05/20/2026
Congratulations to Art Education PhD student Syed Faizaan Ahab on receiving the People’s Choice Award in the 2026 Image of Research competition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign! 🎉
Here's how Syed described his award-winning project, "Move:"
This image captures a video-based research project, "Move," at the intersection of movement, listening, and power. The three performers stand facing the viewer, gesturing classical South Asian dance vocabularies. Yet their bodies are held in stillness rather than spectacle. Their hands articulate meaning, but their expressions remain restrained, refusing explanation and performance as entertainment. This tension highlights how embodied knowledge is often rendered hypervisible yet misread within dominant cultural spaces. The stark lighting and frontal composition render the performers almost haunting, neither fully absorbed by the space nor entirely outside it. This visual ambiguity reflects what Allie Martin describes as the politics of listening, where sound and presence are interpreted through social hierarchies rather than neutral perception. Just as Martin argues that sound "happens in interpretation" (Martin, 2025), this image suggests that movement, too, is legible only through the frameworks viewers bring with them. The performers' stillness becomes a form of sonic restraint, an echo of moments where cultural expression is asked to quiet itself to belong. In this way, the image operates as both documentation and critique: a reminder that presence, like sound, does not require permission to exist, even when it is misheard or only partially seen.
Organized annually by the Graduate College and the Media Commons of the University Library, the Image of Research competition celebrates the creativity, innovation, and intellectual diversity of graduate student research across disciplines.
Join us in celebrating Syed’s incredible achievement and the powerful impact of arts-based research! 👏
