ECH Blog 2021

  • ECH Day 6 Summary by Mario D'Souza

     

    “I will do what I can and I will say what I should. These intolerant voices find strength in our silence. Let them learn to argue using words, instead of threats” - Gauri Lankesh.

     

    The call to speak truth to power, hold it accountable and challenge its ideas with veracity - is the very foundation of Journalism. It must not be seen as courage, it exists as a duty to the people. To call it courage is to place it outside of the ordinary – and if that is the odd case then we must be worried, very worried.

     

    Ayyub started her note by reminding the audience of the arrest of Samriddhi Sakunia and Swarna Jha’– two women journalists, who were covering the recent communal incidents in Tripura were arrested by Tripura police. “I wish to have given you an optimistic picture” but “it is an extremely frustrating time not (only) as a journalist but as a citizen of this country where we have long cherished our democracy and (ideals of) secularism” continued Ayyub. Unlike a lie or a rumour, the truth must persevere; be told over and over again, and work to find favour. Your “readers keep asking you why are you saying the same things again and again, you sound repetitive”. “Journalism is on a ventilator in India and my friends said that there are too many of us writing and speaking the truth, but we are not the mainstream media”. A majority of the Indian population, particularly those in rural areas are accessing Hindi news channels and subscribing to their propagated truths and ideologies. This seeds a very specific and dangerous condition – news agencies as makers of truth, instead of those that carry it. What happens to the process of veracity when those entrusted with it decide to produce ‘truths’ instead?

     

    To speak the truth also comes at a price. Ayyub’s next book is titled The Beautiful Isolation – “never before have I felt so isolated not just as a journalist but as a human being who is losing friends every day” – friends who no longer want to be seen in public with her. “I am not here to be brave, not here to be courageous because that hurts.” Responding to Ginwala’s question about informal networks and learnings that emerge from being in conversation with journalists in similar conditions such as ours, Ayyub spoke about Maria Ressa, and the assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia – and the threat that binds each one of them and their families. Oppressive regimes across the world have positioned journalists as the enemies of the state. “How do you attack them? If it’s a man you abuse him, charge him of collusion, corruption, national security and if it’s a woman you intimate them online, book for treason”.

     

    One of the reasons she chose to be at the Curators’ Hub “is to feel a sense of empathy and that I am not alone and that there are people who are listening to me right now and that people are still believing that there will be a day when the India of our dreams will be realized.” In the course of her address Ayyub left us with two thoughts. The first is that “bigotry is all pervasive and this belief that oh it’s not going to come to us…hate cannot be confined. When you unleash the demon called hate it will not just come to my door but come to yours too.” The second was that she is not going to speak for any of us – “you have to fight this battle yourself…this is my personal battle and I am fighting for the idea of India that I believe in, I am not fighting it on your behalf”.

     

     

    It was a difficult transition to the group discussion - where we were joined by most presenting curators of this edition – difficult not only because of what Rana said, but also because it cut right through our individual and collective silences.

     

    Osei Bonsu reflecting on “how we could be together post-pandemic” asked Ginwala what it would mean to conceptualise and organise a forum such as the hub. To which she reminded us of the “shrinking public sphere” and “what does it mean to gather in this way” in a space that not only asks you to discuss propositions, but failures. She placed her faith in “listening to people”, which may enable debates and a recognition of features and strategies amongst us.

     

    Ginwala addressed the ideas and aspects of representation that are being widely used at this moment particularly in institutional politics and positioning. In this “rhetoric of diversity” and the “co-option of critical practice by institutions at the center of the internationalised art world, how can we in our work represent an ethics of diversity (after Kwame Anthony Appiah) to allow for forms of difference to continually be generated? Bonsu replied by foregrounding how calls for diversification of arts on face value can be detrimental to its possibility. There is a need to shift methodology in a critical way. Inviting diversity into structures and modes of knowledge that were essentially imperial and colonial - is “violent and inhospitable” in many ways. He suggested that this repair needs to happen in silence at and internally because of the lives entangled within them and from lived experiences. Johal reminded us  that despite all of the machinery of the institution - the encounter of the visitor with the artwork is something we can and should hold onto, “it has charge and power and meaning”.

