This event will feature
contributors, artists, and curators, Tausif Noor, Laimah Osman, Wazhmah Osman, and Gazelle Samizay
speaking on contemporary Afghan art, including photography, prints, multimedia works, and installation art, that engages with questions of borders, (im)mobility, diaspora, family, cultural traditions, colonialism, and war. They will discuss the material and representational ways that artists address these and other topics and reflect on how visual tropes and creative interventions are reshaping how Afghanistan is portrayed locally and abroad.
Wazhmah Osman is a filmmaker and associate professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce. She is the author of Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (2020), which won the 2021 Activism, Communication, and Social Justice Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association.
Laimah Osman is an artist, designer, and educator whose artistic production takes the form of drawings, prints, and artist’s books. Her work has been displayed in numerous exhibitions and is archived in various libraries. She has been awarded residencies at Camargo Foundation, Lower East Side Printshop, and Women’s Studio Workshop, as well as grants from Brooklyn Arts Council and Jerome Foundation. She earned a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (1998) and an MFA from Pratt Institute (2010). You can view more images on my website: https://laimah.com
Gazelle Samizay is an Afghan American multimedia artist, curator, and writer whose work explores how systems of power shape memory and historical narratives. Through participatory installations and video, she invites audiences to engage in reconstructing histories fragmented by violence and omission. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), Linden Museum (Germany), the de Young Museum, and the Slamdance Film Festival. Samizay’s work is held in the collections of LACMA, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and En Foco. https://gazellesamizay.com
Tausif Noor is Assistant Curator at BAMPFA, where he supports the development and realization of exhibitions, programs, and publications. Previously, he was the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the ICA Philadelphia and worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Noor is the recipient of the 2025 Holt Prize from Lambda Literary, the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Art Writing from the Silvers Foundation, and a 2022 Andy Warhol Art Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing. He has published in various periodicals and journals, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Art History, and Artforum.