This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month Seriesfeaturing an interview with a different emerging transgender or non-binary artist each weekday throughout June.
For the second installment of our month-long series, we spotlight the work of Tara Asgar, a Bangladeshi trans woman, asylum seeker, and artist currently based in Brooklyn. Born in Dhaka, Asgar became involved in organizing the local LGBTQIA+ community to push back against conservative and state-sponsored persecution of gay people. Asgar participated in the mobilization of Bangladesh very first Pride Parade in 2014 and the creation of safe spaces for those at risk. She identifies as one of the first openly queer visual artists in the country.
In 2016, the artist witnessed the murder of LGBTQIA+ activist Xulhaz Mannan and his friend Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy by an Islamist militant group. She narrowly escaped the attack and spent three months in hiding before being able to move to the United States via the Artists’ Protection Fund residency and assistance program. Since then, Asgar has earned an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and moved to New York. she explores trans identity and her own experience of coming out at a young age through public performance, text, video and activism.
Hyperallergic: What is the current orientation of your artistic practice?
Tara Asgar: I am currently interested in understanding loneliness and its embodied experience as a trans person. As a trauma survivor, not only do I find freedom in sadness, but sadness also makes me think about the impermanence of our time. Loneliness and sadness are very vital to the survival of trans queers – there is obviously joy that exists alongside, but I believe my radical acceptance of myself came from experiencing a deep sense of loneliness. In my current practice, I focus more on experiencing the everyday and the mundane, thinking about how to find a space where my body, my gender, my immigration status, and my experience of surviving death and injuries are not exceptional.
I like to take very long walks near the ocean and feel unnoticed, somehow camouflaged between the ocean and its landscape. The series of videos I started working on, Home is a foreign place, is an extension of these beliefs, feelings and experiences. It is a kind of daily recording of a lonely and sad person who wants to claim the feelings of loneliness and expresses his embodied experience of sadness through movement and gesture against the backdrop of the ocean. I am currently reading the book Racial melancholy, racial dissociation (2019), which makes me think deeply about how loss and sadness are associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora and assimilation.
H: In what ways, if any, does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
TA: Gender and my sexuality became very important from the first days of my practice. Somehow, I had no choice but to work there. I grew up being constantly bullied for being a very sissy child; I struggled with being too feminine as a man at birth and not feminine enough to be considered a woman. It created this constant anxiety about my gender performance, and making art about it kind of provides a refuge where I can build my own narrative about my identity. The performance series I worked on in 2016, Shamelesswas a way for me to address anxiety related to assigned gender and societal expectations.
I did a series of very long performances in which I combined mirrors, self-reflection and metaphor to conceptually question what we are conditioned to be and how we actually belong as queer people with our body in a heteronormative society. Very recently, I did an iteration of my current project A private view at the Montalvo Arts Center, where I combined food, melancholy, drag, and Fox News images of Tucker Carlson to provide an environment in which an intersectional body and its gendered representation of desire connects to audiences through visuals, smells, and contrasting metaphors. In a way, this complicates our linear idea of gender and how we are prepared to experience it on a daily basis. Gender is a constantly changing experience in my work as well as in my life.
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
TA: I really enjoy watching Vaginal Davis’ work, especially the video works, and learning more about their drag and other methods they have incorporated into their practice. I am also very influenced by the late Bengali gender queer filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh. In a way, Ritu was my first queer icon and a reference for understanding my own queerness. My other sources of inspiration are talking with plants, working in a garden with friends, random errands and taking very long walks near the ocean.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community right now?
TA: My hope for the community is that we all learn as a collective that survival is never a singular journey and that we allow ourselves to fail but always hold each other close.
