ARTISTS | taweez

Sadia Uqaili is an artist, independent curator, and the Chief Creative Officer of Somerset Street (somerset-street.com), a creative arts organization that specializes in transformative experiential events, arts integration programming and leadership training, and arts-based workshops for not-for-profit, corporate, healthcare, and private clients. She is the past Chief Program Officer at Snow City Arts, which provides on-site arts educational programs for children at four leading pediatric hospitals in Chicago. Sadia’s award-winning work has been exhibited in Chicago, Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Phoenix, and Quebec, and is included in numerous collections around the world.

Artist Statement: Having lived in five different countries on two continents, I have had the fortune to experience a panoply of cultures and to interact with the people who make these cultures thrive. I have enjoyed the process of learning how to function and create in so many distinct environments, following the ebb and flow of one society to the next—and the subcultures within each—in a constant fluid motion. Through these influences, I have come to be wrapped in a fabric of numerous emotions, values, and traditions, all sewn together by histories and narratives that belong both to me and to those I’ve met along the way.

My past encounters and those I experience in the present blend to create a rich infusion of memory and desire. It is an alchemy that compels me to express them in images. My work, then, is an inquiry into how our individual pasts inform our present, leaving us open to undefined possibilities in the future. Often inspired by nature, my work explores the intimacies and distances that exist between individuals, memories, energies, objects, and forms. My intent is to create art that delves into and explores our place within this evolving system of knowledge that is our diverse world, and in doing so to construct monuments to the ordinary and the fantastic.

Faisal Mohyuddin is an artist, educator, and writer. He teaches English at Highland Park High School and is a fellow in the U.S. Department of State’s Teachers for Global Classrooms Program. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Poet Lore, Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.

Artist Statement: As an artist, I turn to the written word for inspiration; as a writer, to visual art. My drawings exist at the intersection of these two modes of expression, serving as a bridge that keeps me connected to, but not limited by, the parameters of each. When I paint, I turn inward, delving beyond and beneath words and images, in order to reflect with a different kind of wonder at life’s ambiguities.

Zafar Malik is an artist, Director of Publications and Dean for Development and University Relations at East-West University in Chicago. He is also Managing Editor of East-West University’s Center for Policy and Future Studies Journal East-West Affairs. Prior to moving to Chicago in 2000, he was based in London, England and was the Art Director of Arts & The Islamic World, a quarterly journal. He has a studio at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston where he paints regularly.

Artist Statement: Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by patterns and shapes. There’s something mystical about the natural relationship and juxtaposition of quite diverse and seemingly random elements that appeals to me. The infinite variety of color, texture, contour, and spatial organization of the natural world inform my aesthetics. I am also acutely aware of the same random pattern of my own existence – attachment, separation, longing, loss, adjustment and compromise. In my work I simply attempt to understand and relate to this profound dichotomy, harmony and balance.