ECH Blog 2018

Impromptu, Sabih Ahmed flexed his archivist muscles as, just before he was to begin to speak, he began to take off his jacket; one arm at a time. The audience made note of it. Some would later, over drinks, ask why he didn’t do so before he assumed centerstage; while Priyanka and Prateek Raja were still introducing the eighth edition of the Curator’s Hub which would become part of their soon-to-be-launched Experimenter Learning Programme; and soon after, while Natasha Ginwala made her moderator’s remarks about processes of erasure and rewriting; invoking an excerpt from a conversation between Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak that underlined the need to assert futures of planetary belongingness and to consider utopia as a no-place, instead of a better place in order to do so as well as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower; an Afro-futurist narrative centered on a female protagonist who urges us to exercise a hyper empathy, not only with humans, but with all beings that inhabit the planet; thus setting the skeletal tone for this year’s proceedings; ending with a suggestion by Aime Cesaire about how “it takes all kinds to make a world.”

As the first in the line-up for the 2018 edition; Ahmed’s unintentionally performative act felt like a confessional; a subconscious shedding or stripping off. That someone whose name has become synonymous with the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive’s India division but who primarily identifies as an archivist should be invited to not only speak but open the eight ECH did feel significant. It was as if The Rajas, along with Ginwala, had seriously considered expanding the notion of what constitutes the curatorial imagination. Jacket undone, Ahmed began by casting a critical semantic lens on AAA— all the constituents of which, he believed should have a question mark in front of them. “Asia? Art? Archive?” he proposed. “What do each of these things mean today? A lot of the projects we do alert to these question marks and we try to push the definitions by which we want to develop our projects.”

Ahmed spoke eloquently and enthusiastically about the ground realities of archiving, even offering audiences two instances of photographic evidence that revealed what these archives looked like; a room full of boxes and papers; each image conveying nothing about whether it came before or after the archivist’s intervention. It was an example of source; how an archive, at its heart, was an accumulation of varied documents; and how the archivist’s role is essentially premised on its long-term preservation and a retrieval system. Metadata became the prevailing term that Ahmed would return to; and how the database involved a rigorous classification system. His bottom line seemed to suggest that what the archivist shared with the curator in terms of methodological disposition was a process of recoding.

Jeebesh Bagchi, who followed Ahmed, retrieved this word in the course of his presentation, which began with him humorously introducing himself as the equivalent of the Ambassador in the triumvirate Raqs Media Collective, who are known and held in equal regard as both artists and curators. “He [Shuddabrata Sengupta] is like a Tesla car and Monica [Narula] is like a Ferrari,” he said, eliciting appreciated laughter from the packed-beyond-capacity audience. He then chose to present an image with which to locate himself by invoking the word “fallow”: Land ploughed but not planted. “What we’re doing is ploughing the land. You can define land in any way you want, but it’s a practice of ploughing; the artistic practice is ploughing; the curatorial practice is ploughing.” Reflecting on Raqs Media Collective’s engagement in January 2017 with the Arts and Aesthetics Department of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), teaching curatorial studies; he spoke of an episode of a collective reading at the Delhi-based campus with students of Gilles Deleuze’s classic 1992 text, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, citing this argument by the French theorist: “But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production,” words that seem prophetic in retrospect. “Deleuze paraphrases Foucault brilliantly, he speaks of deferment of freedom; everything is deferment. He spatialises capitalism, this is back in the early 1990s… that spatialising of a system produces a lot of problems in how you will reconfigure it; decoding is very easy. There is nothing to decode here. But the question is how do you respatialise it; recode it?” Bagchi also very directly referenced the significance of source, particularly its role in Raqs Media Collective’s curation of the 11th Shanghai Biennale, titled Why Not Ask Again?Counter-arguments, and Stories deriving from Ritwik Ghatak’s 1974 film, Jukti, Takko Ar Gappo (Manoeuvres, Disputations and Stories), which he believed was wonderfully ‘incoherent’, qualifying incoherence as not inability but capacity. The biennale could be seen as the result of artists having generated responses to the film, and Bagchi offered the audience images to show the durational nature of the biennale.

Erin Gleeson, who has been working in Cambodia since 2002, followed Bagchi and spoke about how the archive was for her just a constant presence—“its absence is a constant presence,” she said. “It’s not easy to write history and to turn to an archive to do that.” She spoke about Reyum, a Cambodian institution set up in 1998 by Ingrid Muan (1964-2005) and Daravuth Ly as source; a space where she cut her archivist and curatorial teeth. Reyum was initially conceived as an exhibition space for contemporary visual art made by Muan and Ly’s colleagues’ and evolved gradually into a forum for research, documentation, management and promotion of both traditional and contemporary Cambodian art and culture. “They laid the foundation for so much of the work that I do,” Gleeson said. Daravuth Ly was also responsible for introducing Cambodian artists to a contemporary art curriculum.

“The contemporary maybe happened when we touched our everyday materials; when we could move away from painting and sculpture into the everyday,” Gleeson hypothesised. “You had the US coup in the 1970s, the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, during those four years, 90 per cent of artists were targeted and murdered…Contemporary art is shaped in this decade of the 80s, in this decade of absence, artists are sent to become masters, textile designers, automobile designers, they are taught extra territorially.” This was the landscape when Gleeson arrived in 2002. “The students had no where to work; they wanted to be contemporary artists, but the role didn’t really exist,” she said. This led her to found the BAASAC, offering artists space to work on their own. Gleeson ran the audience through some of her most significant projects; with artists like Sin Sisamouth; Vann Nath, Chan Dany, Svay Sareth, among others, and two editions of the exhibition, Fields: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia. In country where artists had little access to means and resources, in order to be an artist, you had to build your own infrastructure. Gleeson saw her role in the development of the Cambodian Contemporary art scene as someone who was essentially present. “My role is just always to be there, as a friend, a conversationalist, critic; to realise what they wanted. We could do a lot on a very little budget, in our context. It was about realising what they wanted.”

— Rosalyn D'Mello is an art critic and the author.

“I’m not an early bird. It’ll take time to get the ball rolling,” Adam Szymczyk thus prefaced his presentation. He seemed to prefer to sit casually instead of addressing the audience upright. There was an air of expectation. The last time Szymczyk was at ECH his documenta 14 was at the level of concept, which he wasn’t necessarily at liberty to share. This time around, a year had yet to pass since the Kassel leg of the two-city edition had ended. He was still the victim of heavy criticism by the European press that had been lambasting him for over-spending and over-reaching among other alleged sins. The ex-artistic director began by directly confronting the mainstream perception of what constitutes an audience, and how the success of an art event is still derived by relying on the quantum of visitors as a measure. He alerted us to the multiplicity of methods by which audiences can be generated. His approach, in Athens, was not to create institutions from the ground up but to invest in already existing ones that could use a fresh infusion of energy. “Exhibitions seem by definition to be public. Are they? I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s very difficult to get out of certain habits, like to whom does an audience belong? The exhibition is one of many things produced, not a production by a particular curatorial team which is then offered on a plate to a particular audience. There is something terribly patronizing to the idea of producing something and giving it to someone. Whose courtesy should this be?” Szymczyk had arrived at this juncture after speaking about the learning process that was embedded in what was originally a working title; Learning from Athens. It remained for him a working title, because he had internalized it in its gerund form; not a particular result or material effect of the exhibition. “Learning means that you are opening up to practically anything, any influence, you become like a locus of confluence.”

Szymczyk’s did not specifically outline the crux of his curatorial imagination, he suggested it instead, when he spoke about Dimitris Pikionis, an important 20th Century Greek architect, who had been commissioned to design a system of footpaths on the hills of Filopappou; a vantage point from which one can view the Acropolis. “He used the paths that were shepherd’s paths for centuries. He didn’t landscape the landscape. The idea of landscaping as incursion was rejected and a certain passivity of design was accepted; how to situate works within the exhibition rather than trying to go with. Pikionis then built his paths out of spolia, fragments of both the rubble of buildings destroyed and demolished after WWII in Athens and some ancient pieces of broken clay pottery found here and there in Athens. He created a huge horizontal sculpture on which to walk.”

Berlin-based Turkish curator Övül Ö. Durmusoglu followed Szymczyk who had, mid-way through his talk, set the ball rolling with such velocity the hub was running behind schedule. Durmusoglu positioned her ideological position by referring to two works from antiquity; a four-headed sphinx from 2AD; an idol of two female goddesses embracing each other from neo-lithic Anatolia; and another goddess figure where two bodies emerge from the same base. These illustrations seemed suggestive of her desire to challenge binaries. “Against this environment of deranged reduction, we must not surrender to the partitioning of the world.” She suggested curating as a form of resilence. “Honestly, there’s nothing else to do,” she said. “I use this word because I refuse these straightforward distinctions between art and activism. Resilience is a model we need to reject the dichotomy machine.” She reminded the audience that resilience had a connection to the word, ‘to recoil’. “It already carries this conflict inside itself; a jump back and leap at the same time; a term regularly used in physics, ability of elastic material to absorb energy and respond back. This phenomenon is also a person’s ability to bounce after a set back. For me resilience is a major component of constructive hope, and today, experimenting in my work with various models; with institutions and independent work, expressing a work vision in various forms; claiming for a political voice that doesn’t repeat that status quo. Yes… curating is a form of resilience.”

