[Mar 18, 2023] All Eyes on Me: The Violence of Discrimination, Kaashif Ghanie
Event-Past
This conversation will highlight Kaashif Ghanie’s artistic practice which responds to racial discrimination. This session will discuss Adaptation, a series of ceramic vessels crafted by Ghanie embodying the look of traditional Islamic vessels, scaled to least 10 times larger than average. These works function as vessels in a dual sense– designed to hold physical matter but also acting as containers for human emotion and experience. A first-generation Muslim Guyanese Canadian, Ghanie considered stereotypes and his own experiences with Islamophobia and reflected these sentiments in his pots, seeing the vessels as people, who adapt to their environments, cracking under pressure, breaking, and scarring but also healing and continuing to stand tall. We will explore the public response to these ceramics along with Ghanie’s contribution of adding and building onto a discourse of deconstructing discrimination and furthering a dialogue for the general public’s awareness of it. Through the public exhibitions of these sculptural Islamic forms, Ghanie encourages discriminated communities to speak their truths and fortify their resilience.
Presenter Details:
Kaashif Ghanie -or Kaas, is a first-generation mixed Guyanese Canadian Muslim born in London, Ontario the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe. Ghanie is a Bealart Alumni and completed an undergraduate degree in Ceramics and a Minor in Art History at NSCAD University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax in 2016. Post-graduating, he completed the Centre for Crat AIR Craft Residency (2017-2018) and the CEEDS Business program (2019) in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Both experiences have helped him launch his contemporary ceramic artistic practice and his functional pottery business, KG Ceramics. Ghanie is one of the three ceramic artists working and operating the ceramic studio in the Wonderneath Art Society.
Hosted by:
Dr. Heba Mostafa has held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Kansas and the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence. Her research explores the formation of Islamic architecture through the lens of early Islamic sectarianism and governance and the intersections of politics, the sacred and architecture. A focus of her research is the interface of Islam with late antiquity, Christianity and Judaism through commemorative architecture, pilgrimage and ritual practice. Her two most recent projects explore Davidic commemoration in Jerusalem throughout the Islamic Medieval period and the spatial repertoires of Nile veneration in Medieval Cairo.
Sanniah Jabeen, PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto and Senior Fellow at the IAMCC.
