Amna Asghar and Alex Ito‘s (O), The Stranger joint exhibition on at New York’s Hotel Art Pavilion, opened August 12 and is running to September 23.
In the free standing shed in a Brooklyn backyard, the two artists capture “the fickle ruptures between familiarity and alienation” by transforming everyday objects into art and addressing “the translation and intersection between historical and personal narrative in visual culture.”
Influenced by jhankaar remix music, Asghar takes the cropped and fragmented images of Pakistani digest magazines, texts, advertisements, and personal ephemera, and combines them with painting to mirror the “rhythmic uncertainties” of identity formation and its entanglements.
Ito’s sculptural installation of deformed chromed objects, on the other hand, presents mounted images of Japanese internment to contemplate “the body/object’s ability to retain and distort legacies of violence and trauma embedded in spaces we inhabit.”**