An artistic response to border restrictions


An artistic response to border restrictions
Bangladeshi refugee women. Photos by Naila Mahmood

Borderlines, a two-volume art catalogue featuring work that explores issues erupting in North American and South Asian border regions, will be launched on Friday in Austin, TX

Date: Friday, March 4, 2016
Time: 4.00-6.00 pm
Address: CLA 1.106, UT Austin Campus

The launch of Borderlines: Volumes One and Two with readings by Indian and Pakistani origin writers will take place on Friday in Austin, Texas at a free public event organized by the South Asia Institute, University of Texas at Austin.

Bangladeshi refugee women. Photos by Naila Mahmood

Bangladeshi refugee women. Photos by Naila Mahmood

Borderlines, published by the non-profit Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), is a series of art catalogues featuring photos, essays, poetry and interviews that explore issues erupting in North American and South Asian border regions and their impact on Houston’s communities.

By Sehba Sarwar

By Sehba Sarwar

Edited by University of Houston professors Drs. Margot Backus and Maria Gonzalez, the publications feature writings and images by Bapsi Sidhwa (Houston/Pakistan), Naila Mahmood (Pakistan), Nandita Bhavnani (India), Tayeba Begum Lipi (Bangladesh), Emmy Perez (US/Mexico border) among others.

Borderlines publications give voice to “artists and citizens who push past border restrictions, while drawing attention to challenges of living in today’s world when movement is contained,” says VBB Artistic Director and Founder Sehba Sarwar, a writer, and activist who focuses on displacement and women’s issues. and has been visualizing and producing VBB shows since 1999.

She is currently working on a memoir titled What Is Home? Supported by a residency with the Mitchell Center for the Arts and a 2014-15 Mid-America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovations grant. Her published works include a novel  (Black Wings, Alhamra, 2004), and essays, short stories, and poems. Her video collages have been screened in Pakistan, Egypt, India and around the US.

Hands: Still shots from documentary by Sebastian Verghese (Delhi)

Hands: Still shots from documentary by Sebastian Verghese (Delhi)

What We Leave Behind: Installation by Sehba Sarwar (USA/Pakistan) - Slippers, spray paint, cardboard.

What We Leave Behind: Installation by Sehba Sarwar (USA/Pakistan) – Slippers, spray paint, cardboard.

At the Borderlines launch in Austin Sarwar will read her work along with fiction-writer, poet and critic Harbeer Sandhu and Shreerekha Subramanian, Associate Professor of Humanities at University of Houston-Clear Lake who has just completed her first monograph, Women Writing Violence: The Novel and Radical Feminist Imaginaries (Sage 2012).

Sandhu has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and recently received a Creative Capital I grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts and Writers Program to launch texphrastic.com, a blog covering Texas visual art in a global context.

Admission to the event is free and open to the public.

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