Cut Out the Tongue: Curated Exhibition by Alexis Özden
On view from Sunday, November 23rd - Sunday, January 18th.
Cut Out the Tongue is a mixed-media exhibition curated by Alexis Özden that showcases Queer artists with Southwest Asian and North African backgrounds. This show emphasizes the individual reclamation of cultural resistance through art, providing perspective on community, spirituality, and queerness, in direct opposition to the colonial model.
Queen of Palestine by Ali El-Chaer - Gold, 18″x24″, Screen print and gold leafing, 2024
Ali El-Chaer (b. 1995, they/he) is a trans diasporic Palestinian writer, illustrator, and artist, currently living in Nashville, TN. They received their bachelors in fine arts at Austin Peay State University in 2018 and is a MFA for Design candidate at Rutgers University. They have shown in numerous group exhibitions, including: Moving, Transfer at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH (2024); Watermelon Seeds at Begonia Labs at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN (2024); We Are Sorry to Inform You That, curated by Adele Jarrar for MNFA gallery in Amman, Jordan (2022); Queer Identity at the The Dirty Spread Collective, Bristol, UK (2022); The Divine: Beyond the Bounds of Queerness at the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery, Seattle, WA (2022). They were also selected as a resident artist for the Bethany Artist Community in New York in 2024 and he was selected by South Arts to represent Tennessee as a fellow for the 2024-2025 National Leader of Color cohort by Arts Lead.
Alexis Özden, curator
Alexis Özden (Öz) is an organizer, poet, and mixed-media artist who explores generational trauma, somatic healing, and gender expression in their work. Öz currently facilitates the Nashville Radical Library, which is a free lending library located at Random Sample that provides the Nashville community with access to radical literature. Öz also routinely hosts and participates in communal discussions and spoken-word events that take place throughout the city, namely in association with WXNA-101.5 FM, the Nashville Poetry Library, and the Porch. They hold memberships with Nour Nashville, the 11:11 Art Collective, and Buchanan Arts.
The opening reception will be Sunday, November 23rd from 6-9 PM. There will be henna artists tattooing hands during the event.
Ali El-Chaer (b. 1995, they/he) is a trans diasporic Palestinian writer, illustrator, and artist, currently living in Nashville, TN. They received their bachelors in fine arts at Austin Peay State University in 2018 and is a MFA for Design candidate at Rutgers University. They have shown in numerous group exhibitions, including: Moving, Transfer at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH (2024); Watermelon Seeds at Begonia Labs at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN (2024); We Are Sorry to Inform You That, curated by Adele Jarrar for MNFA gallery in Amman, Jordan (2022); Queer Identity at the The Dirty Spread Collective, Bristol, UK (2022); The Divine: Beyond the Bounds of Queerness at the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery, Seattle, WA (2022). They were also selected as a resident artist for the Bethany Artist Community in New York in 2024 and he was selected by South Arts to represent Tennessee as a fellow for the 2024-2025 National Leader of Color cohort by Arts Lead. El-Chaer has a wide variety of professional experience. They were commissioned to write the Olives Are Beautiful article for CedarHill Homestead, Springfield, TN (2023) and they were chosen to be the Editor for Heaven Replied anthology published by Renascence Books in Nashville, TN (2024).
They were also commissioned by the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York to illustrate the Love Letters folio publication in 2023, and they were selected by University of Syracuse to have their illustration included in Issue 48 of the Salt Hill Journal. In addition, El-Chaer has also worked as an archive assistant for Tennessee State Archives.
El-Chaer has gone on to found a community collective, Nour Nashville, catering towards political education, organizing, and outreach in Nashville, TN. He has been nominated and awarded the Press On Southern Movement Media Fund for his work within Nour Nashville and their use of journalistic and artistic practices to help Palestinians in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. El-Chaer’s present artistic practice and research has transitioned into tackling intense interpersonal emotions around the ongoing Palestinian genocide and continued displacement, pulling from archived political posters from the Levant Region from 1913-present and Byzantine art.
My name is Amel Abdalla. I’m a Palestinian mixed media artist from Nashville, TN. My two pieces are based on the destruction of the family in Gaza. Both pieces have a story and a ton of inspiration from Gustav Klimt (especially the piece titled: “the family”). My pieces aim to bring people together to tell the stories of the people of Palestine who aren’t seen as human, but rather as collateral. We need to stand up for those who can’t stand on their own, or at least help them up.
AB Bedran: My creative approach derives from a multidisciplinary process with a focus on mixed media collage, textiles, performance art and writing. Other materials used are elements of different recycled pieces and found objects. The work represents themes of a spiritual life embodied through familial connections and personal identity. The pieces also act as the blueprint of a queer/ gender nonconforming experience in cohesion with spirituality. Concepts of reaching for a universal self, investigation of flaws and the acceptance of imperfection as an asset to the esoteric experience rather than a downfall exist in this work. Culminated together, this allows the audience to be transported to an inner depth of one’s self that is normally unreachable on a conscious level. The work offers an escape into an illusive world where inner knowledge is the ultimate guide and the higher power that presents itself is unique to each onlooker.
Fluid & thunderous as a Flood, Diluvio (they/them; elle/elles; void) is a non-binary intersex artist & poet at the nexus of multiple diasporas who lives in a world between the realms of the known and unknown, of the physical and the spirit, eternally drawn to the cosmos, death, mysticism, transformation, and the power of nature. On a path of ancestral reclamation through generations of severance, they've found comfort in the feeling of reconnecting with their lineages through their art & poetry, which come from a deeply intimate place of spiritual wisdom beyond the self as the spirits of their ancestors manifest through the words & creations in their work. This deep connection has helped with the realization that their ancestors & elders are always with them despite colonization working so hard to separate these strongly woven lineages of resistance. With several lifetimes of experiences & connections to recover in their journey, they're guided & reassured by the geodesic beauty, resistance & love of their communities that one day oppression will forever end & the world will be birthed anew with liberation at its center.
Henna art by Sri