ASMA KAZMI’s large scale installations blend physical and virtual spaces. Her sculptures, connoting materiality, cultural lineage, and craft are juxtaposed with virtual and augmented reality models of art historical objects and particular geographies. Taking an expansive approach to installation art, she researches and reassesses the intertwining histories of Western colonialism and her diasporic Muslim culture.

Using transgressive curatorial tactics, she combines visual and textual detritus from historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixes them with her own “critical fabulation.” Drawing on her own history as a third generation émigré, migrating across continents, Kazmi’s installations are experimental museums that make use of Islamic display devices and strategies to address colonial and indigenous technologies and knowledge systems, global flows of people and commodities, and interspecies entanglements.

Kazmi was born in Quetta, a city in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. She works between the US, India, Pakistan, China, Europe, and the Middle East to create installations that are legible in various cultural contexts.

Asma Kazmi’s selected exhibitions include: Galerie Cité internationale des arts, Paris, France; Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco; the Espacio Laraña, University of Seville, Spain; the Commons Gallery, University of Hawaii in Honolulu; Faraar Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Queens Museum of Art, NY; H&R Block Space, Kansas City; The Guild Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Gallery 210, University of Missouri St Louis; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago.

Kazmi is the recipient of many grants including the C/Change Creative R&D Lab, Goethe Institut and Gray Area, San Francisco; Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant, New Media Caucus, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Townsend Fellowship; the Hellman Fellow Fund award; the BCNM Seed Grant; Al-Falah Grant; the Fulbright to India; Faculty Research Grant, CalArts; the Great Rivers Biennial Grant, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Rocket Grant, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; and the At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago, Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago.

Kazmi is currently an associate professor in the Department of Art Practice and the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) at UC Berkeley.

Jill Miller is a visual artist and a professor in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. She works across a wide range of media, from video installation to public practices (and many hybrids in between). She often collaborates with individuals and local communities in the form of public interventions, workshops, and participatory community projects. She describes humor as “the greatest social lubricant” for opening up meaningful conversations about difficult subjects. In past work, she: lived in the remote wilderness in search of sasquatch (Waiting for Bigfoot), assisted mothers who were harassed for breastfeeding in public (The Milk Truck), and organized teenage girls who were closing the gender gap by learning to edit Wikipedia (WOW! Editing Group). Miller is on the Executive Committee at Berkeley Center for New Media. She is affiliated faculty at the Berkeley Food Institute and Global Urban Humanities, and she is the Area Head for Public Practices in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley.

Miller’s selected exhibitions include: the Palo Alto Art Center, California; AMP Art Fair, San Francisco; Woods Art Museum, Hamburg, Germany; FAB Art Gallery, University of Alberta, Canada; Kibbutzim College of Education Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Korea; California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside; CMU Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile; Sesnon Gallery, UC Santa Cruz; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Erman B. White Gallery, Bethel University, Kansas; United Art Fair, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, India; Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada; Pittsburgh Biennial, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris; Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC/VAL), France; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; de Siasset Museum, Santa Clara, California; Musee Ingres, Montauban, France; Lord Hall Gallery, University of Maine; Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute; The Menil Collection, Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Centre National d'Art Contemporain, France; British Film Institute, London, England; National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia.

She is the recipient of many grants including: C/Change grant by the Goethe Institute and Gray Area Art Center, Arts Council England Award, California Arts Council ‘Artists in Communities’ Grant; Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant; STUDIO for Creative Inquiry Grant; Berkeley Center for New Media Seed Award; Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship, and Creative Discovery Grant.

Missing Objects Library (MOL) is a curated, web-based repository of handmade 3D objects that are designed with an intersectional, feminist lens. MOL is displayed as both a physical video installation and a web-based, free model library. MOL offers an alternative to commercial, status quo storefronts that provide digital assets for game design and special effects. Objects sold in these spaces are typically devoid of provenance, and they continually reinscribe false notions of neutrality while privileging a white, cis, heteronormative dominance. In contrast, MOL is an open platform with downloadable models that accurately represent the world we inhabit. MOL disrupts historical gatekeeping performed by “neutral” marketplaces by offering 3D modeled objects that span a wide range of identities, abilities, and affinities. In addition to critiquing existing 3D model storefronts, MOL builds community by offering an economic system of reciprocity, where technological representations of things are exchanged to produce meaningful relations and effects.