A Prophecy of Chaos and Miracles: Anwar Mahdi & Val Schlosberg

Angels, ancient monsters, abundant gardens, flowing waterfalls, flaming swords, awakening mountains, vengeance and raunchy sex: these make up the vibrant, fantastical landscape that Anwar Mahdi and Val Schlosberg’s work evokes and inhabits. In A Prophecy of Chaos and Miracles, we invite you into this shared mythological realm. Through conversation and collaboration, we explore how shared visual language emerges from our different cultural contexts and experiment with merging our divergent mediums. Together, we invoke a shared ecstatic vision of gay and trans belonging to community, culture, and cosmos.

Anwar Mahdi was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs from a Filipino mother and an Arab father, they navigate their queer identity and Eastern cultures in a society that has constantly alienated them. They focus on retelling their story of abuse, and discrimination by projecting themself onto divine beings, fusing mythological narratives with events in their life in hopes of destroying and challenging patriarchal conservative ideals, thus releasing a new age filled with divine queer beings. Anwar attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in painting and drawing. @boi_venus on instagram

Val Schlosberg is an artist, writer, and educator. Val’s creative work deals with themes of Jewish mysticism, ecology and ecotheology, speculative futures and apocalypse, and gay love and sex. Through their cultural work, they hope to carry the legacy of the anti-fascist clay monster of Jewish myth, the golem, by using their creations to shame, mock, and attack Empire and its agents, while simultaneously celebrating the spectacular irresistibility of militant joy, freedom, and frivolous faggotry.