The [current work of New York-based artists Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall] is inspired by the lost histories of Bengali sailors who, passing as Black in the early twentieth century, settled into communities of color in the wake of anti-Asian immigration laws in the United States. For their installation at the Dodd Galleries, Pigeonhole, Dasgupta and Marshall create a multidisciplinary portrait of Bahauddin (Bobby) Alam, a Bengali peddler and lascar who migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century and lived as a Black jazz musician in order to circumvent the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917.
— From the accompanying exhibition text
Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall’s installation Pigeonhole remains on view at the Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, through February 22.
Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall are New York-based artists whose collaborative projects are located in the gaps between history and story-telling, and draw from archival texts, sociological conventions, oral histories, postmodern theory and postcolonial studies, to examine power and privilege in the United States. They began working collaboratively in 2015 after each working as individual artists for a decade.
