Progressive Diasporas

co-curated with Sheetal Prajapati

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY | October 2022

Artists: Adobo-Fish-Sauce, Umber Majeed

Progressive Diasporas is a curatorial project series exploring the experiences and intersections of immigrant diasporas through a set of collaboratively developed, cumulative experiences and events. The project - formed in part through the exploration of the curators’ own ongoing creative and personal exchange over 7 years - aims to share and support collaboration between artists, non-artists, program participants, and the curators. With a focus on process as practice, Progressive Diasporas draws its shape from the immigrant experiences embedded in our everyday strategies for survival, amassing small networks, shifting forms and identities, seeking out resources, adjusting comfort, and other invisible forms of sustainability. The project hopes to create spaces for intersectionality around the shared experiences and connections one finds through the process of migration, movement and displacement of identities.

The first iteration in the series welcomes artists Umber Majeed and collective Adobo-Fish-Sauce (Ricky Orng and Febo Anthony) to explore the experience of diasporas through the development of ongoing and new work with others. Each artist invited a member of their own community outside of the arts to collaborate with, producing ideas, inspiration and work for this project.

Events & Programs

This series will include an installation presenting the artist’s work alongside a reading resource space hosting events and open hours for visitors and program participants. We welcome participants and attendees to join us for any of these programs and hope you’ll be able to attend more than one event in the series to experience the progression of ideas and work.

Opening Event

Saturday, October 22, 2pm - 6pm

The project will launch during The Elizabeth Foundation’s Open Studios on October 22, featuring installations and video work by both artists, and a zine-making workshop led by Adobo-Fish-Sauce.

Bring Your Own Diasporas

Tuesday, October 25 6:30-8:30pm

Co-curators Anna Harsanyi & Sheetal Prajapati will host a sharing session inviting participants to bring an object/artifact or share stories expressing their experience of intersectionality in diaspora. During the session, participants will share their stories and objects and a facilitated conversation will be led by prompts for discussion drawn in part from Adobo-Fish-Sauce.

Closing Performances and Gathering

Friday, October 28 7-9pm

A final culminating event will present the artists’ work over the course of their projects, including a lecture performance by Umber Majeed and a cooking and poetry performance by Adobo-Fish-Sauce.

About the Artists’ Projects and Collaborators

Adobo-Fish-Sauce will examine how the diaspora has affected their larger Puerto Rican and Khmer communities, then dive into how it has impacted their personal families and the ways it has manifested in them. With this new perspective, they will envision paths of joy and healing, moving forward through habits and rituals they wish to put in place. The project will showcase their process of discovering and writing new works, as well as featuring a final video piece and performance.

Adobo-Fish-Sauce will dive into the history of their family’s journey through collaborations with family members in interviews and research. Febo shares, “The Puerto Rican history I carry with me is the spirit of the Jíbaro: The classic image of the farmer, the mountain whisperer, the lineage of my father and his father and all my aunts and uncles in between. My father always said, “dejalo bruto” — leave them dumb — that no one expects the jíbaro to know much but we always have something up our sleeve…” Ricky adds, “I’ve been asking myself why it seems like my family and their history only began in America, as if the journey to make home here was just a consolation prize for an American Dream. I can imagine so much violence in a retelling, of a person’s erasure of childhood substituted with survival...”

Umber Majeed’s project is an iteration of an ongoing work, Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan), an interactive installation incorporating video, ceramic sculptures, postcards, and other elements to speculate on nostalgia, gentrification, and futurity of urbanization claims in Lahore, Pakistan. Combining familial archives, the apparatus of the screen, tools of leisure, context of gentrification in South Asia, the project seeks for viewers to loiter in the kitsch imaginary of corporate culture and critical analysis within a former failed tourism company of the artist’s uncle (a digitally revitalized “Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services”). This specific iteration includes an interactive booth, Overseas Enclave, directly addressing the accumulation of the ‘South Asian digital kitsch and labor.’ Through a collaboration with self-taught South Asian graphic designers, the artist has designed Trans-Pakistan logo postcards combining digital prints and screen printing processes. The available takeaways will be framed around a number of promotional videos on behalf of Trans-Pakistan.

Umber Majeed will be collaborating with Shakil Miah, owner of Graphics World in Jackson Heights, Queens. Shakil Miah, a Bangladeshi immigrant, opened Graphics World in 2012. His small scale company specifically caters to the South Asian local community and businesses in multicultural Jackson Heights, Queens. Graphic World's offices are in a central part of the diasporic South Asian community around Roosevelt Avenue in Queens and comprise of 4-5 graphic designers on staff. The designs from the company reflect the aesthetics and design of a displaced South Asian urban landscape.