“Verge” at The Border Gallery

Participating artists: Anna Costa e Silva, Iván Sikic, Fanny Allié, and Qinza Najm + Saks Afridi

Curated by Jamie Martinez

February 15 – March 24, 2019

The Border is pleased to announce Verge, a group exhibition featuring artworks across mediums by Anna Costa e Silva, Iván Sikic, Fanny Allié, Qinza Najm, and Saks Afridi curated by Jamie Martinez. The work being shown by these five immigrant artists comments on borders, territories, immigration, people, and edges.

Walls, borders, and immigration are part of a daily argument going on in society today – an argument fueled by fear and misunderstanding. The symbol of the Wall emerges as an attempt to demarcate a final separation between two cultures that are irrevocably entwined.

“A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (Gloria Anzaldúa).

Across language, ethnicity, nationality, borders emerge as a way to shape identity through exclusion. If this border is threatened, so is this constructed idea of the self.

By placing it at our feet, Verge inverts the concept of a wall as a barrier, transforming it into a platform for the convergence of human experience which was created with 1300 clay bricks.

Verge poses the tantalizing question of what is left when borders are brought down. Beyond borders, all space is liminal.

Beyond them exists uncertainty – and freedom.

Anna Costa e Silva (1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) works in the intersections between visual arts, performance, film, and social practice.  Her projects explore human vulnerability, states between awareness and sleep, encounters and a constant search for the self. Anna received awards such as FOCO Bradesco ArtRio, Funarte Grant for Artistic Production and American Austrian Prize for Fine Arts. Between 2014 and 2018, she has done 10 solo shows, in institutional spaces such as Centro Cultural São Paulo, and Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro and galleries such as Superfície, São Paulo. She also participated in group shows in spaces such as Contemporary Art Center  (Vilnius) Art In Odd Places, Interstate Projects (NYC) A Gentil Carioca Gallery, Triângulo Gallery, Oi Futuro (Brazil) and others. She was an artist in residency at the Salzburg Academy for Fine Arts (AAF Fellowship), Phosphorus, Pivo Pesquisa (Sao Paulo) and the School of Making Thinking (NY). Anna has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, with the Edward Zutreau Memorial Grant, having lived in NYC between 2011 and 2013. She lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Fanny Allié is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in Montpellier, South of France and graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (The National School of Photography) in Arles, France in 2005 and moved to New York City shortly after graduating.

Princeton University, DOT Art, A.I.R Gallery, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Fresh Window gallery, Chashama and St Eustache Church in Paris, France have organized solo exhibitions of her work. NYU/Gallatin Gallery, Freight + Volume Gallery, Field Projects, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Dekalb Gallery/Pratt Institute and The Bronx Museum among others have featured her work in group exhibitions. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NY Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, Le Monde Diplomatique, DNA Info, Marie Claire Italy and Artspace Magazine.

She recently exhibited her mixed media work for El Espacio with Rata Projects and Good To Know during Art Basel Miami 2018.

Iván Sikic (b. 1983, Lima, Peru) makes work about issues he believes to be unsustainable in our society: how violence affects women, the destruction of our natural resources for the sake of greed, mass consumerism, social inequalities and the unjust treatment of the disenfranchised and what it means to be an immigrant. He responds to these themes through durational performance, installation, public intervention, sculpture, and photography.

His work has been shown at The 8th Floor (New York), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn), Km 0.2 (Lima and Mexico City), Luis Adelantado (Bogotá, Madrid, and Valencia) amongst others and he has attended residencies in the USA, Europe, Latin America and Australia. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Qinza Najm is a Pakistani-American artist whose work explores gendered violence, human rights and social justice issues particularly in regard to marginalized populations.  Utilizing performance, multi-media, video, painting, and other means, the artist, originally a trained Psychologist, understands herself as a denizen of the world, using artistic means to create empathy and understanding between societies, cultures and both East and West in order to address the deepest social traumas.

Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Najm pursued her fine arts studies at Bath University and The Art Students League of New York. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has exhibited internationally, including at the Queens Museum (NY), Christie’s Art (Dubai), Art|Basel (Miami, FL), and the Museum of the Moving Image (NY). Her work has been featured in ArtNet News, the Huffington Post, the NY Daily News, International Business Week, Buzzfeed, and Herald.  She lives and works in New York.

Saks Afridi is a multi-disciplinary artist, born in Pakistan and raised in several countries; he now lives and works in New York City. Saks’s art practice is two-fold: Collaborative and Personal. His personal work investigates the predicaments and perplexities of the life of an ‘Insider Outsider’. His collaborative work has tackled themes around human rights, Islamophobia and drone warfare. His work is also spiritual in nature, hybridizing Islamic Design/Architecture with Science Fiction narratives to create a new genre he calls ‘Sci-Fi Sufism’, a sub-category of ‘IslamoFuturism’.

Saks is the proud recipient of 2 Gold Cannes Lion Awards, 3 D&AD Pencils, 2 OneShow pencils and a United Nations Award for Peace & Understanding. His work has also been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN and The Colbert Report.