Mumtaz Hammad works across urban planning, sound design, and writing to explore spatial justice, cultural preservation, and community-centered mapping. They hold an M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia University's GSAPP and an M.A. in South Asian Studies from UT Austin.
Their trans-disciplinary practice investigates how community spaces are located, interpellated, and experienced through processes of planning, performance, and sonic composition.
Their writings have been published in EFNIKS, Spy Kids Review, URBAN Magazine, Cordite Magazine, and Rest for Resistance.
CV may be provided upon request.
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AND WE WILL SING IN THE TALL GRASS AGAIN: POSTCOLONIAL FUTURITIES AT THE END OF GENDER
Group Exhibition
2021
Role: Featured Artist
Curators: Winter and Alan
Venue: The Fronte Art Cultura, San Diego, California
Theme: Postcolonial futurisms and abolitionist artforms
Project Overview
A multimedia art show and exhibition organized by queer and trans artists of color, curated at the Fronte Art Cultura in San Diego, California. I featured an installation of three of my poems, as well as a looping soundscape that I produced. Flier artwork by program organizers.
Artist Statement
“These poems have been composed as contextual responses to contemporary issues of racial capitalism, identity formation, and intergenerational epistemologies continuously reworked, reassembled by trans people. In a global capitalist matrix fixated on axioms of binaries, these poems by ISRAFIL seek to address and engage in dialogue with mainstream narratives of identity and subjectivity being fixed markers, instead suggesting that subjectivities of individualism can transform into proclivities of relation through repetition and intention.
Poems like"the bloc party and what happens during it" suggest that none of our actions are isolation, as all human beings and non human beings are delicated threaded in capacities of love and war. Yet even in the midst of love and war, poems like "hope" sugges that there is always a possibility for self actualisation that occurs not through identity, but through intention.”
Exhibition Context
"And We Will Sing in the Tall Grass Again: Postcolonial Futurities at the End of Gender" brought together queer and trans artists of color creating speculative, future-oriented work. The exhibition's title evokes both remembrance (singing again) and futurity (tall grass as site of growth, wildness, possibility)—positioning trans and queer worldmaking as simultaneously connected to ancestral knowledge and oriented toward liberation yet-to-come.
The collective organizing model centered artists of color creating work outside mainstream institutional frameworks, demonstrating community-led curatorial practice and cultural production rooted in mutual aid and shared political commitments.
Curatorial Themes:
- Postcolonial approaches to gender and sexuality
- Trans and queer futurity beyond current constraints
- Abolition of gender as liberatory practice
- Artists of color worldmaking and speculative practice
- Community-centered exhibition and cultural work
Community & Cultural Significance
This exhibition created vital space for queer and trans artists of color in San Diego—a region where LGBTQ+ cultural infrastructure, particularly for artists of color, faces institutional underfunding and marginalization.
The collective organizing model demonstrated:
- Grassroots approaches to cultural production outside institutional gatekeeping
- Community care and mutual aid as curatorial practice
- Trans and queer artists of color creating platforms for each other
- Accessible cultural programming centering marginalized voices
- Political solidarity through artistic collaboration
By bringing together visual art, performance, sound, and installation, the exhibition modeled multidisciplinary approaches to trans and queer cultural work—refusing singular medium or methodology in favor of expansive, relational artistic practice.