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung joined the hub over a Skype call from a location he described, vaguely, as “somewhere”. Beginning by inviting the audience to listen to two tracks composed by the late Halim-al-Dabh, an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist and educator. His motive was to use the sonic as a point of departure to speak about a project he guest-curated at the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal titled The Dog Done Gone Deaf, deriving from one of al-Dabh’s album titles. The exhibition was for Ndikung a method of de-erasure; an attempt to bring al-Dabh’s work into mainstream conversations to possibly re-constitute his legacy. Ndikung also spoke of another sonically derived exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary, the art laboratory he runs in Berlin with his diverse team of 26 people, that sought to bring back into focus the practice of late American composer, Julius Eastman before delving into a recent event he engineered called Whose Land Have I Lit On Now, a four-chapter meditation on the politics of hostility and hospitality that are foregrounded through the word hostipitality; an exhibition conceived of as an act of defiance against Donald Trump acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte were the concluding presenters for day two. As a duo that wears multiple hats, from architects to artists to activists, but who primarily identify as urbanists, they took turns walking the audience through the processes that are intrinsic to their artistic practice to arrive, eventually at their understanding of the porousity of Mumbai’s cartographic structure and the blurred edges that are often erased from city planning. Their artistic and curatorial practice seemed intertwined with the questioning of the alleged incoherence of a third-world metropolis, the premise for their exhibition titled Being Nicely Messy and also their Transactional Objects series which they’d debuted at All the World’s Futures at the Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. They proposed a multiplicity of futures as a way of countering the hegemony of a singular urbanist future.

— Rosalyn D'Mello is an art critic and the author.

“In situations like these, people of indigenous origins should perhaps be asked to speak first,” Erin Gleeson told me during a tea break on day three. I agreed with her wholeheartedly, Léuli Māzyār Lunaʻi Eshrāghi should have been the first speaker on day one of the hub, because the concerns he raised in his presentation through the linguistic strategy he chose to adopt, coupled with his dual perspective as both artist and curator, could have elevated the level of discussion quite significantly. Consider the invocation he made in the beginning of his talk, which he aptly titled, “Languaging and Critical Care”—Faʻatālofa atu i le paʻia ma le mamalo ʻo le aofia i lenei fono. Shubho oporanno. Johar. Tālofa lava. I offer fanaʻafi ʻo faʻamalama to the Ancestors, elders, plants, birds, animals, lands, waters and skies of this place where we meet. Tulouna, tulouna, tulouna. I come from the villages of pia, Leulumoega, Siʻumu and Salelologa in the Sāmoan archipelago in the centre of the Great Ocean, the Pārs plateau village of Najafābād, and other ancestries including Guangdong. I am a grateful visitor to this part of Bengal today, andoffer warm greetings especially to fellow Indigenous kin, the Santal, Kurukh, Munda, Bhumij, Kora, Lodha, Hō, Mahali, Bhutia, Sabar, Bedia, and Tāmāng peoples whose territories are included in West Bengal and neighbouring Bangladesh. This was not lip service of any kind, it came from a space of learning and reception, and Eshrāghi embodied throughout the spirit of acceptance and diversity that ought to be qualities more readily associated with the art world which, instead, could be construed as hegemonic in its Western-centric discourse and sites of power. “I acknowledge the violence of English monolingual presence globally on our distinct languages and ways of knowing and being, and varied states of language distress here and elsewhere that can only be remedied by more care across communities,” he said. “I am a multilingual person using using ia and ū pronouns in Sāmoan and Persian, and any in English in marking distinct territories of being apart from Western-centred access and consumption. I will situate where I come from, share reflections on ongoing concerns in my work, and speak to projects centred on gagana, language, sauniga, ceremony, and ʻogānuʻu ʻo fāʻaliga, display territories.” His presentation accomplished with elan the task he had set out for himself, allowing for moving discussion about how indigenous practices continue to exist on the margins of the global art world. “It’s about who gets to control the budgets,” Eshrāghi said later. Could the future of curating be both queer and indigenous?

Kavita Singh, who followed Eshrāghi, began with a slide presentation the premise of which was simply, Why the National Museum Can’t? “Why can’t it keep its collections well, document them, make information public? Why can’t they serve an educational function? Why can’t they be what they’re supposed to be? How has the museum, started in 1948 in New Delhi, fresh with independent ideals, sunk into the morass of the morgue?” she asked. Coming from an art historian scholarship and embodying the zeal of a researcher and pedagogue, Singh was clearly aghast by the state not just of the National Museum in Delhi but the steady and deliberate decline of Indian cultural institutions over the last few years; an almost direct consequence of the rise of right-wing fundamentalism and the wrestling away of narrative power by the self-appointed custodians and proponents of a singular, selective history. During the discussion, which went well beyond the 30-minute allotted time frame, Adam Szymczyk made an insightful observation, that the decline of museums is part of the larger picture of the demise of democratic institutions world over. Mario D’Souza, who works with KHOJ, attempted to move the discussion into a slightly different political framework, speaking of the exercise of museum making as one in which vandalism was itself a strategy; how does one reconcile that fact with the ongoing acts of discreet vandalism in terms of objects that are meant to belong to its collection, he asked. The one question that Singh raised that will continue to linger until more concrete evidence is available is quite simply, where is the famous ‘dancing girl’ of the Indus Valley Civilization, given that the National Museum, to which it purportedly belongs, used a third-grade replica of it for the most recent exhibition titled India and the World, with blue-tack covering the region of her groin. Filmmaker and artist Ashish Avikunthak reminded the audience of the 2013 Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) Report; calling it a damning analysis of Archeological Survey of India (ASI). “We have close to 100,000 antiquities and they don’t have a clue where they are,” he said, putting some of the facts that Singh presented into chilling perspective.

Shumon Basar joined the hub post-lunch, over a Skype call from the Sharjah Art Foundation, his presentation was about the rise of technology and the challenges it poses to the discipline of curating while also addressing many of the concerns he raised during his interview ahead of the hub.

The conversations that unfolded during the group discussion that signaled the impending end of the eighth edition of the hub were multiple and diverse, straddling many deep curatorial concerns and speaking of the crisis that is the rise of right-wing fascism in various parts of the world and how art could respond to it, and how the role of a curator could be politically subversive. Labour, trained and untrained, within art institutions, emerged as a subject of much debate as did the topic of first-world strategies of art conservation and how vastly they differed from the almost non-existent or differently operational methods practiced in developing nations. Could there or should there even be a universal guideline for the handling of art? And what was on the hidden agenda of Western institutions invested in restoring and conserving non-Western or indigenous art? Art education or pedagogy was another recurring thread. All in all there emerged a confident assertion that art was possibly the only bastion of freedom across cultural contexts, but there needed to be a recognition within its many players that all is indeed not well; that the act of curating couldn’t afford to be divorced from the political fires burning through; most significantly, those spread through hot-bed issues like migration, displacement, and rising fascism. Eshrāghi gave the audience a subtle but powerful metaphor to describe the discreet nature of this distress. “The creek that runs through my family’s land is not well, and indication that we’re not well. We talk about it as just a creek, the tears of an ancestor. It’s supposed to be a space of healing; if it’s not running well, we’re not.”

— Rosalyn D'Mello is an art critic and the author.

As returning moderator for the Experimenter Curator’s Hub (ECH), Natasha Ginwala responsibly sets the tone for the annual event, with her meticulous propositions of some of the key issues concerning the curatorial vocation and alert, considered, ever meaningful responses to each participating curator’s discursive intervention while acting as a bridge between the audience and presenters. Ginwala makes it look like a cakewalk.

Ginwala, who is now based between Berlin and Colombo, spoke about the uniqueness of the hub as a platform and reflected on her own trajectory as a curator that has run parallel to the hub’s evolution over the last eight years.

As someone who has been instrumental in steering the conversations at Curator’s Hub through your role as moderator for most of its eight-year life span, how have you seen your own curatorial practice evolve through the intense engagement that has become a characteristic of the hub? For sure there must be an osmotic consequence. But have there been any particular revelations that you had while at the hub that inadvertently, or consciously informed your practice?

There hasn’t been any other discursive platform within South Asia that I’ve had such a sustained engagement with; and I think it’s precisely because of the intrinsic characteristics of ECH as something that is constantly in shift. It is a format that invests trust in the guest-host relation as a co-production; and so there is porosity across the contributions of the participants and the evolving agenda of us as organisers. I see myself as having the privilege to “listen close”, and mediate between the lively and varied audience in Kolkata and the dynamic field of experience that the participants come with. ECH believes in the potential of curating as an accumulating practice of knowledge-production, communal work and one that can build solidarities across disciplines in a reactionary and divisive present. We see curating as a form of labour that is heavily collective and associative. There are few moments where one can turn a critical gaze towards one’s own trajectory while still being in a larger public, conversational setting. I believe these features enable us to invite people we are deeply inspired by each year, who treat the exhibition as a site of contestation and speculation rather than simply pitching artistic practices with a formal orientation amidst predominant networks of image traffic and delivering only the official narratives of institutional agendas.

