The Loft Hour: Asma Kazmi + SanSan Kwan

Asma Kazmi is a research-based artist who combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial contexts. Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixing them with her own fabulations, Kazmi tells intertwining stories about Islam, Muslim culture, complex trade routes, global flows of people and commodities, labor, colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, and interspecies entanglements. Kazmi was born in Quetta, a city in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. She works between the US, India, Pakistan, China, Europe, and the Middle East to create installations that are legible in various cultural contexts. Kazmi’s selected exhibitions include: Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco; the Espacio Laraña, University of Seville, Spain; the Commons Gallery, University of Hawaii in Honolulu; Faraar Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Queens Museum of Art, NY; H&R Block Space, Kansas City; The Guild Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Gallery 210, University of Missouri St Louis; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago. Kazmi is the recipient of many grants including the Townsend Fellowship; the Hellman Fellow Fund award; the BCNM Seed Grant; Al-Falah Grant; the Fulbright to India; Faculty Research Grant, CalArts; the Great Rivers Biennial Grant, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Rocket Grant, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; and the At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago, Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago. https://www.asmakazmi.com/

SanSan Kwan advocates for the meaning-making power of the expressive body. Through research, writing, performing, and teaching, she explores how dance serves as a potent way of being in the world and a valuable lens through which to understand the world. She is interested in the mutually productive interrelationships among moving bodies, place, history, and identity. In particular, she lifts the embodied perspectives of racial minorities and offers expertise in intercultural collaboration via corporeal practices. SanSan’s recent book, Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford UP, 2021), is winner of the 2022 de la Torre Bueno© Award and a 2022 Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She is also author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford UP, 2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (University of Texas Press, 2004). Her article on cartographies of race and the Chop Suey circuit, a group of Asian American cabaret entertainers who toured the nation during the World War II era, is published in TDR. Her article, “When is Contemporary Dance,” on contended understandings of the term “contemporary” across dance genres and communities, is in the December 2017 issue of Dance Research Journal. She recently published an article reflecting on her experiences creating an immersive dance work during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Additional articles can be found in Theatre Survey, Performance Research, Representations, and other journals and anthologies. SanSan remains active as a professional dancer and is currently performing with Lenora Lee Dance, Chingchi Moves, and Jen Liu. She is currently serving as the chair of the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. 

Carolyn Chen received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program. Professor Chen’s research focuses on two areas: work and religion in contemporary America, and religion, race, and ethnicity, especially among Asian Americans. She is author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion among the Latino and Asian-American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her new book is Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton 2022). At UC Berkeley, Professor Chen is Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, a member of the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Religious Diversity Cluster at the Othering and Belonging Institute, and an affiliate in the Department of Sociology.