     

    Responding to a question about experimental pedagogic models that are created as efforts of decentering - that are forged and formed from conditions on the ground - and how does one continue the process also in the framework of ethics of diversity, Aline Khoury foregrounded how Palestinian communities have always been diverse. She also expressed her fears as well, with the settler-colonial occupation disrupting these harmonious relationships in its bid to destroy these ways of life. Diversity takes a different meaning and form at Dar Jacir and emerges from intimate forms learning and sharing.

     

    Lily Hall also pointed out that a lot of these structures are held into place by the need to fit certain mandates that enable governmental and other modes of funding. Bonsu continued to extend from Elvira Dyangani Ose and Hall’s conversation from the previous day to further note the “transfer of knowledge” as a generative mode. “Ethics of diversity has got to do with listening as we’ve heard from Rana” but also listening “deeply enough so that we can build a sense of commonality”. This goes beyond merely occupying our professional roles - to want to learn from someone for reasons such as the continuation of knowledge.

     

    Finally I leave you with two things to think of and think from. The first is a question that Ginwala asked during the discussion: “How can we cede power to the communities we serve while maintaining the work central to our mission?”

     

    And the second is this piece of poetry from Etel Adnan, who left us last week.

    She also leaves with us, with the inheritance of her immense hope:

     

    I am not at the mercy of men

    since trees live in my fantasies

    men and trees long for fire

    and call for the rain

    I love rains which carry desires

    To oceans.

  • ECH Day 5 Summary by Mario D'Souza

     

    The acclaimed African writer Bessie Head is mentioned early on in Lily Hall’s presentation as she introduced us to an exhibition titled Women on Aeroplanes at the Showroom, where she is curator. Bessie exiled herself to Botswana on a one-way ticket with her son, following her experiences with Apartheid in South Africa. “I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.” wrote Head later.

     

    Hall’s mention of Head was from a mural by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum commissioned for the Showroom’s facade. Titled Exalt B.H. Sunstrum’s mural envelopes the building with Serowe’s landscape under the weight of the vast sky. Head’s words from Earth and Everything are etched over it. It reads “to the sky, to the sky, to the sky” on the left; “to the stars, to the stars, to the stars” on the right and then these two facades intersect by a single phrase “up these with me” Hall elaborated.

     

    The fifth day of Experimenter Curators’ Hub hosted a conversation between Elvira Dyangani Ose, now Director of MACBA, Barcelona and former Director of the Showroom in London and Lily Hall, her former colleague and currently curator at The Showroom. To give us a sense of where the Showroom conceptually and structurally stands at this point, Hall informed how she along with her colleagues are “thinking ahead and imagining alternatives” for the present and future of the institution. “For me and our team, we come with the inclination and a real necessity to return to the material realities and conditions on the ground, the here and the now from within which we imagine. “This relay of productive tension between the imaginary and the material conditions from which and with which we enact those imagined possibilities in practice and everyday life is something that we consider and work through in all of our collaborations”.

     

    The Showroom is planning long term - “to present new challenges that we face within and beyond this current situation”. A question they are asking is: How does a small scale institution embody the values that we share and enact those on a daily basis, when delivering in quite precarious conditions? “It feels like a very generative moment to take stock and have the capacity to open up to alternative modes of instituting”. To start by also asking “Who has a stake in that very decision making process? What are the visible or less visible power structures embedded and in play in our current status quo?”

     

    Dyangani Ose continued to ask: “How can we support each other and build a sense of new institutional model from there and discuss the possibilities that the exhibition has to afford to the institution - intervene with the institution?” She noted how her work with the Showroom has allowed her to think about “how can (we) develop strategies that are used around issues of identity and create a sense of belonging to certain stories, agents and narratives to a space given to (us)? How can I intervene from these positions of post colonial subjects as a descendents into the official now?”