How do you locate your curatorial position, given your South-Asian origins and your being based in Berlin? Do you think it is even imperative for one to claim a position or situate oneself geo-politically?

I often get asked this question and my answer is different each time. When I left Delhi, soon after studying at The School of Arts & Aesthetics, JNU, to be absolutely honest, I was ready to escape the scene I had come to know and the assumed hierarchies and comfort that surrounds us when we become overly self-assured. In Delhi, I missed a more interwoven regional and international conversation at the time, which is taking place in a more serious way more recently. And so I wanted to throw myself into this “unknown” context where my voice as a curator could be sharpened through a broader web of experience and among peers from different corners of the world. It became a trajectory in learning by doing and having senior colleagues as a safety net to carry out my own quirky experiments and to access archives and dwell in late night conversations with artists in Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere.

It feels imperative to redefine our sources and complicities, which become lazy and at times a dangerous means to assert a fixed point of origin. So distancing and intense proximity can be meaningful in re-animating our place in the world. As [Edouard] Glissant says: “One way ashore, a thousand channels.”

After the first few years of personal rebellion in a way; and having my first serious encounter with biennial-making; I felt more ready to develop my own relationality and lasting conversations in the realm of South Asian cultural practice. I’ve also been positively surprised by the depth of engagement that my international collaborators have had when we invited artists from the region together, and how refreshing it has been to collaborate in holding those conversations while commissioning work by artists like Shilpa Gupta, Bani Abidi, Naeem Mohaiemen, Nilima Sheikh, Lala Rukh, so what we’ve kind of done each time is that, for me, it’s been a project of re-education through the artists. So the style of exhibition making has not been a way of flattening out the context or having the practice being over-determined by it. One is, first, I also wanted to escape this, I felt I didn’t know enough about what institutional characteristics are within any context beyond India, and I felt very limited by it. This process of pushing yourself into this unknown, and yet having colleagues immediately to do this kind of exchange of learning basically. Then, luckily also, these exhibitions of Indian Contemporary Art also slowly trickled out; and in their place was Kochi [Muziris Biennale] coming out in 2012; for South Asian artists to be represented by artists in Delhi or Kolkata was not happening; all of this started with this marking. That’s why these eight years of Experimenter Curator’s Hub is the eight years of doing curatorial work. We have a similar timeline of practice. That helps us to consistently challenge and inform one another.

What are some of the more nuanced ways in which you strengthen your authorial voice as a curator? How do you go about honing your craft? And do you think that being based in a city as intellectually robust as Berlin gives you better exposure or offers a better vantage point from which to comprehend the conversations that dominate the international art world?

At the moment when I was starting to practice, from Amsterdam, I realized that my background in political science and journalism was not excess baggage but could actually help me hone an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to curating. One that remains grounded in live responses to the social terrain in which art is being produced. I’ve come to understand that the white cube need not be treated as an alienating space if one constantly pushes against that logic and its disciplinary codes. Instead, how can the exhibition develop modules of living ‘otherwise’ and activate propositional as well as argumentative structures conversant with today’s artistic practices while generating counter-archives to master currents of historicity.

In exhibitions such as Corruption: Everybody Knows… at e-flux, the Contour Biennale 8 titled Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and the most recent Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa-Galerie in Berlin and Stuttgart, I have attempted to generate an asynchronous architecture of thought and enduring relationships with artists and thinkers. How may the exhibition perform the role of planetary thinking (as [Gayatri] Spivak would encourage)? As an independent curator it has been essential to hold fast to an internal compass of which questions matter most and find the means to articulate those beyond the assigned mandate of institutional structures. In the curatorial field, we are essentially operating as bodies in alliance, and yet the authorial voice is what is demanded—the polyphonic has remained my strategy of response.

I’ve worked across different institutions in Berlin, while currently being engaged with the Gropius Bau. When, being invited for the exhibition Hello World at Hamburger Bahnhof, I decided to view the sphere of Indian modernism through a specific collection of artistic works from the 1950s and 70s that resides at the Ethnological Museum complex and therefore brings forth certain eccentricities and networks of international exchange. It is therefore not a reshuffling of names we frequently observe in such group exhibitions that celebrate the modern artist as a stable, venerated figure. As an example, I would cite the pairing of two portraits of Jawaharlal Nehru, by Laxman Pai and Satish Gujral. Or let’s take the re-positioning of satirical cartoons of Gaganendranath Tagore with the compelling social critique generated by George Grosz. Arrival, Incision considers the cosmopolitan affinities that lie at the core of artistic lives in the time of decolonization.

Adam Szymczyk was the artistic director of a highly unusual edition of documenta 14 that was spread across two European cities over a more extended time frame—April 8, 2017 to July 16,2017 in Athens, Greece, and June 10, 2017 to September 17, 2017 in Kassel, Germany. It was a documenta that dared to take risks, particularly in its level of inclusiveness, defying easy expectations of what could be exhibited within the space of the quinquennial, despite the continuing surge of negative criticism and accusations about budget mismanagement from various quarters that continues to plague its legacy.

Over email, Szymczyk reflected on some of the ideological consequences of his curatorial paradigm while also addressing the rising climate of hostility and xenophobia and its implications on the display of artistic practices.

What did you learn/unlearn from Kassel and Athens?

In the process leading up to documenta 14—from 2013, when I was appointed as artistic director, to 2017, when both acts of the exhibition unraveled in Athens and then Kassel—as well as in our present state of dealing with the aftermath of the project and its political ramifications, while beginning to realize in full the possibilities documenta 14 unleashed, my many collaborators and I went through a tremendous experience of questioning and revising truths we had learned to believe and that we intuitively and consciously rejected. Both cities, the difference they produced, their specific social fabrics, political circumstances and diverse economic conditions, necessitated and demanded unlearning of most of what we believed to know about how to act politically with means of aesthetic experience, with means of art, both its making and the discourses it generates. Other knowledges—let’s call them specific, minor, repressed, indigenous—provided means of resistance, antidotes, cures. Rather than one narration, the exhibition materialized as a dispersed multitude of rituals of the oppressed, responding to variety of instances of repressive state, or dominant class, race, gender or caste ideology exercising their power, sanctioned by the same law those in power proclaim themselves to be the sole guardians of, within the general framework of neoliberal capitalism and its attendant necropolitics that dictates to us how we, anyone, must live and how we, anyone, must die. The artists in documenta 14 sought to expose what Walter Benjamin called “the little crack in the continuum of catastrophe” or the cracks in delusional continuums of absolute power. We’ve learned—and I mean both the artists and curators and others on the organizers’ side of documenta 14—that there is more to unlearn and the process doesn’t end with official ending of documenta 14 exhibition in Kassel in September 2017. I hope we have learned to be less selfish, less possessive, more able to yield.

During your talk at the 2014 edition of Experimenter Curator’s Hub, after beginning by invoking the Latin roots of the word curating, you spoke about exhibition as a way of revealing something; bringing to light. “There is always this remnant of what is left from an exhibition where you take away as an intellectual exercise the idea of display and the apparatus that goes with it. Take exhibition minus display. What is left? My belief, or conviction, rather, and we’re not talking about physics—What is left is the essential thing, which is what the artists wanted or didn’t want to tell us. It couldn’t be reduced to mere display.”

Etymological inquiry is liberating when it is not meant to be enslaving us within one immutable etymological source of a term. “Curara” is a plant extract poison in Amazonas, “curare” means to cure in Latin—seemingly contradicting, elective etymologies. What’s left from the exhibition when display (in French dis-plier means to un-fold) is removed remains a question—an inviting darkness, a fold of not-knowing, perhaps.

Intriguingly, the most enthusiastic vindication for the de-centering, inclusive, and almost rebellious vision of the documenta 14 curatorial team you assembled came from around 250 participating artists, who proclaimed in a joint letter that they understood the exhibition to be a “listening documenta”. “The curatorial team took care to listen closely and carefully to artists, rather than imposing a top-down curatorial will… Whether in crisis or inflection point, enquiry was encouraged, challenging the more frequent move of wanting to own the other people’s understanding. The curatorial innovation was to create the space for such an encounter, in Athens and Kassel,” they wrote in their letter that was titled “On the emancipatory possibility of decentered exhibitions”. Did you see their open letter as validation for the efforts you and your team put in? What did it mean for you, as a curator, to read such a document?

It probably means that many artists felt that we showed respect to what cannot be brought under a common denominator, what is odd, singular, personal and political—a remainder that cannot be subsumed within a unified display, contained in one house style chosen for wall texts and neat signage design. We proposed a polyphony instead of one clear curatorial concept and multiplied the so-called main narrative lines of the exhibition. The result was a fragile complexity of voices. I think there is no one meta-language, no science that can be applied to explain all exhibitions. There is no unifying theory of exhibition. Tony Bennett’s 1988 essay “Exhibitionary Complex” (republished, with the author’s new introduction in the documenta 14 Reader) gets near to it in that it demonstrates exhibitions as a function of apparatus, next to other apparatuses of power as they manifest themselves in institutions of Western European Enlightenment—schools, prisons and clinics, later in the concentration camp. But the phenomenology of exhibitions is yet to be written, their affective power is yet to be understood and, maybe, seized. We acted as if exhibition could be thought anew, with full awareness of documenta’s ambiguous role in writing the Western European and U.S.-American canon of modern art since the first documenta in 1955 until documenta X in 1997, which exposed this canon as deeply problematic, and documenta 11 in 2002, which brought the missing global dimension of contemporary artistic production into play.

Certain events specific to documenta 14, for instance, the right-wing resistance to Olu Oguibe’s site-specific obelisk at Konigsplatz, the terming of it as “deformed art” by Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) – a nationalist right-wing party that entered the German Parliament in 2017, reveal much about increasing xenophobia in Europe, and resistance to the very idea of decentering privilege. Within an environment of rising hostility against the more liberal, inclusive, listening space of artmaking, how do you think the role of the curator can be re-envisioned?

Xenophobia and hate come always together with what Pakistani artist and feminist activist Lala Rukh addressed very precisely in one of her Women’s Action Forum posters presented in documenta 14 in Kassel: “Unholy Trinity: Men – Money – Morality”. This was 1985. In our era nationalism is on the rise and politicians ride the wave of ressentiment. Within the framework of sovereign nation state, a locus of essentialist longing is deliberately falsely constructed for the people—such as one religion, one ethnicity, hate towards “strangers within” and those coming from an elsewhere, disregard for “unclear beings”, those beyond gender, class and race, soon artists too, as demonstrated in the example of AfD’s attack (while the mainstream German parties across the entire political spectrum remained cryptically silent) on documenta 14 and Olu Oguibe’s “Monument to Refugees and Strangers”, an obelisk built on Kassel’s main square, the Königsplatz, which bears a quote (in German, Turkish, Arabic and English) from the Gospel of Matthew: “I Was a Stranger and You Took Me In”. Like opium, this toxic mix of ressentiment and megalomaniac projections is offered to all-too-willing voters as temporary cure for their sorrows—forget democracy in crisis, forget exploitation of resources with complete disregard for irreversible environmental destruction on planetary scale, forget the greed of the 1%, forget the blinding spectacles, exhibitions of money and power. What shall we, the curators, do? We can try asking ourselves and those who give us jobs how relevant our work is today and how we can make it more relevant in order to widen the cracks in the catastrophe.

Léuli Māzyār Lunaʻi Eshrāghi situates himself as being of Sāmoan, Persian, German, and Chinese ancestries, a nod to the multiple sources from which we often derive our being and the legacies of our identity. He speaks about his native heritage; his location in a land not necessarily his own, while improvising strategies for de-centering and de-colonializing curatorial practices.  

How can one indigenise a curatorial practice?

I don’t think curatorial practice can be indigenised by people who are not Indigenous, though moves to indigenise curricula, institutions, ways of working in the arts are in vogue in Canada and Australia. It's not just a set of key performance indicators, because just as settler colonialism is a process, Indigenous-determined agency over cultural presence, display and performance in ongoing colonial contexts is a process. The guiding principle is nothing about us without us, but of course, I cannot speak to the contexts of Indigenous peoples of South Asia which I have recently begun learning more about. I think the diversification of learning and display practices, distinct to the Western-centric educational and aesthetic institutions and canonised histories that have become widely known, means that we can ask ourselves what is curating, if not care for the display, embodiment and living archiving of our histories and territories.   

It seems like you strategically configure your bio in order to situate yourself and locate your position in the spectrum of coloniser/colonised. I’m particularly fascinated by this one, where, after stating your Sāmoan, Persian, German, and Chinese ancestries, you speak of yourself as an “uninvited guest in unceded Kulin Nation territory.” Is this an embodiment of both indigenising and decolonising the Western hold over curatorial practice?  

It is firstly an ongoing Indigenous practice in the Great Ocean region and elsewhere to situate yourself in relation to your genealogy and home places, and to your interlocutors. It is in part aspirational as I, like many diasporic and displaced people, seek connection and warm knowing of my lesser known ancestors and their histories that flow through me. It is also a strategic invitation to everyone present to locate themselves in Indigenous territory, whether they know who local Indigenous peoples are or not. Particularly for use in large settler and militourist colonial contexts like Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, Kanaky/New Caledonia, United States of America and other places. The main thing I mean is that we who are not descendants of the first Western European colonisers on this planet are the inheritors of thousands of histories and practices linked to valleys, deserts, wetlands and plains that anchor us, so a hegemonic Western-centric curatorial practice, owned and canonised by Euro-Americans today, cannot be the compass by which we see ourselves into non-colonial, non-traumatic futures if these are ever to be realised.  

In “Who are we Beyond Imperfect, Imposed Asia,” you write about how the very term ‘Asia’, which continues to be an organising curatorial principle for large-scale, international shows, is a Western imposition. Towards the end, you say the following: “The opportunity exists today to enact decolonial approaches to diverse ways of knowing and being that have been marginalised and silence since at least 1492. This challenge to decolonise our languages, our conceptions, and our practices is a unique chance to redress the colossal weight of continuing intersectional oppressions.” What does this opportunity look like? And what are some of the diverse ways, in your opinion, by which curators can facilitate such a decolonisation of language and mind?  

I think we can more deeply consider the framing of works, artists, curators, writers in regionalised histories and continuities of practice. Instead of Asia-Pacific as an unidentified, shifting grouping of territories as is used in many region-based biennial/triennial exhibitions globally, I would suggest we extend the semantic field of Indigenous and non-European language terms, and create new ones when needed. Thousands of peoples maintain sensual, agricultural, ceremonial-political, and speculative practices in every part of the expansive Great Ocean region, that has variously been referred to as Oceania, Pacific, Pacific Rim, Australasia and South Seas by the interests that led the region’s colonial invasion for the last 500 years. As Tongan and iTaukei Viti theorist and educator Epeli Hau‘ofa has shown, these worlds can be viewed as a sophisticated oceanscape of relationships rather than tiny islands in a fluid expanse. I-Banaba, I-Tungaru and African-American theorist, poet and educator Teresia Teaiwa famously explained our kinship links with our primary Ancestor in this way: We sweat and cry salt water, so we know the ocean is really in our blood. It is more honest and cognisant of genealogical time to group artists of the Philippines, Taiwan, Okinawa with artists of California and Mexico with artists of New Guinea and Australia if ancestral ceremonial and trade relationships are to be considered, than to artificially separate artists by current nation-states. Further, the universal applicability of concepts and approaches is what we are questioning here, meaning that I would like to see more locally accountable and responsive approaches to organising cultural display and performance that are say based in Bengali village sociality or the like.   

Sabih Ahmed’s vocation as an archivist has been intertwined so intricately with his relationship to Asia Art Archive. He pauses to reflect on how cannons need to be read horizontally; not vertically; and the complex processes of data analysis and back-end configuration that are integral to how an archive can be digitally accessible before contemplating whether his last archival work at the 11th Shanghai Biennale could be construed as an art work.

You’ve spoken before about how the canon needs to be read from the ground up. “How is a set of practices reading into a canon, how does it then start absorbing the canon, and how does it start reflecting in the field?” you say in an interview. Could I invite you to share with us what is your understanding of the canon, particularly as someone who has been so instrumental in aiding and abetting the surfacing of material that could be seen as either challenging, endorsing, or critiquing the canon?

Having been a student of art history and in the last few years also having had the opportunity to teach in art programmes, it is hard to ignore the fact that the very resources that are instrumental in disseminating and sharing knowledge are also sometimes the most imposing of impediments in exploring other ways of thinking about the history of art. By that, I mean something as simple as commonly referenced books through which knowledge about modern and contemporary art gets shared on a very wide scale turn out to reinforce certain ideas one is mostly wanting to move away from. Notions around how artists are solitary (most often male) geniuses; or how certain parts of the world always pave the way for the kind of art that is important and representative of a historical moment (the zeitgeist) while the rest of the world follows; or even terminologies where some Art is universal while others need to be situated in national histories, or prefixed by ethnicity and gender without having the latter necessarily identify themselves as that. There are innumerable examples of a history of art that is disseminated, which even despite being thoroughly critiqued by now, still bring us back to the same canonical figures, the same set of artists, and to the primacy of the same historical contexts. Of course we know that canons have always changed, but we are also aware that institutions and the knowledge they impart often absorb or register those changes at very slow pace. And it is therefore often easy to glean what a canon is by simply looking at our own points of reference when we discuss the history of art.

So, there is a rather simple answer to how one may define what is a canon—as rules that define a field—and along with that the pantheon of names that become exemplars of standing for those norm. The consensus around who makes these rules have historically seemed rather centralised and imposed top-down from certain locations of institutional power. But we are also aware that in recent decades there has not only been a strong questioning of such centres from the peripheries of art history, but in fact a kind of explosion of many centres—what Hans Ulrich Obrist often speaks of as ‘a polyphony of centres’. And if we went by that perspective, it only makes it more apparent that that framework of canonisation reproduces itself in concentric circles or like Russian Dolls—there is the global canon, within that a national canon, and within that the regional ‘vernacular’, and so on, each one bringing out its own hagiographies.

This is something that we at AAA have always been alert to as my colleagues and I have developed various projects over the years. Knowing well that the canon and processes of canonisation are not things one can avoid when building archives (can there be a space outside of representation?), how do we make sure we address our own position when we work on archival and digitisation projects with artists? So, for us, the question of how we at AAA respond to canons has not been so much to simply fill the gaps in art history and include new names that can then be canonised. Instead, it has been to find other entry points by which we could start looking at the history of art and what forces constituted a field in different historical moments. Every artists’ collection we have approached for a digitisation project has been with an endeavour to excavate contextual materials that could shed light on wider histories—artist travels, their affiliations, the debates they found themselves amidst, and the milieu they were part of, rather than focusing on their personal biographies. For instance, something we have been looking at rather closely when working on artist archives in this country has been their role in institution building in post-Independence/post-Partition India. ‘The Baroda Archives’, while focusing on four artists’ collections, really goes into itineraries of artist travels in a different geo-political context—both outwards to other continents based on specific institutional configurations as well as their travels into rural India to study the ‘Living Traditions’. While artist archives in such a project can surely reinforce hagiographies, we have been particularly invested in ensuring that the archive does not stand just as evidence to reinforce the singularlity of intentions an artist or author brought to their art-making. And this has been arrived at in close dialogue with the artists themselves. From this standpoint, to read the canon from ground up has really meant for me to arrive at a sense of the terrain in which questions were posed, debates were carried out, and futures were being proposed.

The same has gone for our Bibliography project, ‘Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing of South Asia’ (where along with about 17 other artists, researchers and friends, we came together to map published writing on modern art from 13 languages. In carrying out the project, one of our greatest inspirations has been the work of Prof. Susie Tharu who co-edited literary compilations such as the Women Writing in India Anthology and the Dossiers on Dalit Writing. When our Bibliography project’s website launched in 2014 with a conference in the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Tharu’s keynote paper was titled ‘Without Guarantees’, as a homage to Stuart Hall’s ‘Marxism without Guarantees’. Her presentation really opened up many directions as well as cautions for me. It was in a sense about archive without guarantees, and the openness of the future and the possibilities that it can offer. In her words, ‘any archive that we think of today, whether a physical or digital one… accompanies a new proposition in the present. What is the project of the present with which you will go back to the past, to re-read it and ask new questions and agendas?”

I think it can't be iterated enough that all our initiatives at AAA have been inspired by and informed by innumerable dialogues, collaborations and inputs from various practitioners in the field and it feels like the need to rethink the discipline and the canons is mutually felt in widespread ways.

You end your essay, “What Does the Revolt of Sediments Look Like? Notes on the Archive” by returning to Edward Said, whose keynote address “Palestine: Memory, Invention and Space,” you had invoked in the beginning, where he spoke of how memory and geography were no longer being seen as sources or contexts, but as continuous acts of invention for political ends. “If the archive and maps were the technological base for the way we understand memory and geography in an older era, data and rising tides gush out in their stead like a torrent through the floodgates.” What are the larger “curatorial” implications of this conceptual and technological shift?

Two things that I wanted to lay emphasis on in the essay you have cited are how we might really need to reconsider, firstly, our place amidst the collision between the infinitesimal and the colossal. And, secondly, our place in a media environment where processes of sensory perception, recognition, transmission, and remembering are happening all at once in real time through mediations of electronic technology.

The first point was in reference to the emergence of big-data and the molecular levels at which it operates. Think of the excessive yet detailed levels at which it is generated, be it in medical reports or the stock market. And the simultaneous awareness of colossal planetary changes and deep time as discussed through climate change and the contested anthropocene, which also happens to be substantiated by big data. I don’t think we can position ourselves merely at some already existing anthropocentric scale vis-à-vis these processes. We cannot have a so-called human ‘perspective’ over these. We are dispersed in all kinds of ways within these processes with no stable vantage point to even have a perspective. If the Cartesian model might have been one dominant paradigm and we all know what its apparatuses were, how do we understand the current model?

The second point, closely connected with the former, was about the processes of mediation that have become increasingly integral to human/social life. These real-time mediations have a profound effect on how we understand consciousness, sense, memory and the self.

These to my mind call for a completely different way of positioning ourselves in the world where Enlightenment’s models of knowledge, disciplinary specialisations, representation, and social organisation cannot be sufficient to understand the changes we are amidst. I believe we might have to completely rethink the very structural principles, metaphors, and analogies through which we situate ourselves vis-a-vis the world. Curatorial practice to my mind offers interesting way to test these changes and think through them by testing the very scaffoldings of our thinking. I often wonder whether that might be one of the reasons why curation seems to have found so much currency in so many other fields and spaces. And vice-versa, how exhibition-making among professional art curators is increasingly seen to bring together a wade array of material into complex relationships in an exhibition space that would otherwise have privileged the artwork. Sure the curator might be a decorative title in many spaces (say in a showroom or for a restaurant menu, and this is not to dismiss them), but the fact that there’s something that curation offers which other practices may not be able to is telling of what might be a much larger conceptual shift in our time.

In the same essay, you quote from section two of Svetlana Boym’s “Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto,” the paragraph about short shadows and endless surfaces to give readers a sense of Striated Light, a work you created at Raqs Media Collective’s invitation to participate in their Infra-Curatorial Project by speaking about your experience as an archivist. You used Ha Bik Chuen’s personal archive as a source to draw out over 3000 digitized contact sheets as a way to explore the changing optic of the archive in the 21st century. “The passage of light that ran through a hand-held camera, into the dark room, then locked onto the surface of contact prints, stored in dark boxes in a studio space in Hong Kong, re-illuminated some four decades later with scanners, enlarged on high tech computer monitors and reprinted into new undulating surfaces 40 feet wide, resembling thumbnails on our personal computers, and re-circulating in further unpredictable environments and forms, is the journey of the archive as it comes into our age,” you wrote.

Striated Light assumes the form of an installation; thus an art work. Curiously, Svetlana Boym ends her Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto speaking about the strange twist in aspirations between artist and theorist/curator. “If in the 1980s artists dreamed of becoming their own curators and borrowed from the theorists, now the theorists dream of becoming artists. Disappointed with their own disciplinary specialization, they immigrate into each other’s territory. The lateral move again. Neither backwards nor forwards, but sideways.” Did you engage in some way with this question of inhabiting or switching territories as you evolved Striated Light?

I’m glad you bring this up. ‘Striated Light’ emerged out of an interesting framework that Raqs Media Collective proposed in 11th Shanghai Biennale called Infra-curatorial projects. That edition of the Biennale was titled by Raqs as ‘Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments and Stories’, and I had the opportunity of working as one of the Curatorial Collegiate members with Raqs as the Chief Curators. It was one of my first encounters with curating where the approach was so strikingly different from what I used to think curation should be, i.e. bringing together artworks that articulate a theme/proposition, and that the duty of a curator is best performed if s/he is able to critically decode artworks and the contexts they come from when presenting them to the world. In the 11th Shanghai Biennale, the exhibition was decidedly not thematic but about questions, analyses, and procedures. The methodology, which was one of my biggest takeaways, was that curation perhaps need not be so much about decoding but an exercise to recode the world and the art therein. The research behind it not only entailed going over a lot of art made in 20th and 21st century alongside larger historical shifts, but also think inventively with the very frameworks and structures we see them in. The Infra-curatorial projects were only one among three other propositional layers, configurations and densities, namely ‘Terminals’, ’51 Personae’, and ‘Theory Opera’. These can be read about in the 11th Shanghai Biennale Guidebook and a quick glimpse of these can be found here.

The idea behind the Infra-curatorial projects was to invite individuals (with different specialisations and not necessarily curators) to bring the very thinking process behind their respective practices into an emergent force. This idea emerged when we were asking ourselves the question: what if particular impulses, particular methods, particular archives and trajectories of different practices were redeployed into curatorial propositions… What kind of scaffoldings would it create? The scaffolds I mentioned in my answer to the previous question in fact came up during these discussions we were having in the studio for almost a year and a half before the Biennale opened.

So the 11th Shanghai Biennale's Infra-Curatorial projects became an exploration of multiple time-based, incremental formation of scaffoldings within the exhibition space. There were seven Infra-curatorial projects in the Biennale, none of which were produced as sub-curations or mini-exhibitions. This was also something we were alert to, to break the linkage of curatorial thinking from exhibition-making. They need not always coincide. Rather, the seven projects were more like thinking processes of different practitioners being made manifest through curatorial propositions. In a nutshell, the Infra-curatorial projects were an exploration of forms of thinking, forms of being with a work, being with an archive, etc. Just as some situations ask you to think mathematically, some musically, kinetically, some with poetry and some with an essay, we were exploring what thinking curatorially would look like. It is from within this framework that ‘Striated Light’ emerged, and I was invited to bring the thinking that goes into shaping my archival projects to the fore. As I had written in the essay you cited, and if I may quote that passage here, the project “redeployed Ha’s personal archive to draw out over 3,000 digitized contact sheets as a way to explore the changing optic of the archive in the 21st century. The passage of light that ran through a hand-held camera, into the dark room, then locked onto the surface of contact prints, stored in dark boxes in a studio space in Hong Kong, re-illuminated some four decades after with scanners, enlarged on high tech computer monitors and reprinted onto new undulating surfaces 40 feet wide, resembling thumbnails on our personal computers, and re-circulating in further unpredictable environments and forms, is the journey of the archive as it comes into our age. Ours is the age of pulsating screens and virality of thoughts, where the substratum of the analogue beneath the digital erupts to form new striations that might not lend themselves as much to genealogies as to topographies and geological formations. Time stretches, scatters, and pixelates the archive rather than perhaps inscribing itself upon it. The familiar is likely to be rendered unfamiliar and uncanny, and we may find ourselves more at home with the unfamiliar that the archive throws up."

