Spring 2020 Visiting Artist Fellow Numair Abbasi is a Pakistani multidisciplinary artist whose practice draws on popular culture and anecdotes to challenge how gender is socially constructed and performed. In this video, he discusses the work behind his virtual exhibition, Everyday Encounters, with the Harvard Ed Portal.
“The body of work that is currently on display is one of my earliest works, and if I recall correctly, sums up some of my experiences from back when I was in college and also when I had freshly graduated,” he says. “[At that time] a lot of assumptions and judgments were passed around about me, which I would hear from different sources. Statements like, “oh, he is too feminine, too flamboyant, too loud, arrogant, intimidating, full of himself,” etcetera, etcetera. And I kind of let that affect me, but it also made me question: what was it about me that brought in those responses?”