival, participated in Fleisher Art Memorial’s Wind Challenge Exhibition in 2019, and contributed to the 12G Contemporary Video Arts Exhibition since 2015. He holds a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester.