Group Show: MENASA+ Thresholds of Representation

Group show opened, Feb 14th - April 20th 2026
Bringing together artists from across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asia diaspora-these artist’s lived experiences of migration, hybridity, and gender, redefine what global contemporary art can be. This curatorial framework positions MENASA+ and AAPI dialogues not as categories, but as interconnected conditions of making - translation, survival, inheritance, reinvention, and resistance.
It reflects a belief that identity in art is not fixed but continuously negotiated across borders, languages, and histories of gendered power.
At a time when geopolitics continues to compress complex identities into binaries of “us” and “them,” the art world has mirrored similar patterns of exclusion and invisibility. This presentation resists that logic. It centers practitioners-particularly female and femme-identifying artists from MENASA+ and AAPI regions-whose voices have emerged from unforgiving cultural and political contexts, yet continue to embody resilience, autonomy, and creative power.
This exhibition was made possible with curatorial assistance from Narimon Safavi, an Iranian-American entrepreneur and cultural commentator; and Rosa Matinfar, curator and writer whose work focuses on contemporary art from the MENASA region

Alemeh Bagherian, Gordon Cheung, Michael Joo, Manish Nai, Sara Rahanjam, Shahpari Rahmani, Rewind Collective, Karin Abu Shakra, Haya Zaidi