Richard Taittinger Gallery is pleased to present Desi-Pop artist Maria Qamar for her first solo show in New York City. Qamar’s start in the art world began largely through Instagram where she cultivated a devout group of over 166k followers, including art critic Roberta Smith, Mindy Kaling and the New York Times, with her Instagram handle @hatecopy. With our summer show, Fraaaandship!, Richard Taittinger Gallery is working to bring this online Instagram community to the physical art world providing a gallery experience to many art lovers who are more familiar with viewing art through their screens. This relationship with a social media star serves to disrupt our white wall space and draw it into the new world of online art communities creating a more open and accessible space.
This series of Qamar’s work deals specifically with the realities of online interaction from a strong feminist perspective. Online communication, social media, and a sense of personal branding have changed, or at least complicated, the concept of friendship. She questions a further distortion of the term into “fraaaandship.” In the Desi community, the use of the term “fraaaandship” on social media and communications apps such as Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook, takes on a sexual, and potentially shady connotation. Offers of “fraaaandship” often come totally unsolicited and are unwanted.
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Featured Artist(s)
Maria Qamar is a first-generation Canadian from a traditional South Asian family; her mother is Indian, her father Bangladeshi. She moved to Canada at the age of nine in 2001 and was forced to endure bullying and racism as a young...
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