540WMain Announces Current Seen Featured Artists Mara Ahmed & Siena Pullinzi

We are pleased to announce our involvement in Current Seen

About Current Seen

Exhibitions, pop-ups, and public art projects that explore our current moment and our changing city.

Current Seen is a multi-venue, contemporary art biennial bringing together new curatorial voices and artists along historic East Ave. and Main St. The Gallery at 540WMain and Douglass Auditorium at 36 King Street are part of over 15 venues that are participating in this biennial celebration of big ideas in small spaces.

Artists & Exhibitions

We have the pleasure of working with two women artists for the duration of Ciurrent Seen, Siena Pullinzi & Mara Ahmed.

Siena Pullinzi | Not Your Object

Siena Pullinzi is a 23-year-old artist based in Rochester, NY. Born in Batavia, NY, she began finding her love of art in high school. During her sophomore year, she won the Congressional Art Competition with her work displayed in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C for a year. After four years of being taught by Rochester based artist Mandi Antonucci, she was inspired to continue to develop her craft during her college years.

“Not Your Object is a feminist series focusing on the objectification of the female body, sex, and the internal conflicts of lonelieness and isolation. Siena uses the women in her prints as a self reflection of how these topics  coexist in everyday society.

Mara Ahmed | This Heirloom
Mara Ahmed has lived and been educated in Belgium, Pakistan, and the United States. She has a Master’s in Business Administration and another in Economics. She worked in finance until 2004, when she decided to switch careers. She is now a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose work has been broadcast on PBS. Her third documentary “A Thin Wall,” a film about the partition of India in 1947, was released in 2015. It premiered at the Bradford Literature Festival in England, won a Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Film Festival in 2016, and has been screened worldwide, most recently in Taiwan. In 2017, Mara gave a Tedx talk about the meaning of borders and nationalism entitled “The edges that blur.” She is now working on a film about racism in America, for which she is interviewing women of color exclusively. It’s inspired by Claudia Rankine’s book, “Citizen: An American Lyric.” Mara’s artwork has been exhibited at the Kinetic Gallery in Geneseo, the Colacino Gallery and at City Hall in Rochester, and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in California. Her shows are multimedia fusions of her collage work, photography, graphic art and film work. Mara writes for the Socialist Worker, blogs at maraahmed.com, and lives in Pittsford with her family. Her production company is Neelum Films.

In this series the artist Mara Ahmed has re-created her own history by using old, black and white photographs of her ancestors, juxtaposing them against South Asian architectural details, and subverting boundaries by placing them on the wrong side of the India-Pakistan border.

Don’t miss both Opening Receptions
Date: Friday October 4th | 6-9 PM

Location: 540WMain & Douglass Auditorium at 36 King St

Details

—> $2 | admission (pay at the door)
—> Refreshments provided
Picture of Calvin Eaton

Calvin Eaton

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