Artist Dina Abdulkarim, in collaboration with the Southland Institute, will discuss her training in architecture and planning to explore themes of home, citizenship, and identity exchange that she presents in her work. She will focus on the visual and cultural influences that have shaped her appreciation of patterns and the institution of their collective meaning. Abdulkarim will describe how, through distinct architecture and specific interiors, the use of patterns, materials and textures form the shared social aesthetics of the very personal space of the home. She will also speak to the experience of living and studying city planning and urban design in the U.S., and how it added a new set of patterns and meanings to her concept of home. In her large-scale paintings, Abdulkarim overlaps different geometries of arabesque motifs and aerial views of suburban communities to represent the cultural, spiritual, and everyday realities of the places that represent home, going beyond the simple distinction of East and West to be complex, organic, and constantly in flux.

Dina Abdulkarim

Dina Abdulkarim is a Middle Eastern-born, American artist. She was trained in architecture, urban design, and planning before completing her MFA at CalArts in 2015. In addition to running her studio in Pasadena, Abdulkarim is a faculty of urban and regional planning at Cal Poly, Pomona.

the southland institute

The Southland Institute (for critical, durational, and typographic post-studio practices) is dedicated to exploring, identifying, and implementing meaningful, affordable, sustainable alternatives in art and design education in the United States. At its core are an unaccredited postgraduate typography workshop and evolving public online repository of educational resources, built around the tools, processes, histories, and discourses of typography, design, and critical art-making. It is also a forum for inquiry into the processes, potentials, and complications of higher education and its attendant structures and systems.