     

    “It has to do with what frames us in the first place” she noted before responding to Ginwals’s prompts about generosity, about the black anthropocene[1], about the possibility of us intervening into the history of earth in a way that wasn't all white extracavitism. Dyangani Ose offers Carrie Mae Weems’ Framed by Modernism (1996) as a critical moment of disruption - the first presentation of an image of a Black man in the US presentation at the Venice Biennale. It broke “the canonical imagination of institutional history of the US representation in the biennale and (was) also equally still framed by all these conditions that had to do with how the modern art was captured by our imaginary” Dyangani Ose noted.

     

    In the ensuing conversations stemming from a range of terms including care and Icebergian economies of contemporary art[2], Dyangani Osei spoke of the agency of the stakeholder and “how to formulate ways in which the most poetic ways of the institution connects with the most prosaic way” while flagging a sense in which “sometimes these visions go parallel with the possibilities of an institution” and enhance changes. Another question by Ginwala probed the lateral, invisible roots of a nimble-footed, agile institution as the Showroom and what it meant for Dyangani Ose and Hall to run it at a moment of political upheavals and economic breakdowns including Brexit, housing burdens, funding cuts etc. Responding to Ginwala’ “to arrive at the institution at a time of turmoil”,  Hall referenced a programme titled This is no longer that place that directly attended to ideas of migration, displacement, security and access at  the cusp of brexit. Hall reminded us of the power and need to create a space for  dialogue where disagreements and other positions could be held, hosted. “It  allows us to move somewhere together” - even if it was in dissonance.

     

    Nodding to Priyanka Raja’s opening remark about the need to come together at this moment and to orient the hub as a space to pose questions and share, Elvira reaffirmed the possibility of participatory models of thinking and making - like at the Showroom or at the MACBA and also at the Curators’ Hub. “The idea of generosity has its own power” and proposed affection as a subversive strategy of an institution, extending and expanding far beyond the idea of care.

     

    [2] After Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder

    https://www.pirammmida.life/cpes

  • ECH Day 4 Summary by Mario D'Souza

     

    Palestinian scholar Sanabel Abdel Rahman writes about the Arabic word istimāta.

     

    “Istimāta” means to do every single thing physically and metaphysically possible towards something; to such an extent that death, “al-mawt”, becomes as acceptable as life itself. Arabs and all the colonized peoples have been enduring a lifelong “istimāta” towards hope. A collective ‘istamāta” to topple their regimes, liberate their lands and stop a 73-year-old and ongoing ethnic cleansing that the world has just become aware of.

     

    Through the conceptual, philosophical and structural modes of home and family, on the fourth day of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub, we returned to hospitality and hope under hostility. One, that is colonized and under constant distress from various actions including forceful occupation, ethnic cleansing, extraction and historic-cultural erasure. Independent curator Rattanamol Singh Johal invited Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury from the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, a grass-roots independent artist–run initiative founded in 2014 in Jacir’s family home Bethlehem.

     

    In her introductory remarks Natasha Ginwala quoted James Baldwin -“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” The violent, physical act of forceful occupation and displacement of the Palestinian people perhaps heightens this irrevocable condition in the loss of the tangibile." The perimeters of my house are all that are left of Palestine" – writes Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh in his heartbreaking diary When the Bulbul Stopped Singing.

     

    The street where the Dar Jacir house lies is the historic Bethlehem-Hebron Road and has always been a conduit for movement and connection. Jacir noted “It is important to situate not only where are temporally and spatially, (but that) we are not in a postcolonial situation. We are living under a colonial apartheid.  (This) needs to be clear because it frames our site and how we operate.”