The Ha archive had already been under digitization by Asia Art Archive in a project led by Researcher Michelle Wong during the time and having gone over the material, I am very convinced that perhaps we all need to see modern artist archives as being precursors to the internet. Almost every 20th century artist my colleagues and I have come across from various parts of the world had been collecting all kinds of print material in their lives, using their own ways of classifying things, using their own idiosyncrasies of tagging, cutting, pasting, regardless of how elaborate or modest their wherewithal. Each artist archive reveals the wide circulation of information, images, content that congealed in different ways, pointing both to the dominant imageries and agencies of distribution of the time as well as highly localized ones, much like an internet in an analogue era. Only, of course, their transmission and velocity had to wait until the 21st century, and that time has now come. To find a structure and a curatorial format through which all of these ideas could be best captured and expressed was what led me in the first place to the artist Ha Bik Chuen’s work. Striated Light at the end of the day was a way of presenting Ha’s secret (and later not-so-secret) practice of photo-documenting everything. So, it’s interesting that you regarded Striated Light as a switching of territories, from curatorial into artistic, although to my mind it has always remained a kind of curatorial reckoning with an artist’s larger oeuvre. The artist/documenter in this is very certainly Ha, and the mode of presenting all the ideas that I shared, infra-curatorial.

When Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung speaks, even in private, he incites in you something irrepressible. You want to say, Amen! Because he has articulated, often not just eloquently but with the earnestness of a truth-seeker, facts that otherwise remained at the level of nuance at the back of your head, because you didn’t have at your disposal the vocabulary to wrestle with their complexities.

We caught up over Skype with the independent art curator and biotechnologist, who is also founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was also curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s documenta14 and is a guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. Edited transcripts.

I would like to ask you a question that may seem really lowbrow. Is that okay?

I don’t believe in highbrow/lowbrow. It’s about sharing knowledge. The so-called art world functions around the highbrow/lowbrow thing and one has to break them. Coming into curating from the other side, you get to hear people ask you, did you go to the Bard College, did you go to Goldsmith or de Appel. I don’t believe you have to have gone to them. I didn’t go. I don’t care.

My question is around my recent experience visiting museums in Europe. I wasn’t prepared, for example, for how discombobulated I would feel in Florence. I had this moment when I suddenly realised the history of Renaissance art, the history of museums is almost exclusively white and male. I couldn’t find my place in anything I saw. So, when Beyonce and Jay Z (The Carters) released Apeshit, I found it very validating to see black bodies in a white institution. I’m dying to know your thoughts.

You’re aware of the history of the Guerilla Girls, right?

Yes, of course!

So you know that if you’re looking at the museum collection in terms of representation of women or people from minority groups—the museums in the West were never meant to represent you and me, except in an ethnographic context. It was not meant to represent western women either. It was a construct. But if you go at the core of it, the museum has a responsibility; to start to present and disseminate knowledge in societies. If you see how the societies in the West change, you claim a position. One of the possibilities is for you to become a curator, one is to become rich like Jay Z and Beyonce and take over that space.

Before getting into Jay Z, I want to mention the Nigerian artist, Emeka Ogboh. When he had a solo project in Baden Baden in Germany, he wanted to take over a space. He rented a casino for the whole day, and in that casino, the only people allowed in were black people. He made a recording, made a film. What was he trying to do? He was trying to deal with the way these spaces are constructed. Even though it’s not written on the entrance that it’s white only, it’s understood. Even until this day, in Berlin, there are small galleries where people look at me from head to toe, wondering, ‘Who is this guy and why is her coming into our gallery?’

In the case of Jay Z and Beyonce, the music is secondary; this is not the best piece of music they’ve ever done, but the idea of getting into the Louvre; not as an artefact, not as a visitor, but taking over the space and trying to create a relation to the space. And that is important, it’s one of the many ways of taking over and reconfiguring spaces, of claiming a position. I for one believe more in creating new spaces. These old spaces that embody patriarchy, racial, class and gender supremacy do not necessarily speak to me. That’s one of the reasons why we created SAVVY Contemporary rather than spending time just taking over. But once in a while we engage in reconfiguring and then back off. It’s guerilla tactics.

I do want to ask you about the notion of defiance, which you’ve spoken about previously. How can a curatorial mode embrace defiance?

I wrote an article, actually, around the end of last year called “Defiance in/as Radical Love”. In this paper, I was proposing the possibility of defiance, of protesting as a possibility of enacting citizenship, of enacting humanity. In the context of the art, I wanted to think along the lines of the idea of the contact zone and contact languages. In the encounter between the colonizer and the natives, one had to create a contact language, which becomes a new language of negotiation, because you have to find a new way of communicating. Mary Louise Pratt calls this the Contact Zone. I wanted to think of a friction zone. The idea was to conceptualise an art space or the practice of curating as a possibility of existing within that friction zone where two things happen; on the one hand, when you have friction you have a transformation of energy; on the other hand, from the friction you have a wear and tear.

If we see art spaces as spaces of defiance, then we have the possibility of transforming what we are defying into something productive in society, we can thus also make the wear and tear. From a theoretical perspective, I was looking at the writing of decoloniality thinkers, like Walter Mignolo, and others thinking around 'Epistemic disobedience'; that is the kind of practice of curating that I am trying to develop with my team of wonderful people—26 in number, as part of the SAVVY Contemporary team—for the last 10 or 13 years. That idea of defiance, an epistemic disobedience, not accepting what is put on the plate, and how history is narrated.

In Giving Contours to Shadows in 2014; a big project we curated in Berlin that was spread across the city; at SAVVY Contemporary but also in collaboration with NBK, Gorki theatre and Gemaelde Gallery, with a lot of performances in public spaces; we were trying to negate the way history is being written. It was done through a couple of chapters: How do we sequestrate history, take it into our own hands? Another chapter was prewriting history; we’re not engaging in acts of rewriting history; it’s been written by some people who had power, rather fictionalised than factual. We were taking Glissant’s statement seriously, that you cannot leave history in the hands of historians only. How do we as people in society, how do we engage in those acts of writing histories? Which is what I see in the work of Mignolo, when he talks about delinking: Delinking is an act of epistemic disobedience. We have to write these histories in another way. It’s extremely important in curatorial practice.

There’s an article published on Aeon a few years ago, in 2016, by a Norwegian philosopher and historian of philosophy, Dag Herbjørnsrud, titled, “The African Enlightenment”; besides the rather simple title, there’s something very important, about this guy writing the history of the Enlightenment, which has to do with Kant, Hume, Locke. What most of us don’t know is the history of the theories of enlightenment and how they are rooted in other cultures, in India, in the Americas. This Norwegian guy is writing about a philosopher from Ethiopia: Zera Yacob, who lived between 1599 to 1692. This philosopher wrote a discourse on reason long before the guys in Europe did. Another example is Anton Wilhelm Amo, an African in Germany in the 18th century who was a professor of philosophy who you will never find in any history or philosophy books, who was fundamental. He wasn’t, like Yacob, based in Ethiopia, he was here. He was written out of history.

How do I, as an exhibition maker, bring in these narratives? In the text I wrote about decanonisation I write about de-erasure, about those who have been left out of the cannon, and the critical multiplicity of cannons. Coming back to your first question, who is in there, how did they get in there, who are they speaking for?

One last example at Dakar Biennale (2018), which was around the work of Halim El-Dabh, he was to me one of the most important composers of the 20thcentury. Leo Asemota did a conceptual piece around two dictionaries of music that he found; one from the late 60s, one from the early 70s. He’s found another dictionary from the early 90s. This guy who was extremely important, one of the founders of Electronic Music. And yet, he’s been written out, he’s not in any of these. How come?—is the question. All the people he collaborated with or wrote music for, they’re all in there, but he is not there.

The question is how do we create spaces of defiance? How do we create spaces of Epistemic disobedience? How do we not accept the master narrative and master plan? I am generally skeptical of anything proposed in that way. The work I’ve been doing with others at SAVVY Contemporary over the years is to create possibilities of defiance, of acting out defiance, being defiant.

Could you talk a bit about the event you hosted recently at SAVVY Contemporary, “Whose Land Have I Lit On Now?” I happened to be reading Derrida’s essay on Hostipitality when you began posting about it and seemed like such an act of synchronicity. I was fascinated.

The first notion of the Hostipitality concept I wrote in 2015; when it was becoming very evident that we would see more and more people coming into Germany from other parts of the world. How do we understand the position of the host and the guest? The relations in the world, world history. A lot of these people are coming here because they are no longer hosts in their own lands. Because of capitalist economies, colonialism, environmental issues, so on and so forth, these people have become guests in their own land and have to leave. They are looking for so-called greener pastures. They are looking for a host, but also to become a host. It’s about understanding these relations.

I wrote this concept and we kept it in the drawers for two years. In 2017, I pulled back the concept from the boxes, just because I thought it was unbelievable for the US to declare unilaterally Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. We all know that this was the key card that had to be kept in the negotiation process. The question we’re asking is, if this was the case, what does it mean for the occupied territory in Palestine, it means that Israel, which has been a settler colonial structure, is being conferred status by the US, and the amount of violence thereby normalised is unbelievable. We wanted to take a few steps back to look at what it then means to be hospitable, what Derrida calls the pact between hospitality and hostility; when the host is displaced and becomes the guest in his own land; and the guest becomes the host.

That chapter was titled, “I Guest, I Host, Who is the Ghost?” and was about the impossibility of being the host, the guest, and what emanates from the struggle. Another thing that became important was to look at the context within Germany. It’s a big political issue, when a lot of Syrians came into Germany three years ago, Angela Merkel said, “we’re going to make it”: Wir Schaffen Das. There was a feeling of hospitality, a new form in society that lasted for two or three weeks, after that there was an incredible amount of hostility, not just towards the refugees but the party in power. Until today, Merkel is accused of selling the country. We wanted to look at that relationship; how it turned to “Das Boot Ist Voll”: The boat is full; those tensions between hospitality and hostility in that moment.

Another chapter we had was called “Riding the Tide: On Hostipitcapitalism”; the commodification of the concepts of hospitality. In Cameroon, for instance, you land at the airport and see a sign that says “Welcome to the land of hospitality”. You can sell the idea of hospitality, but you have 40,000 Cameroonians that have fled to Nigeria, they have become guests in their own world. The commodification of that concept becomes important.

We invited Arjun Appadurai to speak about the concept of the highlands; another particular concept of home. Nobody knows what it really is, and if it exists. But we know it’s a concept that is not inclusive. It is not meant to incorporate others; it is meant to keep others out. It was the keynote for the chapter titled “Caressing the Phantom Limb”; looking at the phantom limb that might not be there, but people feel it. Arjun wrote a thesis of the highlands.

These were the four chapters that we created around the idea of Hostipitality. It was well visited. But as it is with defiance and resisting; generally people don’t want to take time to deliberate. But we have to do what we have to do and just keep on doing it.

His name has become synonymous with the Global Art Forum, easily among the most anticipated features of Art Dubai. As its commissioner, Shumon Basar, a writer, thinker and cultural critic, has been instrumental in shaping stimulating and provocative conversations around a range of subjects that don’t seem to rest immediately within the purview of art; like artificial intelligence. Basar is also editor-at-large of Tank magazine and contributing editor to Bidoun magazine, while simultaneously functioning as director of the format program at the AA School, London, and a member of Fondazione Prada’s ‘Thought Council’ and Art Jameel’s Curatorial Council.

You write in Huck Magazine about the first time you went to Dubai; you locate yourself as someone from Bangladesh, but who “grew up entirely in England and have had a privileged and wonderful European/American-centric education at Cambridge.” You recognised Dubai as a new gravitational center that was speaking about a future you were unaware of at that moment. “There’s always been a gravitational centre of the earth, culturally economically, mythically and in a way the West has owned that for at least 500 years. But I realised at the beginning of the 21st century that a large part of that narrative is over now.” Since then, I imagine your links with Dubai have only grown deeper roots. As someone whose professional associations lie in different parts of the world, where and how do you locate yourself today in terms of your writing and curatorial practice?

I exploit all my privileges. My British passport is one of the greatest privileges, no doubt. It has allowed me to live out my restlessness by deciding to live and work across a number of cities and countries. I have a more productive relationship to feeling ever so slightly alienated from my surroundings than belonging to them. It’s human, maybe, to want to belong, to a place, to a people. My worry with that is that this attitude elicits intellectual complacency. A short-circuiting of who or what or where the Other is. The worst of this is something like nationalism. Or a sickening pride in “X is the greatest city in the world!!” Frankly: fuck off to all of that. As Rana Dasgupta recently posited, can we please enter the next phase of geopolitical organisation that puts the nation state behind us? Another way to say this would be to claim I am driven more by what I believe I don’t know than the many things I think I know. This translates into inhabiting a kind of Frankenstein of place, which for the last several years, is essentially Berlin, Dubai, Milan and London. Each has its own frequency of attentiveness, each frames the current condition in its own way, and each consists of minds I work and love with, without which, I really would be nothing. 

You concern yourself very directly with the consequence of technology on our future. This is the subject of your book, The Age of Earthquakes, co-authored with Douglas Coupland and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. You also commissioned the 2018 edition of Global Art Forum, titled “I am not a Robot”, that had automation as its subject. Have you thought about the repercussions of Artificial Intelligence on curating as a discipline? The brief for the last Global Art Forum mentions the first AI-authored short story and pop song. How far away are we from AI-curated, potentially algorithm-based exhibitions?

It’s already happening. Our content, our playlists, our shopping choices are all being curated, as it were, by the algorithms that learn our tastes, and then reflect back at us. Google Image search is the curating of images (by what surreal logic, you might ask). Their Face-Match app from January this year curated our faces next to art historical faces, an indication of how deep facial recognition has gone. I want to get away from the notion that creativity is inimitably human, that it’s a mark of what makes us uniquely human, and what makes a machine a machine. We have been machines, cyborgs, etc, for a very long time. Machines have been extensions of man, to use the McLuhan term, since the invention of the first agricultural tool. Technology is at its most powerful when you no longer realize it is there. We passed this moment a long time ago.

Somewhere in The Age of Earthquakes, there’s an aphorism about how human beings don’t change, only technology does. It’s a somewhat bleak perspective, proposing a collective inability to self-actualise. How do you contextualise the role of art within this state of “proceleration” (“the acceleration of acceleration?”)

There are two crucial aspects to art. The first is Kantian: its so-called “purposelessness”. Which ironically gives it huge power to disrupt a way of knowing the world, which is predicated on functional, output-based, positivist results. Art can conceptually take things apart by misusing objects and also technology. The misuse reveals the unconscious of that thing. It makes it visible, audible, palpable. Secondly, art’s right to opacity is also a means of, to use an old Greek term, “alethiea,” which is to unconceal. The fact that so much modern and contemporary art is difficult to decipher or decode is exactly why it’s so rich in meaning and fact. Art has the potential to work perpendicularly to the proceleration of technology, which, as we know, is also an embodiment of its own theological, Utopian agenda. 

When is space, and what does it take for space to happen? These were two ostensibly simple questions that became the premise for a large-scale exhibition at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur earlier this year, curated by Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte, architects and artists who prefer to call themselves Urbanists. In an attempt to recognise the expanded field of architecture, and to generate critical commentaries on contemporary space making, When is Space brought together a vast gamut of participants that included architects, artists, designers, researchers, urbanists, philosophers, architecture colleges and museums.

This was among the Mumbai-based duo’s more recent accomplishment. Past coups include their presence at the 2014 edition of the prestigious Venice Biennale, when Transactional Objects, a collection of nine separate artworks representing the creation of a new city based on inspiration from its residents, was part of All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

How would you explain Urbanism to a layperson?  

Henri Lefebvre, in the early 1970s, made an important proclamation—he said that most of the world has become Urban. Of course what he meant was not that most people live in cities, but that city-like conditions, aspirations and practices are emerging everywhere. He was referring to a distinguishable way of life. We think of Urbanism through the idea of ‘form of life’.   

For us, ‘urban’ is not a bounded condition like ‘city’ is and definitely not in opposition to rural. We think of the urban in overarching ways—limitless, formless, characterless and all-inclusive. It is a form of life with a certain intensity of things - claims, organisational forms, gossips, desires, infrastructure, etc. Urbanism is the study and practice of this form of life.  

Urban studies today include a broader study of habitat (study of societies with a focus on physical form). For us, it is also strategically useful to give this overarching dimension—it helps in liberating the engagements from disciplinary and practice-based boundaries. 

You both seem to identify first as urbanists, then architects or artists. Do you see it as a calling or a vocation?

We have been interested in looking closely at the urban condition since quite some time now. Our ways of thinking have been shaped by this interest substantially. For us it is a trip to collect stories from cities and constantly reconfigure existing ideas about the world. So sure, there is a calling. 

Calling oneself an urbanist is rather tactical—we are in an interesting situation where we don’t know what to call ourselves—we are trained as architects, interested in cities and philosophy, and practice as architects/ artists/planners/educators/story-tellers/friends, etc. The term ‘urbanist’ is a soft term without disciplinary boundaries but with an urban focus (again urban here is a philosophical category). Unlike other terms that denote a profession, the term ‘Urbanist’ is not bound by degrees or occupation—but sounds very technical. It gives us a soft identity, which accommodates all our adventures. And usually, and again tactically, depending on whom we are talking to, we mobilise the required sub-identities—as architects, planners, urban designers, architects, teachers, artists, etc.

How do the two very collaborative endeavours you have both spearheaded feed into your individual practices? I’m speaking specifically here of School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) and Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT). And at what point does your Urbanist identity intersect with activism?

We believe in the value of friendship. It is a very powerful organisational form, but not necessarily with imperatives—and that makes it very special. So collaboration for us is more about building deep friendships and growing together. SEA and CRIT are the two organizational forms that have concrete public manifestations and hence are apparent. There have been many others without much public form but high intellectual commitment. Today, our Whatsapp groups are indicative of these friendships. We also think that we can only engage with the emerging world in a collaborative way.   

