drucken

by Tanya Abraham

REDEFINE: Curatorial and Artistic Practices in the South East

This issue focuses on understanding the art practices in Asia and the Middle East through a local lens. To offer strength to my work in India on the possibility of rethinking curatorial formats based on the needs of a society; society and social impact are key aspects in my view. I invited curators and artists working in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Israel and the Middle East to share their ideas and experiences, reflecting on how art practices are connected to a nation’s cultural nuance, offering not only a unique flavor to the events but also insight into how such art intersections propel new socio-cultural frameworks and impact local regions. This issue has aimed to collect a varied sapor of art practices from practitioners working to enhance the possibilities of creating new dialogues within existing indigenous socio-cultural frameworks.

In this issue, Pakistani curator Muhammad Zeeshan, in his writing titled Flight Interrupted: Eco Leaks from the Invasion Desk, recalls his curatorial work at the 2019 Karachi Biennale, which aimed at linking the peoples of Karachi to the ecology of the region, moving past the urban city dwelling through an experimental voice, which could echo beyond the boundaries of Pakistan.

Raqs Media Collective and Meydad Eliyahu write of their artistic practices concerning social-cultural aspects of the nations they hail from: Komu and Raqs Media Collective from India, and artist Meydad Eliyahu from Israel. Eliyahu explicates the ‘Schneller Project’ in Jerusalem in his article “The Schneller Order Case: site-specific art in Jerusalem as a practice of Dialogue", a site-specific work that is an example of how art can be used in Israel to soothe the existing unrest in the country. Raqs Media Collective in Blurry Borders and Messy Realities: Reflections on the Infrastructural in the Curatorial shares some of their select works which queries how art intersects with the “living dynamics of the world”.

My interviews with Shwetal Patel (on the Kochi Muziris Biennale) and Sanjoy K Roy (as Chairperson of the FICCI Tourism and Culture Committee, and co-founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival), traces the challenges and importance of arts and culture in India from a regional perspective, and its possibilities to impact society to create new socio-cultural dynamics within the nation’s unique cultural narrative.

Preeti Kathuria’s article titled Curate - Speculate: Indian Contemporary Art and the Socio-Ecological Contingency, highlights the concerns of rural India and its farmers; her writing talks of the issues faced by India’s agrarian community through select exhibitions. Considering the current political scenario in India, she speaks of art practices, which throw light on problem solving prospects, focusing on the agrarian entropy.

In Undulating Currents: A Group Show - An Analysis into the curatorial process, Mekhala Dave writes about her connection with water, the materiality of oceans’ resources, and contemporary art’s trajectory with decolonial strands from theory to praxis from the exhibition Undulating Currents: A Group Show, she co-curated.

Curator Carlo Rizzo shares about public art in the Middle East, specifically concerning Dubai and Riyadh. In his essay titled Public/Art: Fluid Spaces of Belonging and Transformation, he writes about how art is building new cultural audiences in these regions. In the article Curating an Art Fair for the Global South: the case of Art Dubai, Pablo Del Val, Artistic Director at Art Dubai, speaks of curating for the Global South, keeping in mind the creative economy and how the perceptions of the Global South are changing, and Art Dubai alongside it.

Curator and artist Hadas Kedar takes the reader through the exhibition titled Destabilizing Curating: Southern Approaches to Art, where, in the words of Kedar, “Three projects strengthen the conception of the South as a subverting power that complicates Western approaches, patterns of thought, and institutions.” Here, she questions institutional practices and the formats that shaped Western cultural history and connects it to work in Israel.

In the essay From an event to a movement: My journey with the Dhaka Art Summit, curator Ruxmini Choudhury tells us about the Dhaka Art Summit, how it evolved through the editions to include the regional culture and flavor of Bangladesh, involving local artists and the crafts of the region, and its development into a unique art event.

Lastly, I had requested curator Nicolas Bourriaud to write an article on his curatorial ideas for the Gwangju Biennale, based on his theory of Relational Aesthetics. In his essay titled “Nothing Can be Linear Anymore”, Bourriaud speaks of art as “a semiotic collective production”; in his writing the dialogue between spaces, art works and artists explicate as a commune through which his curatorial ideas emerge.

Through the writings in this issue, I have aimed to offer a look into the curatorial ideas, formats, and impact in the regions of the South East where art has been taking an avatar of a positive socio-cultural accelerator propelling new and positive ideas for societies. In relation to my soon to be published thesis on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale querying its curatorial format as a possible West-driven one, the contributions of the writers here offer substantial strength on how artists and curators could consider additional alternative practices, which are more favorable to regions not of the West.


Tanya Abraham is a writer and an art curator based in Kochi, India. She is the founder of the non-profit The Art Outreach Society in Kochi. and a PhD student in Practice in Curating at the University of Reading. She is an invited member of FICCI Arts & Culture Adviory committee initiated by the Ministry of Culture, Govt of India.

Go back