     

    As the presentation slides reached the Urban farm at the center, Johal prefaced the constant conditions emerging from colonial apartheid and its violent means and ways. Dar Jacir was raided and damaged by Israeli forces some months ago.; their urban farm destroyed and equipment stolen[1]. Even with the kind of heaviness this persistent condition brings to the space and its work – “How to find openings and the strength to re-group...and to find the joy of working with artists, collaborators and the community?”. Jacir responded by reminding us of the spirit of the space, one that is informed by a sense of hospitality, linking it to the early mention of structures and possibilities of family-building and co-sharing. Speaking about a workshop led by Michael Rakowitz at a time when they were not allowed into their own building due to renovations; Jacir narrated how they congregated in other and open spaces - the houses of neighbors, the street, refugee camps, bars, supermarket – a kind of temporary hospitality and the neighborhood as an extended family.

     

    Amongst other projects that essay this spirit of care, conservation and community-building is artist Vivian Sansour’s Home landscape residency and workshop. Titled living seed library and the duality of stones it stemmed from the belief that architectural conservation cannot be complete without the botanical revival… preservation of the crops and plants that our ancestors developed, cultivated and propagated for our survival” noted Khoury. Sansour, who founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library close to Bethlehem, developed the Urban farm at Dar Jacir clearing the ground of glass and shrapnel and composting the soil, raising the beds and planting the land. Her workshop titled Home emerged from the heart-breaking incident of a mother who lost her son in the clashes. “He was hungry and when we found him, he had a bag of chips in his pocket. He was coming home for lunch” narrated Khoury.

     

    Johal referenced Dar Jacir’s mission statement and prefaced its intention of reactivating ties and other kind of transnational networks across the Mediterranean while probing the conditions of the fragmentation and alienation of Palestinian communities from each other - by design and through violence. Jacir responded by reminding the audience that the Mediterranean region is one of shared histories – “of exchanges and traces on both sides of the shore, every side of the shore”.

     

    Amongst other questions that emerged from the discussion were the effects of Covid on the work and programming of Dar Jacir. Khoury’s simple, sharp response reminded us of the mundaneness of violence, conflict and interruptions in the lives of the many who live under occupation and settler-colonial oppressive systems. “Except the lockdown, the conditions are the same” she noted, “the pandemic was just another obstacle in our lifeline” and how over the years they have learnt to find other ways of being together.

     

    Johal returned to Dar Jacir as a space that is artist-led and women-led, also understanding the structures of funding. Several artists have over the years self-funded their participation as Dar Jacir which is one kind of support he reminded. Khoury noted how most of the funding comes with conditions of “what we should do” –  “they are informing what the culture sphere should look like” according to their development ideals and agendas. In responding to the functioning of the space Jacir said  “We talk about every aspect of what we are doing” nodding to Ginwala and Johal’s mentions of the scaffolding – “a scaffolding being movable – that the scaffolding itself is an infrastructure – also connotes something in process”.

     

    In responding to Ginwala, Johal and the audiences about how re-invigoration of a destroyed soil is very much a part of Dar Jacir’s imagination – the idea of this green space is because there is no green space in Bethlehem for people to eat, grow, learn, live together noted Emily and thus the opening of and opening out of Dar Jacir and its spaces was key.

     

    I conclude this text with two thoughts for you to carry away. The first is the image of the Urban Farm Workshop conducted by Mohammad Saleh where children had the change to prepare the soil, experience land and plant seeds – a history and inheritance they have deliberately deprived of by the settler-colonial Israel in a bid to erase Palestinian culture and its ways of life. The second is something that Aline Khoury said and it will continue to stay with me for a long time – “the Palestinians as a people have always been so connected to land – the seasons, the harvest , our rituals – everything is around our land.” Remember!

     


  • ECH Day 3 Summary by Mario D'Souza

     

    The dear, departed Bisi Silva noted, “for me the local is extremely vast and maybe another way of talking about the global - because within the global there is a local and in the local of course there is a global. I am however very concerned about location, about specificity – I emphasise the local as a multitude”. A multitude of layers and conditions – historical, political, migratory and those still evolving. This observation came from Silva’s location and work in Lagos. This rootedness in location and its translation into many global registers and conversations formed one of the many surfaces that hosted the conversations on Day 3 of Experimenter Curators’ Hub.

