THERE IS A FIELD, I'LL MEET YOU THERE

There is a Field... I'll Meet You There, a three-person exhibition curated by Inam Malik.

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“I’ll Meet You There” brings together three divergent but mutually resonant art practices: Syed Hussain, Kris Knight, and Alireza Shojaian.

Rooted in Rumi’s image of a “field” beyond moral absolutes, where our differences can coexist and enrich each other, the exhibition approaches identity not as something static and established but rather as a site of continuous adaptation: of gestures, inherited forms, private rituals, and public expression. The exhibition suggests that a sense of belonging and estrangement, memory and invention, intimacy and spectacle are all aspects of contemporary selfhood. This is not a show about neat typologies. Rather, it is an invitation to consider the provisional and fragile elements that make up individual lives.

Syed Hussain’s revived-miniature idiom chronicles generational memory. His compact, jewel-like panels, rendered with a forensic line and layered papers, are active archives: repositories of domestic objects, oral histories, and the material traces of Hazara life. Hussain approaches portraiture as an ethical act. Resisting nostalgia, he seeks to restore visibility and dignity to the often-erased subject. The miniature’s precision compels us to witness deeply and slowly the displacement and resilience of oppressed minorities.

Kris Knight’s luminous portraits and still lifes strike a different tone: a cultivated melancholy where surface, costume, and floral lexicon become instruments of interior life. Knight’s figures are at once theatrical and intimate, borrowing from Romantic and Symbolist lineages to render modes of queer feeling as both guarded and open. His paintings treat memory as mise-en-scène, with costume, light, and motif composing a self that is performed, preserved, and transmitted across time. Here tenderness is tactical: protecting and translating fragile subjectivity into enduring image.

Alireza Shojaian’s work brings an urgency that is inseparable from bodily risk and exile. Working from experiences of censorship and displacement, Shojaian reconstructs classical and mythic forms into contemporary counter-archives for queer lives under threat. His canvases, at once elegiac and confrontational, reassign the visual vocabulary of art history to acts of commemoration and protest. Shojaian’s painting demonstrates how visibility can be both a claim to dignity and a radical act of remembrance.

Together, these art practices challenge us to see things in different ways. Hussain’s archival modesty, Knight’s staged intimacy, and Shojaian’s defiant tenderness remain distinct, reflecting complex and emotional histories. The gallery is arranged as a series of meeting points: places to sit with ambiguity, register overlaps between private recollection and the public past, and sense how ritual, displacement, and desire shape the making of the self.

As curator, I see the exhibition as convening practices that demand attention across linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. I am drawn to the ways these artists enact connections across distance, whether through stitched paper, tinted canvases, or reclaimed iconography, with each work insisting on encounter. Rumi’s “field” is not an erasure of difference but a practice of shared presence: an insistence that we can encounter one another beyond prescribed categories. “I’ll Meet You There” is an invitation to enter that practice: to look, to listen, and to remain open to the slow remaking of identity through memory, care, and courageous witness.