The MassArt Graduate Programs invite you to the opening event of the 2025 Low-Residency MFA January Colloquium where we are pleased to welcome Ayesha Singh as our Visiting Artist keynote speaker. Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, January 8 at 6:30pm ET.

~ To receive the zoom link please RSVP here ~

Every winter, students in MassArt’s MFA: Fine Arts (low-residency) program gather virtually for five days to engage in a colloquium and review. Each of these intensives are organized around a theme and features guest speakers and visiting artists. 

2025 January Colloquium Theme: Imposters Only: Fake It Till You Break It
“I do not belong here.” Impostors Only invites you to investigate your responses to such a statement, often unspoken, but deeply felt. Together, we will unpack this internal feeling of fraudulence not just as personal anxiety, but as a socio-political construction shaped by external power relations. We will then ask: What becomes possible when we embrace impostorship in our creative practices? How do we turn fraudulence into a radical, generative tool for art? How do we shift our understandings of amateurism, belonging, and kinship? And how, after all, do we fake it till we break it?

Ayesha Singh is an interdisciplinary artist who examines built architecture as spaces that embed power dynamics, expose the intricate politics inherent in nation-building exercises, migration, displacement, and functions as a location of identity- embodying aspiration, desire, and belief. Through critical spatial interventions that emphasize collaboration and coexistence, her works aim to counter established narratives to unpack layers of alteration and erasure of history through construction, restoration, and destruction. This results in her research being experienced through participatory performances with poetry, kinetic sculptures, sculptural line-drawings, public installations of scaffold and images that are created with community involvement, video, sculpture and often graphite drawings on paper. 

In a country with little to no governmental or institutional support for the arts and with limited opportunities, Singh is determined to create spaces for community interaction, alternative methods of knowledge-sharing, and guidance. Started during lockdown in 2020, Art Chain India is therefore driven by the potential for localized assistances and commonalities to create global solidarities within artist communities, to challenge opacities within which systemic hierarchies thrive. It is a movement that seeks to exist beyond the uncertainties of today, to cultivate a politics of autonomy and collaboration, and to decenter conversation, economy and resources.      

This event is free and open to the public.

Questions? Contact gradprogram@massart.edu.

Image detail: Skewed Histories, 2023, wood, 11 arches of variable dimensions. Image courtesy Nature Morte, photographer Jeetin Sharma, and Ayesha Singh.