Sanaa Gateja

Sanaa Gateja, Granary, 2023. Paper beads on barkcloth, 75 × 64½ in. (190.5 × 163.83 cm)

A Conversation: Sanaa Gateja and Sohrab Mohebbi
at Karma Los Angeles
Friday, March 22, 4-5 pm

Karma

7351 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

Karma presents a conversation between artist Sanaa Gateja and Sohrab Mohebbi, Director of SculptureCenter, on the occasion of Gateja’s exhibition at Karma, NOURISHMENT.

Sanaa Gateja (b. 1950, Kisoro, Uganda) makes intricate works from post-consumer paper that he rolls into beads, sewing them onto bark cloth supports in tapestry-like assemblages. Up close, the beads offer glimpses, between folds, of their past lives—as vintage posters, pages from wig sales pamphlets, and outdated textbooks, among other things. His distinctive method requires the involvement of members of his community, whom he has trained and employed since the early 1990s. Gateja envisions artists as agents for social, political, and environmental transformation, and art-making as an act of ecological and spiritual repair. Disrupting conventional distinctions between figuration and abstraction, and two-dimensional work and sculpture, the resulting swirling, mosaic-like pieces instead draw affective connections between people and their surroundings. Gateja lives in Kampala, Uganda.

Sohrab Mohebbi is director of SculptureCenter, New York, where he previously held the positions of curator and curator-at-large (2018–21). At the museum, he organized solo shows with Banu Cennetoğlu, Fiona Connor, Rafael Domenech, Rindon Johnson, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Christian Nyampeta; the first survey exhibition of Tishan Hsu; and the group show Searching the Sky for Rain (2019). Mohebbi served as the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International. He was formerly Associate Curator at REDCAT, Los Angeles, where he organized solo exhibitions in addition to It is obvious from the map (2017; co-curated by Thomas Keenan) and Hotel Theory (2015). Mohebbi received a BFA in Photography from Tehran Art University and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.