Left to right: Denise Markonish, Sameer Farooq, Cassils (photo by Robin Black)
Denise Markonish, Chief Curator at Madison Square Park NYC, will be in conversation with NYC-based Canadian artist Cassils, and Toronto-based artist Sameer Farooq. Together, they will reflect on their practices, experiences as artists in the diaspora and the current political climate between America and Canada.
Denise Markonish is the Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park, starting in June 2025. For the previous 18 years, she was at MASS MoCA where her exhibitions include Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream...(co-organized with the Contemporary Art Museum Houston); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT; Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham?; Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow; Suffering from Realness; Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass; Nick Cave: Until (co-organized with Crystal Bridges and Carriageworks); Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder; Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below; Oh, Canada; and Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum. She has worked on long-term projects with Laurie Anderson, and commissioned works by Sarah Oppenheimer, Stephen Vitiello, Julianne Swartz, Mark Dion, and many others. Markonish has produced numerous exhibition catalogues and edited Teresita Fernández: Wayfinding (DelMonico) and Wonder: 50 Years of RISD Glass, and co-edited Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (Yale University Press). She has taught at Williams College and the Rhode Island School of Design and was a visiting curator at Artpace, San Antonio, and Haystack School of Craft, Deer Isle, Maine.
Sameer Farooq is a Toronto-based artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. With a versatile approach that shifts between photography, documentary film, sculpture, and anthropological methods, he investigates strategies of representation to expand the ways through which museums have looked at the past through traditional forms of collection, interpretation and display. Farooq foregrounds community-based models of knowledge production and an array of contemplative practices in order to suggest new ways of narrating our cultural histories. Together with the public he works to redress the role of exhibition and collection-based practices by employing decolonial, queer, and critical race lenses.
He has received his BA from McGill University, a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Farooq has held exhibitions at institutions around the world. Reviews dedicated to his work have been published by Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, La Presse, Canadian Art, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, Artnet, The Huffington Post, and C Magazine. He is an alumni of the Bemis Center Residency and has been longlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent art award.
Cassils is a Canadian transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils' art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, and empowerment. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils' work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment. They have had solo exhibitions around the world and are the recipient of the USA Artist Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist, a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, Creative Capital Award, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, the National Creation Fund and Visual Artist Fellowship from the Canada Council of the Arts. Cassils’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired, The Guardian, Art Forum, and academic journals such as Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Places Journal, and October. Cassils is the subject of the monograph Cassils, published by MU Eindhoven in 2015; and is the subject of a new catalog published by The Station Museum of Contemporary Art.
Cassils is an Associate Professor in Sculpture and Integrated Practices at PRATT Institute.
Image description: Three headshots, left to right (1) A woman with curly brown hair, light skin tone, and rainbow light refracted across her face wears a black T-shirt that reads “Bad Seed” (2) A man of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent wears a white button down, black baseball cap, and circular wire glasses (3) A gender-nonconforming, trans-masculine person with a light skin tone wears a black leather jacket in front of a fiery backdrop.