Mumtaz Hammad is a trans-disciplinary scholar, audio designer, poet, and urban planner. They hold an M.S. in Urban Planning from GSAPP at Columbia University, after receiving their previous M.A. in South Asian Studies from UT Austin.
Their work engages with spatial justice, nightlife design, intercultural planning, liquid infrastructure, and how cultural spaces are located and interpellated in processes of urban planning.
Their writings have been previously 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
Collection of Poems and Soundscape by ISRAFIL
Curated in 2021
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.