Exploding Gender in Culture Lab LIC’s new exhibition [Un]framing Gender (2025)

Photo courtesy of Donia Mohamed.

By EMMA CIESLIK July 9, 2025

Two weekends ago, I had the privilege to visit Culture Lab LIC’s new exhibition [Un]framing Gender: From Pakistan & South Asia to America in New York City. A curatorial collaboration between Tess Howsam, Artistic Director at Culture Lab LIC NYC, and Pomme Amina Gohar, head of the acclaimed design studio Phenomena by Pomme, the exhibition features 28 artists from around the world. At the center of this exhibition is a cultural exploration of gender, how colonialism impacts insider and outsider views of diversity, and how artists from around the world explode the social constructs of gender to achieve belonging and liberation. 

Howsam and Gohar were originally introduced by a mutual friend and first met over Zoom. Their mutual exploration of gender through art brought them to co-curate this exhibition exploring how gender is shaped deeply by self and social perceptions, as well as how during a time of intense gender based violence, queerphobia, and nationalist politics, art provides a visual language for the explosion and expansion of gender beyond constructed binaries. The exhibition, featuring artists from Pakistan, South Asia, and the United States serves as a cross-cultural bridge exploring shared explorations of gender as a performance. 

“The show became not just about the ability to choose one’s self expression and one’s identity as it relates to gender,” Howsam shared with me in an interview with both curators, “but the complexities of the societal roles assumed within gender identity.” Sandra Cavanagh’s piece Cock Fight, in particular highlights the danger of toxic masculinity and when violence is excused as permissible by men. It’s a visceral warning against gender-based violence featured alongside pieces exploring the liminability of burqas and “gendered” clothing as both constraints and conduits to perform gender norms. 

Deconstructing colonial constructs of gender

It also, as Howsam calls out about her own initial thoughts, problematizes colonial constructs of South Asian and Pakistani gender roles as inherently regressive and restrictive. Howsam admits that when she first started speaking with Gohar, her image of gender in Pakistan was influenced by a colonial mindset imagining it as a segregated, strict place. “When Pomme was describing this nuance to me,” she said, “I said ‘I don’t think a lot of Americans think about Pakistan in this context.’”

Many Americans and Europeans are not familiar with the history of Pakistan, specifically how prior to colonization by Britain, queer and trans people were vital members of Pakistani society. While documentation of khwajasiras, or individuals who identify as a gender other than male or female, date back to the 16th century, ancient texts like the Kama Sutra argue that they date back to antiquity. As Keerthi Shanggar writes for Reclamation Magazine, trans, intersex, and nonbinary representation was all around them growing up within Hindu religious celebrations, and khwajasira are even part of a key story involving the Hindu god Rama. 

Photo courtesy of Donia Mohamed.

Outside of the khwajasiras, some may imagine that in a Muslim-majority country, queerness and Islam could nor or rather would not co-exist, but as the Queer Muslim Project attests, queer people of faith exist, and their identities not only coexist with religion but strengthen one another. Zainab Almatwari wrote for Teen Vogue that as a queer Muslim, she went on her own journey to understand how these two identities intersect. In her words, prefacing a selection of queer Muslim heroes, “seeing and learning from other queer Muslims have been incredibly validating and reassuring.”

As Mina Khan shared for Heroica, “the quality may be confusing for some, but we don’t have an obligation to be less confusing. The more queer Muslims that populate global spaces, the more normalised this identity will become. … Just like everyone else, queer Muslims have a right to simultaneously practise our faith and embrace our sexualities and gender identities.”

Queerness and religion

In fact, one of the central pieces of the exhibition--Pakistani sculptor and painter Abdul Jabbar Gull’s ORDINARY SOUL--explores how the soul has no gender. As the artist wrote, “my ORDINARY SOUL is a universal human which is beyond all discriminations. My text is universal and one can see some glimpses of different languages but it cannot be linked to any specific one.” Although people may present as male, female, or nonbinary in the physical, Gull said, any person’s soul itself has no gender designation or qualifier. 

Gohar further explained that “The soul has no gender, so you can have male attributes and you can make female attributes and you can use both to empower yourself as an individual. It doesn’t make you any more or less than anyone else.” 

Gohar reflects on the importance of including diverse artists in the exhibition, emphasizing that roles around gender and identity are constantly evolving, and that traditional voices with strong, thoughtful perspectives on these themes—regardless of orientation—bring depth and dynamism to the dialogue. She adds that engaging a broader spectrum of artists fosters a richer, more layered understanding of how gender is expressed, performed, and questioned in contemporary art.

