"Never in my life have I felt such fear.
On the morning of September 11, 2001,
I boarded a JetBlue flight bound for New York City.
My son was in his office that looked directly into the World Trade Center,
South Tower. A few hours later I discovered that we were truly blessed.
Many thousands were not…
This series of mixed media collages, created in 2001 & 2002,
reflects my agony and terror" (Terri Katz Kasimov).

Distinguished Buffalo visual artist Terri Katz Kasimov—perhaps best known to Hallwalls audiences for her collaboration with the late, great experimental novelist Raymond Federman on a series of collages inspired by his acclaimed Holocaust surfiction The Voice in the Closet—created this more recent series of 21 collages (each 18" x 24" on Fabriano 100% rag paper) in 2001 and 2002, after her family's close brush with the horrors of 9/11. On that morning, Katz Kasimov boarded JetBlue Flight #1, departing Buffalo at 8:55 a.m. and scheduled to arrive at New York JFK at 10:05 a.m., en route to visit her son, Cory William Kasimov (the "cwk" of the series' title), who worked within close view of the World Trade Center in the nearby 1 Liberty Plaza. For reasons now well known to everyone, her flight was kept circling, as air space to NYC was closed to commercial planes. It was a couple of hours before the flight was rerouted back to Buffalo for landing after noon. The airline being JetBlue, the circling passengers were watching coverage of the breaking news on CNN on their seat-back TV screens. Meanwhile the artist's son Cory had evacuated his own building after the second plane hit and watched in disbelief as the towers burned and collapsed, black smoke billowed, and paper and ash rained down. Previously, he had left a voicemail message on his mother's cell phone that she wouldn't play back until later (see detail). For a couple of agonizing hours, the mother feared that her son presumably at work in a building so close to the WTC might also be in danger, while it crossed the son's mind that one of the planes that struck the towers might be his mother's flight.

View of Ground Zero, Sept. 28, 2001. Photograph by Andrea Booher. 1 Liberty Plaza is the tallest orange building at the center of this photo.

9•11cwk is being installed in Hallwalls' Cinema in conjunction with the September 6th literary event, Ten Years Later: Where Are We Looking Now?, and will remain up through at least the week of September 12th. It can be seen at several Hallwalls events September 6–14, including the gallery opening and artists' talks on Friday, September 9th, and upon request during hours that the gallery is open. The artist will be in attendance on September 6th and September 9th.

The 9•11cwk series was shown in 2002 on the first anniversary of September 11th at The UB Anderson Gallery in Buffalo, and in 2007 on the sixth anniversary at Espace Jean de Joigny, France, a contemporary museum in the heart of a 16th-century walled city.

www.terrikatzkasimov.com