VIRTUAL
REGISTRATION

As queer of color, how do we investigate desire, love, and pleasure? In the age of anti-immigration and digitized global market economy who has the agency on their marketable victimhood? When we think philosophically about queer desire & pleasure through our life, belonging, and nonbelonging; we often encounter living and surviving in between longing and wanting a romantic connection, perhaps to build a sense of home in different lands and territories. This paper/ presentation is a look back into my past 7 years of art and activism in juxtapose to a radicalized reading of queer desire and pleasure. I conduct rambling yet extensive research around the social event, space, people related to their origin of belonging. I connect theory and sentiment concerning the archive, history, language, and identity. I make the argument in my presentation in reference to my practice (art) on how to process trauma and vulnerability especially when our life as a queer of color is in constant need of validation starting from institution to immigration and nation-states. We rather create and thrive in response to these existential challenges to find what left in this process.

ALI ASGAR

Born in 1991 in, Bangladesh; Ali Asgar Tara is a non-binary (they/them) artist from the Bengal Delta. As a transdisciplinary researcher, artist, activist, and scholar Ali’s hybrid practice utilizes body, space, and personal narrative (archive/language/history and identity) to create political, site responsive, and community base cross-disciplinary collaborations. Ali's original work has been featured, exhibited, and staged across the world including the 2014 and 2016 Dhaka Art Summits, the 2016 Kolkata International Performance Festival, the 2014 Dhaka Social Art Festival, and the Asian Art Biennial. Asgar has been exhibited and showcased in Defibrillator Gallery in Chicago, Space Gallery in Portland Maine, Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, Bullet Space, Panoply Performance Lab, Dixon Place, Bronx Academy of Art and Queens Museum in NYC, 7d11 Online performance festival, Trinitite square video and Onsite Gallery in Toronto, Asian Art Initiative in Philadelphia, City of Asylum in Pittsburgh and in many other major North American experimental performance spaces. Ali's work has been reviewed by critique Hans Ulrich Obrist, Platform such as CoboSocial, and appeared in newspaper publications such as Dhaka Tribune, The Daily Star, The Daily Beast, Pittsburgh City Paper, Voyage Chicago. Asgar has shown their work as a visiting artist at the University of Maine, University of Connecticut, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Ontario College of Art and Design – OCAD, and University of California in Berkeley. Asgar has earned a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and recently an MFA in Studio from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago-SAIC, IL, USA.