Opening Reception:
The Bride Has Gone to Pick Flowers, curated by Lila Nazemian
Levon Kafafian, Fatemeh Kazemi, Levani
Mentor: Martha Joseph
Thursday, January 30, 2025 from 6–8 pm
137 W. 25th Street, New York, NY
RSVP
Please join us for the opening reception for The Bride Has Gone to Pick Flowers, a group exhibition that presents the work of three artists: Levon Kafafian, Fatemeh Kazemi, and Levani. The exhibition is curated by Lila Nazemian with mentorship from Martha Joseph. Nazemian is an awardee of CUE’s open call for curatorial projects.
RSVPs to the opening reception are requested but not required. The event is free and all are welcome.
This exhibition will remain on view until May 10, 2025. CUE's gallery space is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 12–6 pm. Please feel free to stop by at your convenience during these times; no registration is required.
Read more about the exhibition here, and see below to RSVP to the opening reception.
About the Artists
Levon Kafafian is a weaver who works the narrative threads of costume, artifact, ritual, and installation into stories about possible worlds and potential futures. Treating woven cloth as portals into these other worlds, Kafafian generates texts infused with future ancestral practice, hybridity, and magic. Their current work channels the world of Azadistan out of the Armenian diasporic imaginary toward the forthcoming graphic novel Portal Fire.
Based in Detroit, Kafafian holds a BFA in Fiber from the College for Creative Studies and a BA in Anthropology from Wayne State University (2014). They co-led a seven-week public educational weaving program in partnership with Trapholt Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark (2022), and they regularly lecture and teach workshops across the U.S. Kafafian has exhibited their work at notable institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Stamps Gallery at the University of Michigan, and the Arab American National Museum. They are the recipient of numerous grants, including the Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum Grant (2021), Creative Armenia Spark Grant (2021), the Red Bull Arts Microgrant (2020), the Rauschenberg Foundation SEED Grant (2016) and the Knight Art Challenge Award (2016). They have participated in residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (2023) and the Arab American National Museum (2019).
Fatemeh Kazemi فاطمه کاظمی (she/they, b. 1992, Tehran)—also known as Afimoh—is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans material fabrication, fiction writing, archiving, filming, curating, organizing, and hosting. Her work engages with themes of communal grief or غم (/gham/), underground economies, kitsch Iranian visual culture, ritual, and subculture. Developed through conversation and community-oriented collaborations, her approach is deeply rooted in collective experiences.
Kazemi earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Tehran (2014) and an MFA in Studio Art from Syracuse University (2024). Her work moves fluidly across worlds, blending installation, lens-based media, and the poetic flow of creative writing. She has exhibited at Parallel Circuit Space (Tehran), SUB Community (Çanakkale), Ruschman Gallery (Chicago), Navel LA (Los Angeles), Smack Mellon (New York), and Bayt Al Mamzar (Dubai). Her experimental films have been screened at the London Short Film Festival, CulturalHub (New York), LUX Book Fair (London), Dresden Film Festival, Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse), and Foundry By Emaar (Dubai), among other venues.
Levani (Levan Mindiashvili, b. Tbilisi, Georgia) is a transdisciplinary artist who works at the interstices of art, contemporary science, ecology, and spirituality. Ze hold an MFA from IUNA Buenos Aires National University and BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Levani has had solo exhibitions at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space; Artists Alliance Inc.; Marisa Newman Projects; the National Museum of Georgia; NARS Foundation, and the Silk Museum, Tbilisi, among others. Zir work has been included in group exhibitions at The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Socrates Sculpture Park; Kunsthalle Tbilisi; the National Museum of China; Elizabeth Foundation for Arts; BRIC Biennial; the Tartu Art Museum, and more.
Levani is a recipient of residencies, awards, and grants that include: the LES Studio Program at Artists Alliance Inc.; the Annual Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park; the Peter S Reed Foundation Grant; the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program; the Creative Time X Summit Grant; the AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the NARS Foundation Studio Residency; and an award from the National Endowments for the Arts. Levani’s work has been featured in Frieze, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, ArtAsia Pacific, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and more.
About the Curator
Lila Nazemian is an independent curator and also serves as Special Projects Curator at ArteEast in New York. In 2023, she joined the Brooklyn-based Transmitter gallery as a co-director. Her practice focuses on reimagining approaches to histories from the Middle East, Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA), and Central Asia regions in an effort to counter narrative revisionism and collective amnesia. Some of her recent projects include: Conjuring Flames at Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2023); Now That We Have Established A Common Ground as part of Protocinema’s Emerging Curator Series (2022); and A Few In Many Places with Protocinema on Governors Island, New York (2021). In 2017, she was the U.S. Projects Director at CULTURUNNERS, where, on behalf of the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, she managed an artist residency in New York and supported various American museums in producing exhibitions of Saudi art.
Nazemian teaches part-time at NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Art Professions. She received a B.A. in History from Scripps College and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from NYU. She has been a QAYYEM Curatorial Fellow (2019), an inaugural participant of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York (2018-2019), and a member of the Independent Curators International Curatorial Intensive in Bangkok, Thailand (2018).
About the Mentor
Martha Joseph is a curator and writer specializing in contemporary art, sound, and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, she is part of the curatorial team for The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, MoMA's space for performance and time-based art. She has organized exhibitions, commissions, and performances with artists that include Sable Elyse Smith, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Yve Laris Cohen, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Guadalupe Maravilla, and David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc. With Ana Janevski and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, she co-organized Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done in 2018. Joseph’s writing has appeared in publications by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bonner Kunstverein, and MoMA as well as Flash Art and Frieze Magazine. Before joining MoMA, she held curatorial positions at The Whitney and The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). She received a Masters degree in the History of Art from Williams College; a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Oberlin College; and a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from Oberlin Conservatory.
Graphic Design: Unche Studio