     

    In A Song for the Lagoon, Akeem Lasisi writes:

     

    In this city of a thousand rivers,

    The Lagoon looms like a sky lying upon its back

    Queen of Lagos waters,

    She wraps the city in an glittering lace

     

    Neither does she depend on the rain-god,

    Nor is she threatened by gluttons or drought

    Eras and errors have passed away

    But the Lagoon still flaunts the depth of the Lagos grace

     

    Lasisi’s poem inspired the title for the path-breaking second edition of the Lagos Biennale - ‘How To Build A Lagoon With Just A Bottle Of Wine?’ – which Ndidi Dike’s A History of a City in a Box (2019) was first conceived for. Invited as a collaborator by Tate Modern’s Curator of International Art Osei Bonsu, the Lagos based British-Nigerian artist’s work formed a scaffolding to hold her complex practice, enmeshed in a multitude of local and regional histories. Bonsu, who was instrumental in the acquisition of this work for Tate, continued to unpack this global-local history, posing both provocations and extensions. The work itself included old wooden file boxes recovered by the artist to form a city-like arrangement of blocks. Some files reveal governmental receipts and documents from the 1980s, along with postcards, clippings and photographs. At the start of the conversation Dike read, “Information is one of the greatest currencies in Lagos. Information is hidden and buried. It is un-accessible to the people, and only permitted to those in power.”

     

    In her opening remarks, Natasha Ginwala invoked the concept of Lateral Universalism responding to which Bonsu said “Lateral Universalism is key to the way we think about our practices in the art world as connected by continuous labour,  and the way in which we are constantly building history on incestual memory, on the same ways of thinking in a circular motion, that will allow us to learn from each other’s work”. He further went on to unpack these thoughts with Dike’s practice and its relationship to those that came before as well as her intergenerational peers in the region.

     

    Bonsu, who was previously an independent curator working closely with artists and diverse sites, flagged how working at the Tate has led to thinking about layers - of collection, exhibitions, display, and how you can bring a curatorial practice within that infrastructure. In his position he has been thinking about – “How African artists can play a role in re-narrating the stories that we tell (through museums, perhaps). Okwui Enwezor believed in the necessity of the institution as a space to act and to think historically in the present” he noted. “How can we treat the museum as a space for historical intervention and activation? How do we make sure that institutions do not become passive observers to history and preservers of history (belonging to) a set group of society, but become engaged through a pluralistic logic of history making?”

    Through Dike’s work the conversation attempted to stage the contemporary as a portal for people to enter regional, local histories. “Taking a history and re-narrating it in powerful and instructive ways” – like Dike, Abdoulaye Konate and William Kentridge amongst others.

     

    Amongst a relay of questions between Bonsu, Dike, Ginwala and the audience, was a reference to the political conditions of our countries ( the N-SARS protests and now the covid crisis in Nigeria for example) and how does the art community deal with it. Dike, with alarming simplicity, reminded us of our local and the larger realities of the majoritarian (aka third) world – “Artists have learnt to practice and produce work with the most minimum of resources”.  She later adds “Your very existence is determined and fed by the political circumstances you are living with at that point of time - you just need to find a way to talk about it”.

     

    In response to a question about the immense work done by the diaspora – in situating and teleporting the local in the cities of the global north, Bonsu reminded the gathering of a generation of African artists that worked in the 1960s, in the diaspora and were acutely invested in the cultural politics of post-independence nation-states in Africa. They believed in the possibilities of pan-Africanism and set a model for cultural exchange that we continue to reclaim in artistic and curatorial practices/movements. As curators we must be interested in the “politics of remapping and redrawing the future but also in how artists change the route/modes and interrupt our thinking”. He further spoke of his own part British, part Ghanian ancestry and noted how “we as curators take our biographies into our work - not just our intellectual biographies but also where we choose to live, where we are able to live, what visas do we get.”

