Amanda KM as ppl carry them

Amanda KM: as ppl carry them*
*Please note gallery hours are Wednesdays-Saturdays from 12-2 PM, September 16-26, 2026

Amanda KM: as ppl carry them will unfold in and outside the galleries at Lawndale over the next year. In the first part of the project, the public is invited to join the artist on Wednesdays-Saturdays (September 16-26) from 12-2 in a collaborative-quasi-installation-recording-booth at Lawndale Art Center’s Grace R. Cavnar Gallery.

Corners of the gallery are activated with objects and images that remind us of those who came before us. Guests are invited to leave an object on a table for the duration of their visit or longer. A sound booth records visitors’ voices as they speak about practices they are carrying that continue to live inside them, whether enacted or not.

Amanda shares, “In my mother’s Houston kitchen, my grandmother circled incense seven times around my mother’s head and mine. Then, we stepped over it seven times. Practices like this are commonplace in my family. They share a resemblance with gestures performed as part of a healing ritual complex called zar. Zar offers a way of thinking about practices that are carried through time, space, and bodies, and reconfigured depending on what’s around and what’s available.

Carrying is a gesture of care. I think about the things we carry for other people, even when they don’t need carrying, as a way of putting the labor of a feeling into the world. What we’ve been taught or given, what we continue to believe, enact, or gesture toward, helps weave the social fabric between people and connects us to those who came before us. To carry a practice or a memory forward is not necessarily to preserve it unchanged, but to cherish it enough to bring it into another configuration.

Taking zar and carrying as points of origin, this project seeks out practices that share the fluid, elusive quality of zar, collecting and reactivating them through a series of three linked gatherings in Houston over the next year. “We all have zar, only some people don’t know it,” says a zar leader quoted in scholar Hager El Hadidi’s recent book.”

Amanda Kerdahi was an Artist Studio Program 2025/2026 participant.

Amanda Kerdahi is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound, video, installation, and performance to examine object-based visual culture through the lens of a queer Egyptian-American perspective. Her work explores the tensions between coveted and discarded possessions, drawing parallels to personal relationships while serving as metaphors for migration and visibility.

Kerdahi exhibits internationally in places such as Raw Material (Dakar, Senegal), Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo, Egypt), and Queer Lisboa Film Festival (Lisbon, Portugal). She received a grant from The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture for Filtered Conversations at Round Table in 2014 and, as part of eo Studio, is a Creative Capital Awardee for Tankugbe Incubation Lab in 2023. In 2018, she co-curated Topophilia, a video art exhibition with 16 international artists in an abandoned farmhouse in Nees, Denmark. She co-founded Benefsigy Studio, a 5 room art space in downtown Cairo. Additionally, she co-organized Pop Up on the Nile, a series of women-centered dance parties on feluccas, which are popular motorboats on the Nile, and served as resident DJ. These vibrant events featured an eclectic mix of music deeply rooted in diaspora and encompassing multiple languages.

Kerdahi received a BFA in Digital Media, a BS in Psychology from the University of Houston and an MFA from the University of Plymouth, UK.