Performance at Soho Gallery Wednesday JULY 15, 2009

Please join me and my Iranian-born writer friend Amir Parsa, and others, next Wednesday at:


Engendered Festival 09
PURDAH 2.0



Closing Night Engendered 09, Purdah 2.0: Body Matters

July 15, Halvai Gallery, 75 Grand St @ Wooster, NY, 7pm Onwards



Now, Then, and Forever:

revolutions, politics, literature, contestation


Creative-Critical-Contemporary

Come to see, hear and discuss the works of some of the leading
avant-garde writers of our time

Canto XIV - Dusk's Ether with Ashes

the bassadiga

Interactive Readings and Discussions

Amir Parsa

With

Joe Brent
& Amir ElSaffar

Kaveh Bassiri

Sarah Husain

Carol Novack

Rodrigo Toscano



7 Prelude | 7:30 Bassa | 8 Fragments | 9 Party

Canto XIV - Dusk's Ether with Ashes

Parafrags (parallel fragments) to Canto XIV at Halvai Gallery unfolding on:

1. Engendered.org: Canto XIV Narraflow

2. Twitter (amparsa): Canto XIV Narratweet

3. Bassadiga: Canto XIV Oralities/Readation,

4. +

A bassadiga is a short interventionist interlude with minimal props meant
to present inroads into artistic and/or literary innovations and
alternatives. The bassadiga consists of readings, oral expressions and,
occasionally, brief mini-lectures and minimalistically performative
interactions and discussions.

*About Amir Parsa:* An internationally acclaimed writer and poet, Amir
Parsa is the author of over ten literary books, most recently* Drive-by
Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition*, and *Erre*. An uncategorizable body
of work, Mr. Parsa's literary oeuvre - written in English, French and
Persian - constitutes a radical polyphonic enterprise that puts into
question national, cultural and aesthetic attachments and discourses while
fashioning new genres, forms and even species of literary artifacts (*Fragment
*and *Ifs & Co.*). He was included in the anthology of new French and
Francophone poets (Ed. Huguet 2004). Born in Tehran, Mr. Parsa holds degrees
from Princeton and Columbia and currently lives in New York, where he is a
Lecturer and Educator at the Museum of Modern Art. His work is featured in
Purdah 2.0: Body Matters as a site specific installation and constitutes one
fragment of canto XIV.

Purdah 2.0: Body Matters
*The Second Annual Arts Exhibition at Engendered*

June 25th-July 16th, 2009 | Halvai Gallery, 75 Grand Street, NY
*Opening Reception: June 30, 2009 7 p.m.*

After the inaugural edition of Purdah - the unprecedented transcultural
exhibition on art, gender and sexuality last year, Engendered presents
Purdah 2.0: Body Matters.

Curated In Two Parts by:
*Amina Begum Ahmed & Priyanka Mathew*

Exhibition Director :
*Myna Mukherjee*

Body Matters is a contemporary & provocative exploration both of why the
body matters and what matters of the body are, have been and could become.
Across cultures, how do we find a visual and aesthetic language to engage
with the body as simultaneously a site of refuge, resistance, tradition,
freedom, sorrow, solace, desire, pain, rebellion, and rage? Body Matters
investigates the body as a site for contestations of power & violence,
perception & reality, memory & loss, and finally, station & displacement -
especially within urban ecologies and the ever morphous shifting boundaries
of personal and political geographies.

Ahmed brings together diverse artists whose stories and experiences form a
narrative that excavates, personalizes and reclaims the 'body' that has been
subsumed by the dominant normative . On the other hand, Mathew's curation of
artists explores the human form as an agent/catalyst to dissect political,
social and metaphysical dialogues on sexuality, gender and the relationships
in the grey areas that don't qualify neatly in either category.

Body Matters brings together figurative, conceptual, experiential and also
site specific works by some of the most leading, iconic and emergent
transcultural artists from India, Pakistan, Iran, U.S & China.

For more info: admin@engendered.org
visit www.engendered.org

Sunil Gupta along with -
Performance Poetry Talks Screenings Education Anwar Saeed Marcus
Leatherdale Ayesha Durrani Abir Karmarkar Raghava KK Fareeda Batool Khalil
Chishtee Dong Ming Guang Shailja Gupta Amita Bhatt Srinivas Kuruganti Amir
Parsa Pritika Chowdhry Noelle Williams Salman Toor Ariane Lopez-Huici Marco
Guerra & Yasmina Alaoui
In collaboration with
[image: Tucker Robbins] [image:
Halvai]