A Quiet Return: Art, Thought, and Work
[Fall 2024 to Spring 2025]
Hello,
It’s been nearly three years since I last sent out a newsletter. From fall 2024 through spring 2025, I’ve been slowly returning to public work- writing, performance, and artistic projects across different platforms. I’m sharing this note as a brief update.
This is also my first newsletter under the name Tara Asgar (she/her), since beginning my formal gender transition.
Image Courtesy: Florida Elago and Meghal Janardan
Writing & Public Essays
I’ve launched a new bilingual essay series titled Gender, Visibility, and Transness in Post-Uprising Bangladesh, reflecting on queer and trans exclusion, the limits of mainstream liberal feminism, and the structural politics of inclusion following the 2024 student uprising.
These writings are informed in part by my participation in the The Inaugural Amber Hollibaugh Seminar Queer Economies of Care: Community, Desire, and the Politics of Necessity (Spring 2025), organized by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Essays from the series have appeared in:
• Dhaka Tribune: Marches, masks, and silences: When trans visibility isn’t enough
• The Daily Star: Whose feminism is it anyway? Lessons from the gender reform uproar
• New Age (Dhaka): Structural limits of representation in post-July uprising Bangladesh
• Nagorik.net (Kolkata) : বহুত্ববাদ বাদে বাংলাদেশ হবে কেবল অতীতের প্রতিধ্বনি
Full archive of bilingual essays: taraasgar.academia.edu
A few new essays will be published in late June and early July, including one with the queer publishing platform Varta Trust (Kolkata). Keep an eye on my Substack or Linktree for those updates.
Public Conversations
These writings have been in dialogue with several public conversations I’ve invited to speak in since July 2024:
• Panel with UC Berkeley Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies: Biplob in Bangladesh: How a Student Revolt Overthrew a Regime (Video Link)
• What feminists are thinking about Bangladesh (Video Link): Panel with Feminist Alliance of Bangladesh
• In conversation with the Bangladeshi Student Association, Hunter College, CUNY
Infographic Courtesy: HUNTER Bangladeshi Student Association, produced for a public Talk with Tara Asgar on the aftermath of the July Uprising, December 2024
Public Moderation & Dialogue
In November 2024, I moderated a panel for the Parsons Fine Arts Fall Visiting Artist Lecture Series at The New School, titled Artistic Journey: Navigating Safety. The conversation brought together artists working in exile alongside art administrators who support their navigation of safety and expression. We discussed emotional safety, censorship, and the shifting conditions of visibility. Read more here.
Performance Lecture Series: Performing Identity
Over the past year, I’ve been developing and presenting my ongoing performance lecture, Performing Identity, which centers around a fictional Bangladeshi art historian named Sharmillie Rahman. The piece is part fiction, part performance, and part investigation—drawing from twelve years of artistic practice to explore the messy terrains of becoming, and the recursive work of leaving gender and memory in the loop. Through Sharmillie’s voice, the lecture explores themes of exile, caste, diaspora, and trans/queer embodiment—treating identity not as destination, but as continual negotiation.
Presented as a keynote piece:
• DC Queer Studies Symposium, University of Maryland - LAG: Labor, Aesthetics, Geopolitics
• Caste at the intersection of Sovereign Power Conference, UC Irvine - Performing Identity: From Cosmic to Corporeal.
Image: With responder Nafisa Tanjim Nipun before performing Identity at UC Irvine, Image Courtesy: Rishi Gun
• AAPI Heritage Month Inauguration, DePaul University - Performing Identity: Bodies that Burn and Bloom
• Candace Allen Memorial Lecture, Worcester State University: Performing Identity: Navigating Visibility, Violence and Resistance
Exhibitions
What Is Seen and Unseen – South Asia Institute, Chicago
My body of work from my time in Chicago (2018–2020) was included in What Is Seen and Unseen: Mapping South Asian American Art in Chicago (May 18 – October 26, 2024), curated by Shelly Bahl at the South Asia Institute as part of Art Design Chicago’s Terra Foundation initiative. The exhibition featured eight contemporary South Asian American artists, including me, alongside archival materials tracing over 125 years of South Asian artistic presence in Chicago.
Art critic Lori Waxman named it one of the Top 10 Must-See Art Exhibitions in Chicago for summer 2024 in the Chicago Tribune, alongside retrospectives such as Georgia O’Keeffe. I was pleased to see artists like Brandon Jonson and Sabba S. Elahi in conversation with my work, and to be part of such a thoughtful and critically engaged cohort.
Image: Documentation of the work exhibited at the SAI exhibition, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue.
Image: Documentation of the work exhibited at the SAI exhibition, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue.
Home is a Foreign Place – Unison Arts Center, New Paltz, NY
Presented with support from the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant, this project featured a month-long video and textile installation exploring alien bodies, queer migration, and layered symbols of diasporic memory—such as the sharee.
Home is a Foreign Place engages themes of spectatorship, belonging, and the emotional texture of migration as both ritual and rupture. Learn more here.
Image: Excerpt from the video "Immigrant Fiction", part of the installation project "Home is a Foreign Place".
In Progress : I’m currently developing a new project titled Bangladesh Block Party, supported by the Laundrymott Projects Create and Connect Grant. More to come soon, read the concept here.
Pedagogical Project :
Decolonial Art Anthology – Stony Brook University / Future Histories Lab
As part of the Future Histories Lab at Stony Brook University, I led a workshop series titled Decolonial Art Anthology, working with a group of MFA and cross-disciplinary students. Together, we built a methodological framework for reading, making, and thinking about art through decolonial lenses.
Image: In-progress documentation from my collaborative project with students at Future Histories Studio, Stony Brook University—exploring decolonial frameworks, image-making, and cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Sessions focused on disrupting colonial hangovers in visual culture, questioning dominant ways of seeing and experimenting with image-making that centers historical rupture, embodied memory, and collective resistance. Read more here.
Thanks for reading. I hope to share more in the coming year.
With care,
Tara Asgar