Contemporary Experimental Video Art Exhibition

12Gates & PAAFF's Contemporary Video Art Exhibition 2025

Experimental, Contemporary video art
South and South-West Asia, North Africa (SSWANA)

The 7th iteration of the Contemporary Video Art Exhibition celebrates contemporary video art—that is, contemporary art using recorded moving images—created by artists from South and South-West Asia, North Africa (SSWANA), as well as artists of indentured Indian descent and their diasporas. This 7th edition of the juried show will be co-presented by Twelve Gates Arts (12G) and the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival (PAAFF). Film screenings will take place at Twelve Gates Arts Gallery on Sunday, Nov 9th, 12 PM - 2 PM and on Tuesday, Nov 11th, 6 PM - 8:30 PM.

Subjects and themes for the exhibit include queer, controversial, poetic, abstract, political, philosophical, uncensored – anything that stretches beyond conventional. We look forward to producing a thought-provoking and inspiring exhibit to follow the well-received exhibits in 2015, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024, which drew submissions from contemporary artists across the globe.

About the selectors, producers, curators, and jury:

Sonali Gulati is an independent filmmaker, a feminist, a grass-roots activist, and an educator. She is a Professor of film at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts in the Department of Photography & Film. She has an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Gulati grew up in New Delhi and has made several short films and a feature-length documentary that has screened at over four hundred film festivals worldwide. Her films have screened at venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and at film festivals such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival, and at several LGBTQ film festivals.

Gulati’s award-winning films have been broadcast on public television and cable TV worldwide. She has won awards, grants, and fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Third Wave Foundation, the World Studio Foundation, the Robert Giard Memorial Fellowship, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship.

Mehrin Masud-Elias (who goes by Mir) is originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is Counsel at Arnold and Porter LLP in Washington, DC, focusing on research collaboration transactions for tax-exempt entities. Previously, she served as Head of Legal for the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and oversaw all aspects of the University's clinical and scientific research collaboration activities in oncology.

Before UPenn, she was a corporate transactional lawyer in private practice, focusing on the healthcare and life sciences industries for 11+ years. She holds several volunteer leadership and fundraising roles with various nonprofit and professional organizations and has been recognized for her professional achievements by a number of legal publications in the United States. She is a graduate of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston's Business on Board program.

She holds a Masters in Bioethics from UPenn, a JD from Columbia University School of Law, and a BA in English and Physics from Amherst College and the California Institute of Technology/CALTECH.

She is a poet whose aspiration is to challenge essentialist notions of what South Asian immigrant narratives can be. She has published poems in collected editions and journals and written essays for a Leeway Foundation grant-funded food blog. She is the recipient of the 2021 William Carlos Williams/Peregrine Prize from the American Academy of Poets and the 2022 Universe in Verse Prize from the Kelly Writers House at UPenn, and a previous host and curator of the quarterly 12G Poetic Circle at Twelve Gates Arts. She is in the process of wrapping up the manuscript of her debut poetry collection titled In/Finite Body.

Dev Benegal is a film director, screenwriter and artist whose work lies at the intersection of cinema and visual arts. He lives and works in New York.

As a filmmaker Benegal is considered the pioneer of the next generation of Indian cinema. His award-winning debut feature English, August (1994) acknowledged as a landmark film in contemporary Indian cinema, won India’s highest film award (The National Award), was selected at MOMA’s New Director’s New Films and was the first Indian acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

An Arrested Moment (2024), Benegal’s new film on the American filmmaker James Ivory for the Metropolitan Museum New York, opened in July 2024 at the exhibition Ink & Ivory.

His feature Split Wide Open (1999) premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at Turnhout International Film Festival, Belgium, Special Jury Award Singapore International film Festival, 2000 and the Best Actor Award at the Singapore International Film Festival, 2000.

Benegal has a long history in Indian cinema. He has apprenticed with India’s legendary Animation guru- Ram Mohan after which he worked with actor Shashi Kapoor’s Filmvalas on their film productions Kalyug (1981) and the English language version of Utsav (1984). He worked with the arthouse filmmaker Shyam Benegal on his feature films Kalyug (1981) Arohan (1983) and Mandi (1983). He was closely involved in the research, making and editing of the definitive documentary on Satyajit Ray- Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker (1984).

In addition to his feature films Dev Benegal has directed award winning short films which have played at leading International Film Festivals. Among them ‘Shabana!’ (2003), on Indian film star Shabana Azmi, and ‘Abhivardhan: Building for a New Life’ (1992) a film on community efforts after the Tehri Garwal earthquake and a series of short films, ‘Kalpavriksha: The Tree of Life’ (1988), ‘Kanakambaram: Cloth: of Gold’ (1987), ‘Anantarupam: The Infinite Forms’ (1987).

He was on the Selection Advisory Committee for the second edition of Mumbai Mantra| Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab 2013. He was also an advisor to the Time-Warner Foundation & Asia Society’s New Voices Screenwriting Fellowship program 2011 & 2013.

Atif Sheikh is the co-founder of 12G and a resident curator. Sheikh has curated art exhibitions such as "Not so black & white" 2010, "Cinephiliac" 2013, perform(art)ive 2015, Lived Experiences 2016, "I Bear Witness" 2016, "Take It Like A ... ; Contemporary Trends In The Aesthetics Of Violence” 2019, and co-curated "New Asian Futurisms" at Asian Arts Initiative 2019 and "Breathing Room" at Leonard Pearlstein Gallery 2020. He was on the jury twice for the Women’s Voices Now Film Festival, at Fleisher Art Memorial’s Wind Challenge Exhibition in 2019, and the 12G Contemporary Video Arts Exhibition since 2015.

Arzhang Zafar is a writer and film programmer based in Philadelphia, currently serving as a festival programming director for the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival. Arzhang is originally from the Bay Area and has a background in video art and both critical and creative writing.