Silk Road Rising is a Chicago-based, community-centered, artmaking and arts service organization rooted in Pan-Asian*, North African, and Muslim experiences. Through storytelling, digital media, and arts education, we cultivate new narratives, challenge disinformation, and promote a culture of continuous learning.

*We define Pan-Asian as inclusive of all cultures that span the Asian continent, including their diaspora communities.

At Silk Road Rising we know that representation matters; it shapes perceptions, informs conversations, and influences policies. In our increasingly diverse American society, we view representation as key to having a seat at the table.

Understanding that cultures are inherently linked and not ranked, our stories explore the intersections of cultures without undermining the specificities of cultures. In striving for a society that values art over ideology and inquiry over dogma, we embrace the complexities and contradictions of our human experiences.

We approach storytelling as a catalyst for connecting peoples, places, histories, and futures. Stories are both a destination and a crossroads; a sanctuary for healing ourselves, healing our communities, and healing our world.

Founded in 2002 by husbands Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury, Silk Road Rising (originally Silk Road Theatre Project) began as an intentional and creative response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Our Co-Founders recognized that the consequences of that catastrophic day would reverberate for years to come, posing unique and urgent challenges for Pan-Asian, North African, and Muslim communities. This dangerous backlash, and its recurring manifestations, underscore our commitment to educating, promoting dialogue, and healing rifts via the transformative power of storytelling.

Harnessing that power, we set out to challenge the ideology and hatred that fueled the 9/11 attacks and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence that immediately followed. Our vision was to counter negative images of Middle Eastern and Muslim peoples with representation grounded in authentic, multi-faceted, and patently human experiences. We centered politics that were anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-feminist, and elected to tell stories that were by us, about us, and for all.

Our focus quickly expanded beyond Southwest Asia and North Africa to encompass the vast territory known historically as the Silk Road, a network of trade routes stretching from China to Syria and beyond. The legacy of the Silk Road provided us with a narrative from which our core values would appear: Discovery, Empathy, and Pluralism.

From the 2nd century B.C.E. until the 15th century C.E. the world’s dominant land routes adjoined China to Syria and connected with sea routes creating an East-West corridor linking Japan with Italy. These transcontinental caravans resulted not only in trade, of which silk was an important commodity, but also in tremendous cultural interchange among the peoples of the regions; interactions that fostered the sharing of ideas and the fusion of art and aesthetics.

The Silk Road spawned rich traditions of storytelling, primarily oral narrative and epic poetry. As we ourselves are storytellers, we understand the Silk Road as both a geographic polestar and a guiding metaphor for our polycultural worldview.

If we were to trace on a contemporary map the numerous trade routes connected to the historic Silk Road, the modern nation-states of this vast territory would comprise some two-thirds of the world’s population. From a political perspective, the Silk Road represents a model of interdependence and connectivity that united diverse peoples across geographically contiguous regions. This history is particularly important to us because it pre-dates the advent of European imperialism and colonialism, with its devastating strategies of conquer, divide, rule, and exploit.

The Silk Road also provides several metaphors within a 21st-century diasporic context.  As a historic transportation hub and trading center, we consider Chicago to be the Capital of the North American Silk Road; a dynamic convergence of waterways, land bridges, peoples, and innovation. In a similar vein, the internet represents today’s global Silk Road, a technological ecosystem of ideas, stories, information, and beliefs.

We embrace the Silk Road as a living heritage and a model of the anti-colonial and anti-Orientalist politics that define our company’s aesthetic and worldview. May its legacy continue to thrive and evolve at Silk Road Rising.

Tasneem Mandviwala’s paintings interrogate the imagined but meaningful boundaries constructed through human cultures, spaces, and truths, inviting the viewer to question the solidity of such delineations. She has most recently embraced abstract landscapes and cityscapes as vehicles for highlighting the fluid interplay between “human” and “nature” and how one is actually a part of the other. Tasneem works in acrylic.