Digital Mapping and the Politics of Place

In partnership with Modern Fuel and Whippersnapper Gallery

Chicago-based artist Hiba Ali has been invited by SAVAC and Modern Fuel (Kingston) to take part in a month-long research residency in the summer of 2017. The residency, titled Digital Mapping and the Politics of Place, engages with Kingston’s arts community and broader public through workshops, talks and walking tours that explore the intersecting issues of race, geography and marginalization.

While Ali is conducting her residency in Kingston, she will be visiting Toronto where SAVAC has partnered with Whippersnapper Gallery to exhibit her newest installation work, Satellites. In addition to her exhibition, Ali will present a talk about her work and lead a skill-building public workshop while in Toronto.

Through a series of physical and digital assemblages, the multimedia installation Satellites includes assemblage sculptures, painting and video. Satellites maps out systems of vision by investigating landscapes known as frontiers, both “outerspace” and “Western”, digital and physical, metaphoric and literal. Satellites pushes present understandings of our mediated realities in relation to how, physical and digital, landscapes engulf the viewer. This multimedia installation utilizes media to make visible the subliminal codes that have historically guided our perception of imagining the world.

Hiba Ali is a new media artist and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She holds two undergraduate degrees from the School of the Art Institute Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film, Video, New Media and Animation and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Critical Studies. Her research focuses on how diverse populations utilize digital technology in ways that empower the community. She joined Project Prospera as the Digital Storytelling, Research, and Film Coordinator in December 2015 and is involved with civic engagement and immigrant outreach projects. She is also a volunteer with the South Asian American Policy Research Institute.

hibaali.info