SFMOMA Acquisition
SFMOMA acquires Mirrors for Aliens by soft-geometry to Architecture + Design Permanent Collection
We didn’t know much about San Francisco or the Bay Area when we moved here in 2017, but we knew the SFMOMA. For years, a generous friend would give us tickets to the museum, and we’d make whole days of it, walking through the giant Richard Serra sculpture, squinting into Donald Judd’s sketches forming the backdrop to his Specific Objects, and splitting an Andrew Warhol themed tart at the cafe. When we eventually moved to our studio, in a very ‘industrial’ part of the city, we shared excited smiles on being down the street from the museum.
As we write this newsletter, we are both 31 years old. When we first came to the US from India, we were 24. Our Indian passports have carried a mumbo jumbo of alphabets and numbers over the years: F1 student > F1 OPT> F1 STEM OPT> H1B > H1B EXT> H1B w/ apprvd I-140. Each of these carried a fresh set of horrors, including once selling everything we owned and packing our lives into 5 suitcases, when we thought we didn't get picked in the H1B “Lottery”.
Last year, in an effort to escape our 22-year sentence in the green card waitlist for Indian workers, we applied to a different category: “EB1A -Green Card for Extraordinary Aliens”. On the official USCIS website, it states “you must demonstrate extraordinary abilities and achievements, examples, Nobel laureates, Oscar winners, Pulitzer Prize winners”. For six months, we pieced together a 300-page application. It was hard to talk about, lest we be perceived as being ungrateful for being allowed to be here; besides, who could relate to spending $15,000 and all of our time searching for evidence that we are in fact extraordinary?
We had 4 steel thalis (segmented steel dinner plates from India), scratched up over years of use. We started to sand them, and it turned out it takes a lot of sanding. Every day when emotionally drained from the green card application, we would sand these plates for a few hours and hold them up to check if we could see our reflections. This practice turned our dinner plates into mirrors; it gave us a way to reflect on our Indian-ness, our alien-ness, and the impermanence that comes with living on visas, and as self-sponsored artists no less.
photograph by Nathan Garcia & Rich Lomibao
We are so honored to share today that the piece born of that practice, "Mirrors for Aliens," has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) for their Architecture + Design Permanent Collection. Of all the things we dream of, ‘permanence’ has always felt most out of reach. For this most personally charged work, to find a permanent home at the SFMOMA, alongside works by Shiro Kuramata, Donald Judd, Isamu Noguchi, and Nathalie DePasquier, is an incredibly motivating and meaningful moment for both of us.
Mirrors for Aliens will make its debut at the SFMOMA at the exhibition, "Table Manners," from July 13, 2024, to May 2025, exploring “how tableware can act as a marker or expression of identity.”
Ending with the deepest gratitude for SFMOMA, and the serendipitous chain of events and people that led us here. This will forever be a cherished milestone for soft-geometry and reaffirms our pursuit of creating contemporary objects that are deeply personal, uniquely Indian, and soft.