Asma Kazmi is an artist whose large-scale installations traverse physical, digital, and speculative spaces. Working across sculpture, moving image, virtual and augmented reality, and curatorial intervention, her practice juxtaposes materially grounded forms—attuned to craft, labor, and cultural lineage—with digitally rendered “twins” of art historical objects, extracted materials, and contested geographies. Her installations examine how histories of Western colonialism intersect with diasporic Muslim identities, ecological extraction, and technologies of display.

Kazmi employs transgressive curatorial strategies that assemble visual and textual fragments from manuscripts, archives, photographs, museum collections, and specific sites, interwoven with her own critical fabulation. Drawing on her experience as a third-generation émigré shaped by migration across continents, she constructs experimental museum environments that adapt Islamic display logics and pedagogical forms. These spaces question dominant epistemologies and foreground alternative systems of knowledge, including indigenous, ancestral, and interspecies frameworks.

Born in Quetta, Pakistan, near the Afghan border, Kazmi works transnationally across the United States, South and Central Asia, the Middle East, China, and Europe. Her work is conceived to remain legible across cultural contexts while resisting singular narratives of place, history, and belonging.

Asma Kazmi’s selected exhibitions include: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Switzerland; Gray Area, San Francisco;  Goethe Institut, San Francisco; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence RI; Museum of Ecija, Spain; Galerie Cité internationale des arts, Paris, France; Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco; the Espacio Laraña, University of Seville, Spain; the Commons Gallery, University of Hawaii in Honolulu; Faraar Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Queens Museum of Art, NY; H&R Block Space, Kansas City; The Guild Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Gallery 210, University of Missouri St Louis; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago.

Kazmi is the recipient of many grants including the C/Change Creative R&D Lab, Goethe Institut and Gray Area, San Francisco; Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant, New Media Caucus, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Townsend Fellowship; the Hellman Fellow Fund award; the BCNM Seed Grant; Al-Falah Grant; the Fulbright to India; Faculty Research Grant, CalArts; the Great Rivers Biennial Grant, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Rocket Grant, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; and the At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago, Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago.

Kazmi is currently an associate professor in the Department of Art Practice and the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) at UC Berkeley.