Karachi-based Pomme Gohar and Brooklyn-based Tess Howsam co-curated ‘[Un]Framing Gender’, an eclectic art show that opened in New York’s Culture Lab LIC on June 5, 2025. The works by 28 artists from South Asia and America were gathered to investigate the enigmas of gender and identity in what is incontrovertibly the post-gender era.

Contemporary understandings of gender have detached it from biology and from physical characteristics that typically divide humans into male and female at birth. Gender has variously been described as a spectrum, as an individual proclamation of identity, as a binary prison to liberate oneself from into the freedom of indeterminism or what is called “constructivist” theories of gender as opposed to “essentialist” ones.

In short, two gender sizes no longer fit all. Many establishments that place themselves at the cutting edge of sexual politics even have gender-neutral unisex toilets, rendering the traditional use of male and female icons obsolete. Feminism and queer theory have sensitised society to the ambiguities that are inherent in the liberal understanding of gender.

The curators’ approach to arranging the show was a provocation to dialogue and aimed to build bridges across continents. The curatorial statement addressed gender as “a field of movement — a spectrum of becoming.” It was interesting to see how differently gendered identity was represented through portraiture, non-figurative and figurative representation, nudity and the burqa. The artworks included sculptures, installations, paintings and performances. ‘[Un]Framing Gender’ served as rich viewing ground to observe how artists are translating the plasticity of gender into visual depictions.

Artists from across South Asia and America recently came together to explore concepts of identity and gender constructs at a fascinating exhibition in New York

Amin Gulgee and Alexandra Limpert work with sculptures. Gulgee’s dense and complex rendering of his own face was paired with a beaked mask to indicate the duality within himself in his tabletop artwork titled The Conversation. Limpert’s wire-framed sculptures work as permeable enclosures to internally placed objects to create an outside-inside dynamic.

Meher Afroz, Anindita Dutta and Umaina Khan worked with paper, cloth and various other materials to create installations of a conceptual nature. Afroz and Khan played with the concept of purdah or concealment, while Dutta used apparel suffused with symbolic power.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Shirley Cruz, Orestes Gonzalez and Jin Ko (also known as Studio Jinistar) worked either wholly, or in mixed medium, with photography as the base in order to portray non-binary individuals. The camera becomes the artist’s accomplice to record emotional states and personal stylistics of dress and hairdo. The characters in the photographic works generally face the viewer in contrast to the figures in most of the painted works, which circumvent the direct gaze.

Elsa Keefe’s impactful Valley of Life, described as a “mythic-scape”, foregrounded a nude woman standing in a crevice at the base of a towering mound of bones. We see her from the back as the weight of the mound seems to melt downwards. Keefe is reworking origin myths through the persona of Eve, who is depicted as the repository of creation and history.

Fariba Alam, Sayeda Habib and Muna Siddiqui have worked in the contemporary miniature style, variously incorporating geometrical shape, figuration and calligraphy. Siddiqui’s pair of lovers are set within a lush, botanically patterned backdrop, and they underscore the traditional binary of male-female love.

Rina Banerjee, Sandra Cavanagh, Tabinda Chinoy, Alejandro Meza Cianeros, Siavash Golkar, Abdul Jabbar Gull, Firoz Mahmud, Qinza Najm, Xandria Noir, Jamie Owens, Joss Sossi Romano and Ramya Shenoy have worked with either oils or acrylic paint on a flat surface.

Their style is expressionist with non-natural colours, distortion of form, and the inclusion of abstract elements that gives their artwork edgy unconventionality and hybridity of style. The mixture of painting styles complements the unsettled and unresolved gender binary.

The female nude is a preponderant feature in the works of the painters. This recurrence echoes and contrasts with the nineteenth century depiction of the secular female nude, as in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814) and Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). These canonical paintings were highly subversive and shocked audiences, not by their nudity, but by the confrontational direct gaze of the subject towards the viewer. Women were no longer idealised, demure, nor part of the mythical and nebulous past.

It is interesting to note that the female form retains desirability across the centuries, whether presented in a distorted manner or realistically. Aesthetic styles and preferences evolve, but the primal association of female energy (shakti) with cosmic rhythms and creative impulses is inextricably bound with art.

In ‘[Un]Framing Gender’, distortion of form and mixed stylistics seems to supersede the older subversion of the direct gaze, as exemplified in the works of the following four artists.

Siavash Golkar’s oil-on-canvas painting titled Nuclear Family Unit depicts three realistically painted figures posing against a geometric backdrop. In a surrealist twist, the figures have hands emerging from their clothing in place of heads. The artist challenges conformity by the anatomical mismatch. He distorts by means of a visual pun.

Qinza Najm’s three large oil-on-canvas paintings in gray-scale work with elongation to distort the female form and give it architectural monumentality. By the geometrical distortions, Najm is expressing the paradox of gender elasticity, which coexists with the rigidity of social norms.

In contrast to Najm’s gray-scale work, Rina Banerjee’s colourful paintings in acrylic, ink and gold leaf on paper place the female form within swirls of abstract colour. The bright and seductive swathes of colour belie the teardrops that fall down the cheek, thus hinting at a deeper, less cheerful narrative underlying the bejewelled figure with painted fingernails.

Jamie Owens’ oil-on-canvas work titled Braided Bondage depicts a woman painted in bright turquoise, pressed against the picture plane. Rendered entirely with biomorphic lines, the fluid association of femininity with water connects woman with nature.

Besides the obvious exploration of gender norms, shows such as ‘[Un]Framing Gender’ call attention to art as a medium for social change. They capture the zeitgeist to create a visionary archive “of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

‘[Un]Framing Gender’ is on display at the Culture Lab LIC in New York from June 5-July 27, 2025

The writer is an independent researcher, writer, art critic and curator based in Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 27th, 2025