Professor Karen Dias Shows in Solo and Group Exhibitions in US and India

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Karen Dias has a new solo exhibition, Karen Dias: A Dotted Line, on view at Twelve Gates Arts, a gallery centering South and West Asian diasporic artistic voices in Philadelphia.

Curated by Murtaza Vali, the show brings sculptural and wall-based works by Dias—an accomplished photojournalist turned artist—into conversation around the line. A deceptively simple yet foundational facet of visual art, the line is afforded new resonances as double-sided razor blades, safety pins, red thread, and red sealing wax.

We Watch From the Margins (dimensions variable, dried red chilies and steel wire, 2020) is at once conceptually and visually striking: dried red chiles strung onto steel wire spiral from the gallery ceiling to the floor in a jagged, coiled silhouette that evokes the barbed wire used to secure borders and properties. Used ritually to deter malignant spirits, the chiles quite literally loosen the line—a domestic protection against state control.

Lines become sites of gendered tension in A Classic Neckline or Mapping My Sternum (24" x 18" x 5", cotton, sewing needles, polyester and thread on wood panels, 2025–2026), the extended ellipsis of bureaucracy in The Banality of Institutional Disorders (5" x 7", sealing stamp wax on paper, 2025), and the fragile branches of the Indian democracy in The Three Pillars of My Democracy (dimensions variable, safety pins, 2022).

For Dias, the line is not only an artistic tool that articulates space, but a political and ideological structure: a border. Fashioning lines from everyday materials that resonate culturally and symbolically with people across South Asia, Dias probes the power of the line to demarcate territory and determine belonging.

Across the globe, Dias is participating in another conversation—about the transnational and transmutational natures of gold. Also curated by Murtaza Vali and produced by RIZQ Art Initiative, പൊന്നുപോലെ/Like Gold is on view December 14, 2025–March 31, 2026 at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India.

Karen Dias: A Dotted Line is on view January 16–February 21 at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia.

Born in Mumbai, based in New York City, and belonging to Goa, Karen Dias is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer exploring systems and representations of violence, power, and pain. Dias has been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA (2022) and Woodward Residency in New York (2023). A participant in the Interdisciplinary Art & Theory Program (2024-25), her work has been exhibited at Chennai Photo Biennale, India (2016), Serendipity Arts Festival, India (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2025-26), Gulf Photo Plus, UAE (2017), and Tisseurs d’Images Festival, France (2018). Dias's photographs have been published in The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, Le Monde, and The Guardian, among others. She has been a grant recipient of The International Women’s Media Foundation and Economic Hardship Reporting Project and has served as faculty at the International Center of Photography and NYU.