To answer your question, we don’t want to make clear distinctions of our works being collaborative or individual. These are probably required for crediting purposes. We see all practices being impacted substantially by all kinds of contexts and people. We think that practices have existed before us and we have joined these practices; reshaping them, adding to them and changing them. With us many others have joined. Sometimes, we join forces and sometimes we do it alone as required. Sometimes these practices have concrete manifestations, sometimes not.  Making friendships and collaborations is a part of our individual practice and our individual practices are a part of friendships and collaborations.   

We started consolidating our practice in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We came from the hard disciplines of architecture and planning. The imperatives of the times then swayed us into activism. For us, there was value to concepts like Rights, Community, Equity, Efficiency, Commons, etc. But after almost 20 years of intense engagement, we think more generously and experimentally now. 

However we do not want to undervalue minds that value these concepts and base their practice accordingly. We believe that all kinds of practices are required to sustain cities. And we ourselves mobilise different conceptual orientations as tactically required, for example, when mobilisation of large groups are required, binary concepts become extremely useful. 

Member of the triumvirate, Raqs Media Collective, Jeebesh Bagchi is among the list of participating curators at Experimenter Curator’s Hub 2018; an exciting proposition for returning audiences who were regaled by his colleague Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s presence in Kolkata back in 2014.

What do you mean by an “Infra-curatorial” layer?

We see infra-procedures as an undercurrent, a subterranean layer. Antashira - in Bengali - captures the enigma of this sense: the kind of energies that are cultivated under the skin. Their fluid latency is their strength. Stepping aside from the secret and the sacred, infra-procedures also allow us to tap into untouched frequencies of the senses, and as yet unversed protocols of conversation and practice. 

In Shanghai, we fleshed this out by inviting a constellation of curatorial intelligences working from different parts of the world, and in different fields of practice, to fold specific curatorial responses within the larger curatorial arc. These were insertions, folds that brought in ideas and modes working at a tangent to, and in tandem with, our own thinking. They preserved their authorial clarity and presence, and yet were an integral part in the making up of an entourage of concepts, sensations, sounds and images that enveloped the spaces of the Biennale.

In an essay published in On Curating, titled “Sources, Itineraries, and the Making of a Thicket, that elucidates the curatorial modus operandi behind Why Not Ask Again? (Shanghai Biennale 2016-17), Raqs Media Collective succinctly outlined its perception of a potential function for art.  “…we see a role for art as embodying the glowing embers of doubt, and freedom towards the unknown in a world of weakening certainties. The creative, the speculative, the imaginary, is—for us—the entity that has the potential to introduce disquieting and angular values, concepts and dispositions that transform the mechanics and orbits of the dyad of politics and economics.” 

The footnote accompanying this passage suggests this is an excerpt from an earlier essay, “Notes towards a Conversation in Making of a Biennale,” November 2015, hinting also that this could have been part of private conversations between artists, curators and other protagonists of the exhibition. 

The “Notes towards a Conversation in Making of a Biennale” was occasioned by our correspondence with the artists we were inviting for the Shanghai Biennale. They are a set of observations, entries, readings and annotations. These grow during the exhibition making process, as our own thinking moves. We are keen to maintain a level of agility in our communications with artists. This means that we keep initiating conversations based on the sharing of notes and sources - which could be things we are reading, looking at, or references that crop up in our conversations. Over time, this becomes a kind of ‘dossier’ of notes, sources, references, as we receive more and more relational materials from artists, researchers, curators and enthusiasts.

Does this continue to be the governing curatorial principle for Raqs Media Collective? How does it get iterated within the space of an exhibition?

We are currently working on an exhibition that will open in the fall at MACBA, Barcelona, where there will be a ‘scroll of sources’—a rendition of the references that underpin our thinking, and built from communications we have had as artists, researchers and curators. We are trying to develop this mode as its after-currents are encouraging. 

1. What is your modus operandi, whether conscious or subliminal, for programming ECH? Your directorial manoeuvring is a form of curating. In choosing whom to invite, and from where, you create, each year, a different set of potentialities. This year will see documenta14’s artistic director, Adam Szymczyk return to ECH; not only that, the line-up shows Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who was curator at large at documenta14 and is well known for his work managing SAVVY Contemporary, will also be present. Given Natasha Ginwala is moderating, and she was also curatorial advisor to Szymczyk’s team, one sees this as an intriguing grouping, and I’m sure audiences will benefit from the existing intimacies between these curators. On the other hand you also have Sabih Ahmed, known for his dedicated work at Asia Art Archive, and Kavita Singh, among the most important art historians in India today. What goes into determining the line-up? How do the two of you make decisions about whom to invite?

Each year there are a set of (subliminal) agendas we are interested in. They may not be overtly presented but are easily captured by the audience. The presenting curators of each year, in our understanding, have shown interest in the same ideas or agendas in their exhibition making process. We find a juxtaposing of these diverse yet connected positions via the presentations and discussions that follow to be a very potent way to discuss and address the concerns at large.

The process of selection of a meaningful group, so as there is a tight flow, precision, passion, balance and momentum at the hub each year, is a deeply deliberated decision between the two of us. This decision takes shape over a year or longer. Our decisions are informed by our interactions and conversations with the curators over the years and our experiences of the exhibitions they have presented. Also, quite often, it is informed by ongoing conversations with colleagues whose opinion we value. Natasha Ginwala, our returning moderator for the hub, understands our position and intention quite clearly and is a close advisor to the process of selection as well.

With regards to your observations on the curators involved with documenta 14, yes this is a very deliberate decision, despite the fact that all the three curators you mention, have strong individualistic and highly developed practices, their recent work makes them share an intimate relationship, we felt that the audience may benefit from a possible dialogue that will emerge from their individual presentations. Sabih’s in-depth work in archiving and open source sharing as well as Kavita Singh’s amazing years of research and pedagogy are a great combination to hear and learn more about at the same forum.

2. Seven editions later, ECH really has evolved as an alternative site for intense exchanges between curators, artists, art historians, institution heads and audiences. The informality of the format has ensured much of the casualness that has become a characteristic feature—free entry; lack of fixed seating; chai breaks, and a deliberate repression of hierarchical structures. How do you, each year, re-evaluate your individual roles as hosts in promoting this fraternity?

The kernel of ECH lies in learning and we look at every edition of ECH as an opportunity for us to learn, individually and as a team. All the aspects that you mention about ECH, that makes it unique, such as free entry, suppression of hierarchy, intimacy, casual conversations, all break the traditional structures of learning as we know it. We both agree that one of the biggest inhibitors to knowledge in our country are our structures of learning and education, and we are deeply interested in breaking these structures even in our limited capacities. We re-evaluate our roles as directors of Experimenter all the time and have been thinking about how we can make a definitive impact to the world we inhabit individually and as directors of our program. We have felt over time, that discourse and conversation lies at the crux of understanding our dystopian contemporary moment and possibly the only way to establish a future of awareness that appreciates plurality and celebrates contradiction and diversity and would like to invite thinkers, writers, curators, artists, philosophers, architects, designers and so on from all over the world. In the pursuit of that intention, we will begin our ambitious Experimenter Learning Program this year, which is envisioned as a long-term, intimate and multifaceted learning and education program that keeps visual culture at its root to build discourse around it. The Experimenter Learning Program will enable dialogue in fields of contemporary and performing arts, curatorship, film, writing, language and social culture. The program will have an intermittent, year-long modular schedule which includes the annual Experimenter Curators’ Hub, workshops, salon-style classrooms, symposia, lecture performances and a young-adults learning program. The ELP program is being organised in partnership with Sharjah Art Foundation and over time will forge further collaborations to further reach and content.

3. Last year’s ECH offered complex perspectives about the need to decolonize the curatorial perspective. What is your approximation of the locus of power shifting away from the West, which has been its mainstay for centuries, in terms of the curatorial and institutional gaze? How do you view ECH’s position in furthering such a redistribution of power? By locating the hub in Kolkata, within Asia, and by pointedly facilitating cross-continental dialogues between curators, ECH has poised itself as a very significant platform. How do you see this role expanding?

We feel that ECH as a platform is crucial, not only because of the role it plays as an incubator or a propeller of ideas or as a fertile ground for debate, but also what it has meant for participants who return to it every year. The locus of power has been consistently shifting from the West outwards and southwards, and we find ourselves in a moment when these tectonic shifts are taking place. ECH acts as a recorder of this shift and over time will serve as an archive or a learning tool to understand these shifts. Therefore, the redistribution of knowledge and the ability to form opinions outside the Western canon (which to us is power) is a significant turn of the tide and ECH is at the center of this tide of change. ECH amongst other similar but still few such initiatives also act as a critical tool that enable this change that is taking place, at a pace that we cannot yet fathom. The role of ECH is thus continuously expanding.

On the other hand, it is equally important to locate the Hub in Kolkata, a decentralized location of power, economy and even culture over the last few decades, yet a place which is a confluence of cultures, a trade route for opium, the birthplace for revivalism of Indian art, cinema and literature. It is also the best place in the world, in our opinion, to have a dialogical program like ECH and as I mentioned in the previous question, with the Experimenter Learning Program in place, ECH becomes an important peg in that wheel of change.