     

    An audience question (redirected to Ginwala by Bonsu) probed how curators from the majoritarian world are able to work in (or navigate) an institution that was originally designed to exclude us? “It has been a process of working across the hemisphere” she noted. To be both an insider and an outsider in the European model and to learn to configure beyond the official roles and designated work. Like Dike and Bonsu, she reiterated how we must put ourselves out there for artists who work against the grain, against all odds and against structures. For it is their courage that makes our work and institutions possible.

     

    I saved a paragraph from Lasisi’s poem:

     

    Then those who want our ports to run dry,

    Must first wait for the ocean to dry

    Let them await the death of the wondrous sea

    Those who dream recession for our aquatic land.

  • ECH Day 2 Summary by Mario D'Souza

     

    Emily Dickinson never left her house. She suffered from the ‘fear of open spaces’ (the world, rather). Yet from the security (or confines) of her room, she wrote a thing about hope for the world:

     

    “Hope” is the thing with feathers -

    That perches in the soul -

    And sings the tune without the words -

    And never stops - at all –

     

    And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

    And sore must be the storm -

    That could abash the little Bird

    That kept so many warm -

     

    The second day of Experimenter Curators’ Hub continued to hope for unusual communities, casual networks, radical hospitality and hopeful actions. Hospitality “as an unwelcome interruption, beyond a planned moment or association and thinking of it as excess where the language of participation may even be ways of making together”, suggested Natasha Ginwala in her opening remarks. In many ways the ensuing conversations enmeshed and departed from the institutional, bureaucratic and policy frameworks, we addressed on Day 1 with Stephanie Rosenthal and Grace Ndiritu. It differed in its approach though – Mikala Tai, Head of Visual Arts at Australia Council and Marc Goldenfein, co-founder of ArtsPay – responded to frustrations with action-based solutions and adaptive models.

     

    Earlier on, Ginwala invoked the image of Simon Kofe, the foreign minister of Tuvalu who recently delivered his address at the COP26 UN climate summit standing knee-deep in the waters of the rising ocean. “We are sinking” he informed {1}. Tai responded to this invocation by suggesting the need to create images that intersect at the right moment to make an impact. Tai, former Director of the ambitious, pioneering small institution 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art{2}, recently moved to this bureaucratic, and policy position, carrying with her a deep understanding of artists’ needs, their friendships and trust. She flagged her frustrations with the rigidity of governmental and private philanthropic funding models and stressed on the need to fill the “gaps” in support towards arts and arts institutions. In one slide she placed the “limitations of curating” and “opportunity of curatorial thinking,” one after the other to perhaps suggest how one neutralizes the possibility and ambition of the other.

     

    Whilst the pandemic made us aware of our precarious lives, it also exposed the deep inequalities in our situated worlds. The past eighteen months imbued us with the need and hope for change. Charged calls for accountability and actions – in light of the Me Too, Black Lives Matters, unfair salary models and funding from settler-colonial, big pharma and the arms lobby amongst others – were made. But the ‘Art World’ went back to being its usual, passive (hopeless) self. The infrastructures continue to fail artists while pressuring them to consistently produce and oil the larger systems – organizations have been defunded or have closed down; the lockdowns have made their incomes increasingly unstable and there has been an extensive loss of jobs and opportunities.

     

    Art reaches only that many audiences. Tai remarked how she moved away from “Art can change the world” to how it can make us debate, re-think (and if I may add) unlearn. “Art can put pressure on power”. Infrastructure though is another beast; the funding comes from sources outside our control – how can we challenge that?

     

    How can we take control of the future then, Tai asked – the future we want as our legacy. How do you respect what’s come before while also building new futures? I add to this Ginwala’s “How to attend to emergent realities?”  The answer in many ways was in the promise of substructures like ArtsPay. Goldenfein’s ArtsPay, that he co founded with Lara Thoms and Alistair Webster is a fintech{3} app, where every purchase contributes a processing fee towards artists. Simply put, the ‘general public’ supports the arts ecosystem by turning into consequential patrons. The money is led into a foundation that will dole our funds to artists and arts organisations. A model where patronage is not a task or a privilege, but emerges as a way of life.

