Role: Curator

Twelve Gates Arts is honored to present A Space for Monsters, a group exhibition curated by Ambika Trasi, featuring works by Maryam Hoseini, Kaveri Raina, and Anjuli Rathod. The exhibition draws its inspiration from Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, wherein she writes, “the monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.” 

Through painting, sculpture, and drawing, the artists work between abstraction and figuration to depict monsters: shapeless, fragmented beings who are part-human and part- animal, cyborg, or shadow; who roam freely between and across normative boundaries of being and simultaneously exist in states of liminality and opacity. The works in A Space for Monsters map the emotional landscapes of these non-subjects to illustrate how internal hierarchies, inner-turmoil, and self-intimacy play into processing grief, anxiety, dislocation, and precariousness. For these beings, monstrosity is a poetic voice and means to work through the incomprehensible, counter rigid notions of expression and understanding, and resist projected identities. On the other side of this period of incubation lies the promise of radical transformation.

In Maryam Hoseini’s installations, femme figures are flattened and pieced together from ruins. They stretch across narrative and historical boundaries, pushing against the violences and vocabularies that have long been projected onto them to give way to new possibilities of representation. Her works extend beyond the boundaries of her boards into the gallery space, underscoring the notion that one has the potential to overcome internal hierarchies and exceed perceived limitations. Kaveri Raina’s new series of graphite drawings on board, Untitled (No Lacks), considers the relationship between the self and shadow while in isolation and through the distorting lenses of mirrors, windows, and screens. In these works, the shadow is examined as both part-of and separate-from the self, familiar yet dangerous. Anjuli Rathod’s flashe paintings utilize color and abstraction to depict the disorienting and transformative experience of grief. Evoking the atmosphere of Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Rathod’s paintings follow the cyclical journey of a character that she calls “Red.” In the paintings on view in A Space for Monsters, Red finds herself in a state of crisis, then cocooned in a period of stasis, after which she becomes a transcendent being who exists between the physical and spiritual worlds. Meanwhile, Rathod’s ceramic sculptures, which are glazed in elemental colors, resemble intestines. To the artist, processing is like digestion: slow, fundamental, and winding. 

Twelve Gates Arts is pleased to welcome back guest curator Ambika Trasi. Trasi first partnered with Twelve Gates as the managing director and curatorial assistant at Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW). She is an artist, arts organizer, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her multidisciplinary practice reveals the coloniality of power within images and sites. Trasi is currently a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of the American Art, where she co-curated the exhibition, Salman Toor: How Will I Know (November 13, 2020 - April 4, 2021). As a curator, Trasi shares Twelve Gates’s passion for engaging emerging voices as artistic exponents in our ever-changing cultural and political landscape.