How might the law read a wall drawing? Would it accept the “evidence” presented in an artwork? What does dispossession look like in different geopolitical and cultural contexts? What can art fix? What do we build with this wreckage?

Join artist and researcher Sa’dia Rehman for an interdisciplinary conversation about art and architecture, ecocatastrophe, and the law, with Azra Dawood, the Loeb's Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs, and Arpitha Kodiveri, Vassar Assistant Professor of Political Science and author of Governing Forests.

This public program is presented in conjunction with the Loeb exhibition Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman. Anchoring the galleries, Sa’dia has created a large site-responsive wall drawing that breaks with the idealized pastoral representations and technological and racial erasures of Vassar's founding collection of Hudson River School art. Paying attention to water’s material nature, and to its varying relationships with land (flooding, draining out of, contained within), Rehman’s work critically engages with the latent themes of empire, religion, and Manifest Destiny that undergird the Hudson Valley, as well as global histories of dam displacement and shifting waterways. The wall drawing is in conversation with other multimedia works by the artist.

A reception with light refreshments will follow the program. As part of our Late Night at the Loeb series, the galleries will remain open until 9 p.m.

Bios

Sa’dia Rehman (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator focusing on race, empire, and labor. Rehman experiments with hard and soft materials, from rebar to charcoal and plaster, found objects, denim, water, rust. They use these substances and materials to illustrate erasure across generations and geographies. Rehman’s artistic practice has interacted with their family’s histories of migration and loss in various ways. They engage with family photos and architectural forms to investigate the idea of nations and borders in a way that encompasses not only detention and surveillance, but also resistance and survival. In doing so, they bring attention to the fragmented and hybrid realities in which we live, fight, participate.

Rehman has exhibited work at venues including the Tate Modern, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Frost Museum of Art (Miami, Florida), Governors Island (New York), Queens Museum (NYC), and Pakistan National Council of the Arts (Islamabad), among others. Rehman received the Ohio Excellence Award, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship, and the Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship. Rehman was awarded residencies at the ArtLab at Harvard University, Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and NARS Foundation.

Arpitha Kodiveri is an environmental law and justice scholar whose work focuses on the role of law in the context of redressing climate harms faced by indigenous communities in South Asia. Her previous research examines land conflicts and legal mobilization by forest-dwelling communities in India. She has worked as an environmental lawyer supporting Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities in India. She is the author of 'Governing Forests' which examines the role of law as a tool for resistance by indigenous communities in India.

She is currently an assistant professor of political science at Vassar College. She is the recipient of the Hans Kelsen Fellowship at the EUI and the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. ML, University of California-Berkeley; ML, European University Institute; BL, BS, Indian Law Society's Law College; PhD, European University Institute.

Azra Dawood is an architectural historian, curator, and educator. Her research and teaching focuses on built environments and art practices through the lens of religion, immigration, empire and philanthropy, and anthropogenic change. Azra has practiced architecture in Karachi, Austin, and New York City. She has a doctorate in architectural history from MIT, and has taught at the University of Houston, Bard College, and Pratt Institute. Her previous research focused on the institutional projects financed by the Rockefeller philanthropic network in the early-twentieth century, reading these from the perspectives of immigration, the network's pursuit of social engineering, and early-twentieth century theological movements. Her public-history projects include the exhibition City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space (which she previously curated at the Museum of the City of New York) and Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman. Her curatorial work centers socially-engaged approaches to public history, and has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and other outlets. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (Vassar College).