Uploaded February 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

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Marjan Baniasadi and Maryam Baniasadi in conversation with Salima Hashmi (Beaconhouse National University, Lahore) and Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University)

Sponsor(s): Duke University Middle East Studies Center and Art, Art History & Visual Studies

This event investigates aesthetic archival practices between Iran and Pakistan and their entanglements with political ecologies. It focuses on the artwork of the artists Maryam Baniasadi and Marjan Baniasadi. Marjan and Maryam are twin sisters and have developed distinct aesthetics during their training at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. Marjan specializes in painting and ceramics; Maryam in contemporary miniature painting. Both explore social, biological and material transformation in urban ecologies in their work. In conversation with Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University) and Salima Hashmi (Beaconhouse National University, Lahore) Marjan and Maryam discuss through their artworks the interface between fictive and non-fictive life, injury and death. Ecological aesthetics scrutinizes the radical potentiality of decentering the human body to reflect on spatiotemporal manifestations of affect/emotion, social mobilization and movements and the possibility of ecological repair.

Convenor: Paniz Musawi Natanzi (Duke University)
Event took place on November 15, 2023