An exhibit by Sabeen Omar, Designer in Residence in Human Centered Design. Curated by Prof. Denise Green.

How can I paint like I would embroider? This question has fueled my work for a very long time. The slow covering of a surface (as opposed to a quick brushstroke) and the connection to needlework I have with my mother, and she had with her mother, provoked this question. Painting with needlework has liberated me from the traditional rectangular canvas. I became inventive with surfaces, materials, and new forms. I found myself opening boxes, dismantling their form, and creating new substructures for my work.

The boxes simultaneously became surface and motif. I began layering boxes with oil pastel, oil paint, colored pencil, and graphite by cutting and slowly scraping away. Through this process, needles became a drawing tool that created intricate objects. I made marks by scraping, and used needles to create a diagonal grid pattern beneath the work. This underlying structure referenced the warp and weft in woven fabrics. Most recently, handkerchiefs have become my canvas and I experiment with removing warp and weft to create absences. I repopulate the surfaces with embroidery, crochet, and other needlepoint techniques. The needle is a tool that both creates and destroys. The materials I use are non-archival, meaning that my artwork will degrade and change over time. The notion of being precious about something that will not last is foundational to my practice and more broadly, to the ephemeral nature of reproductive labor.

Embracing temporariness in the work was a departure point for creating other types of non-lasting surfaces. I have been collecting my mother’s, sisters’ and my old clothes which I began to cut and dip in chalk gesso. When I layer these crisp surfaces with pastel, cut, scrape and sew them, the gesso slowly cracks; making them flexible, like fabric, again. When a piece is complete, I feel like I have imbibed treasured-ness into something that would otherwise have been thrown away.

Recently, I returned to boxes and have been drawn to the shape of a tiger balm box. I began to play with the form, but as I continued to work with it, I could not escape the fact that the women in my family have used this balm to massage away physical ailments. For as long as I can remember, we’ve used the contents held by the tiger balm box to alleviate physical pains that come with the repetitive motion of needlework and women’s daily labor. These oblique connections bring meaning into my work and offer a new kind of canvas where painting with needles and threads is both additive and subtractive.

How can I paint like I would embroider? This question has fueled my work for a very long time. The slow covering of a surface (as opposed to a quick brushstroke) and the connection to needlework I have with my mother, and she had with her mother, provoked this question. Painting with needlework has liberated me from the traditional rectangular canvas. I became inventive with surfaces, materials, and new forms. I found myself opening boxes, dismantling their form, and creating new substructures for my work.

The boxes simultaneously became surface and motif. I began layering boxes with oil pastel, oil paint, colored pencil, and graphite by cutting and slowly scraping away. Through this process, needles became a drawing tool that created intricate objects. I made marks by scraping, and used needles to create a diagonal grid pattern beneath the work. This underlying structure referenced the warp and weft in woven fabrics. Most recently, handkerchiefs have become my canvas and I experiment with removing warp and weft to create absences. I repopulate the surfaces with embroidery, crochet, and other needlepoint techniques. The needle is a tool that both creates and destroys. The materials I use are non-archival, meaning that my artwork will degrade and change over time. The notion of being precious about something that will not last is foundational to my practice and more broadly, to the ephemeral nature of reproductive labor.

Embracing temporariness in the work was a departure point for creating other types of non-lasting surfaces. I have been collecting my mother’s, sisters’ and my old clothes which I began to cut and dip in chalk gesso. When I layer these crisp surfaces with pastel, cut, scrape and sew them, the gesso slowly cracks; making them flexible, like fabric, again. When a piece is complete, I feel like I have imbibed treasured-ness into something that would otherwise have been thrown away.

Recently, I returned to boxes and have been drawn to the shape of a tiger balm box. I began to play with the form, but as I continued to work with it, I could not escape the fact that the women in my family have used this balm to massage away physical ailments. For as long as I can remember, we’ve used the contents held by the tiger balm box to alleviate physical pains that come with the repetitive motion of needlework and women’s daily labor. These oblique connections bring meaning into my work and offer a new kind of canvas where painting with needles and threads is both additive and subtractive.

States often fortify their borders against militant threats. How do these efforts shape civilian welfare and perceptions in borderland communities? Professor Christopher Blair conceptualizes border fortification as a legibility-building endeavor. By bolstering state reach in areas of weak historical penetration, fortification enhances the government's capacity for monitoring, administration, and control. Yet, expanding state authority also disrupts traditional cross-border markets. A trade-off between security and corruption emerges in consequence. He provides evidence for this theory in a difference-in-differences framework, combining administrative records on violence and representative data from a NATO-commissioned survey fielded across Afghanistan. Fortification facilitates government information-collection, improving security provision and fostering national identification. Enhanced state capacity is countervailed by negative economic impacts. By disturbing the informal borderland economy, fortification fuels criminalization and local opposition. Civilians rely on illicit economic entrepreneurs to sustain traditional market access. Higher smuggling rents fuel official corruption and bribe-taking. The findings point to a key dilemma inherent in border fortification strategies.

About the Speaker

Christopher Blair is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. His work spans across international relations and comparative politics, with a substantive focus on the political economy of conflict and migration. The main questions motivating his research are: (1) how counterinsurgency policies impact rebel and civilian behavior; and (2) how prospective hosts respond to forcibly displaced people.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

Shannon Philip explores the gendering of everyday urban spaces and the social production of gendered violence. Through ethnographic data collected by ‘hanging out’ with young Indian men in New Delhi, he discusses the ways masculinities are constructed and performed, and how these in turn produce hostility, fear, and violence for women and girls accessing the same urban spaces.

Through weaving together material from myriad urban sites like gyms, bars, trains, street corners, night clubs, gay cruising parks as well as shopping malls, Philip explores how there is an attempt to make the city a masculine space, with a hypersexualization of women in the same spaces. However, this process is not even or uniform, with several masculine anxieties and vulnerabilities also emerging in men’s claims on the city from queer and non-masculine bodies. In this way, the urban space becomes an interesting palimpsest to explore the politics of gender, class, sexualities, and violences on an everyday level.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr Shannon Philip is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of East Anglia, UK and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His first monograph has recently been published with Cambridge University Press (2022) titled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony. Shannon’s new research project comparatively explores youth, sexualities, urban transformations, and gender in South Africa and India.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

The exhibition 75 Years of Consequence: The Partition of India explores the legacy and tragedy of Partition, which created the independent states of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. At this panel discussion, two of the exhibition curators—Ellen Avril, the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the Johnson Museum, and Zain Abid ’24, a visitor services intern at the Museum and Outreach Coordinator for Cornell University’s South Asian Council—will be joined by Iftikhar Dadi, the John H. Burris Professor of History of Art and Binenkorb Director of the South Asia Program, and Durba Ghosh, Professor of History and director of the College of Arts and Science’s Humanities Scholars Program, to discuss the processes behind the exhibition and the social, cultural, and historical contexts of these works from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Cosponsored by the South Asia Program

Photo of Mohandas Gandhi on a morning stroll with his granddaughter Sita and grandniece Abbha, India, by Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904–1971), 1946-48 (negative); ca. 1965 (print), Gift of the artist, Class of 1927, and LIFE Magazine

Join us on Zoom to practice your Bengali skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public.

Join Bengali Conversation Hour on Zoom!

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.