It wasn’t until British colonization introduced violent queerphobia that anti-khwajasira sentiment grew and, with the institution of the Pakistan Penal Code in 1860, became written into the legal code. This code remains active today, and according to Section 337, criminalizes all gay sex with punishments ranging from two years to life imprisonment. This section has been used by police and government authorities to harass, blackmail, and out LGBTQ+ individuals.

But as Sophya Diwan writes, there is a vibrant underground LGBTQ+ community in Pakistan, and in recent years, growing visibility surrounding queer representation and scholarship. Omar Kasmani’s Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere (2023) was and is a pivotal text in shifting queer scholarship internationally, and Writer-director Saim Sadiq’s film Joyland, which explores queer love, trans identity, and the performance and perception of gender roles in a patriarchial society, was the first Pakistani film to enter at the Cannes Film Festival. 

“Trans people have a big history in Pakistan,” says Sadiq. “They were actually part of royal courts. They were poets, they were artists, and they were very respected. It was after colonization that the discrimination came in, so we kind of have to unlearn that in our own way.”

And Joyland is not alone. The Pakistani web series Churails also unpacks and explores gender and queer representation in Pakistan and South Asia. As Rauha Salam-Slamaoui and Shazrah Salam write for the Journal of Bisexuality, the series holds space to challenge and deconstruct heternormative, cisgendered structures by expressing and visualizing queer identity. And in 2018, despite the continued application of Section 337, Pakistan passed the Transgender Persons Act providing some protections against discrimination on gender identity, however its application has been inconsistent and challenged by Pakistani courts. 

Cock Fight by Sandra Cavanagh. Photo courtesy of Donia Mohamed.

Tracing Pakistani histories of heteronormativity

So when they were conceptualizing the show, Gohar and Howsam explicitly wanted to trace the lineage of heternormative, patriarchal gender roles in Pakistan. As Gohar showcases in the exhibition, queer, trans, and gender expansive artists exist and create within Pakistan and artists exploring gender have long held influence. While she explains that the art created by American artists featured in the exhibition is more explicit such as Mariette Pathy Allen’s photo series, it does not deny the rich history of gender expansiveness in Pakistani and South Asia--often in these spaces, explorations of gender were more coded but still just as impactful. 

And as Howsam explains, these diverse depictions invite people to think critically about how queerness and gender as a whole is presented, especially in the art talk that Howsam and Gohar held with both the NYC based artists and those who could not travel to see the exhibition in person. The most impactful takeaway from this talk, Howsam said, “that as a bisexual woman, our gender roles in a same-sex relationships are not as simple because you are not defined by your opposite. This was an insight shared by Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier during our Artist Talk whose collaborative film When We Arrive As Flowers is on view in the exhibition. It made me ask the question, are gender roles defined by our opposites?” And if not, how are we freed from binaries?

I found it an impactful analysis of how gender is visually and culturally diverse from one community to another but how queer and trans people exist unilaterally. It showcases how western colonialism and colonial violence not only brought patriarchal and heternormative control but also inflamed anti-LGBTQ+ hate. For many of the artists featured in the exhibition, exploring and deconstructing colonialism is at the heart of what it means to reclaim and celebrate gender diversity and queerness, and instead of shying away from these histories of coloniality and gender, the curators lean into this complex history. 

Photo courtesy of Donia Mohamed.

The exhibition acts as a journey through this history, as well as an examination of gender across multiple cultural contexts. As Gohar said, the exhibition “starts from history and tradition and moves through the ages and countries. It’s a trip around the world in 30 frames,” right from a gallery in New York City. 

[Un]framing Gender will be on display until July 27 at Culture Lab LIC NYC. The following artists are featured in the exhibition: Meher Afroz, Fariba Alam, Marietta Pathy Allen, Rina Banerjee, Sandra Cavanagh, Tabinda Chinoy, Shirley Cruz, Anindita Dutta, Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier, Siavash Golkar, Orestes Gonzalez, Amin Gulgee, Abdul Jabbar Gull, Sayeda Habib, Jinstar, Elsa Marie Keefe, Umaina Khan, Alexandra Limpert, Firoz Mahmud, Alejandro Mexa, Qinza Najm, Xandria Noir, Susan O’Brien, Jamie Owens, Jess Sossi Romano, Sadeqain, Ramya Shenoy and Muna Siddiqui.