No father–no frontier Opening Reception

12Gates is honored to present No Father–No Frontier, a two-person show curated by Protyasha Pandey and featuring work by Humaira Abid and Aiza Ahmed. Join us for the opening reception of No Father–No Frontier on Friday, March 7th, from 5:30 – 7:30 PM.

No Father–No Frontier is an examination of the relationship between family and state, and their subversions by the female gaze in exile. All three of us, removed from our points of origin, in the tout-monde–the West is in us, we are in the West. Displacement affords us the luxury of viewing distance. Drawing on the feminist argument for family abolition, Humaira Abid and Aiza Ahmed deliver critiques of paterfamilial regimes, and lay claim to personhood made outside of the established paradigms of lineage and citizenship.

To the infant, Gender is the first instrument of abstraction. Home, follows as a first threshold; and family, the first line-of-control. To the artist, family is formidable emotional terrain—the possibilities for kinship, love and care sit alongside the possibility of despotism, pain and violence, subject to an unpredictable lottery. Poised against society, state and capital, She continues to be at once in need of the meagre protections of family and yet marginalised by its legacies and prescriptions.