     

    Tai and Goldenfein posed questions to each other and invited the audiences to contribute to their understanding of global challenges, invisible models and other modes like ArtsPay that may (or could possibly exist) in our regional contexts. What are the gaps in the current arts funding landscape? Goldenfien asked Tai. “Knowing that grants exist, knowing that you can apply, to believe that you can apply”. An audience member further questioned accessibility, and disparate or meagre funding for traditional arts and crafts when compared to modern and contemporary practices. ArtsPay is currently working on a report that includes suggestions from artists across the spectrum to understand challenges and mitigate them in the Australian context. Responding to accessibility Marc suggested “no application grants” or creating ecologies where we “trust artists” easily as solutions.

     

    Another audience question reminded the presenters and us of our shared realities and political states - Will platforms such as ArtsPay give right wing governments a further excuse to reduce arts funding? While we must continue to think about how we will avoid this co-option, Tai reminded us that artists have always been exposed to the risks and whims of governments and their changing agendas.

     

    Funding for artists and emerging artist spaces and institutions is key to their confidence and development. It validates the work that they do whilst also enabling it materially. A good funding model then is one that allows artist to focus on their ideas and craft, whilst relieving them of the pressures of immediate sustenance and bills. Tai left us to think about “how do you create something that enables artists to recognize the moment themselves – this is the point I need to try and apply for this?” Perhaps the answer is in something Marc noted about ArtsPay – that its vocation is not to be a tool, but to be a structure that's going to give back to the ecosystem – an ecology of co-nourishment.

     

    As Dickinson writes, hope is generous and only giving! It takes nothing of us to hope.

     

    I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

    And on the strangest Sea -

    Yet - never - in Extremity,

    It asked a crumb - of me

    {3} Financial technology (Fintech) is used to describe new tech that seeks to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services through tech solutions.

  • ECH Day 1 Summary by Mario D'Souza

     

    In 1977, Roland Barthes taught a course of lectures at the Collège de France thinking about human relationships, its forms and social models. Here is where idiorrhythmie — “a form of living together which does not exclude individual freedom” was conceived[1]” In Barthes’ living together, one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other, where the social is inseparable from the ethical and perhaps the transformative. In many ways I read these impulses in the 11th edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub. Prateek Raja in his opening remarks posits - “How can we be equivocal about issues that confront us, underscore the differences that are inherent in it and yet build a constructive sustainable dialogue?”

     

    Held online for the second year in light of the pandemic and ongoing global restrictions, the 11th edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub experiments with its very form. Introduced by Priyanka Raja, the format invited five curators, who in turn invited five collaborators including individuals and institutions. Conceptually, it also moves away from looking at past projects and instead thinks of the possible, the propositional.

     

    In her introductory reflections, Natasha Ginwala invokes two critical voices. The first of the dear, departed Lauren Berlant who as Ginwala notes, “encourages us as affective subjects to continually calibrate our belonging to our (known) world and to strangers, to dream with eyes wide open while surrendering to vulnerability”. And to the poet Ellen Bass who writes in The Thing Is:

     

    when grief weights you like your own flesh

    only more of it, an obesity of grief,

    you think, How can a body withstand this?

     

    These two registers, one of our relationship to the world and strangers, and the second of the body’s to grief (one that we have come to experience immeasurably in these past 18 months since the covid-19 pandemic) coursed through the opening conversation between Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin and her collaborator, the British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu.

     

    Grace read, “If you visit the Ancient Egyptian galleries at the British Museum in London on any given day, you may not realise that the objects on display are unhappy. They no longer feel special, but objectified – in the true sense of the word – because of the cultural and energetic violation that has been enacted upon them through being exposed to endless photographs of tourists and other museum visitors. These objects were never meant to be seen by a single ray of sunlight or looked at by millions of keen Museumgoers. Hence, they feel like they are being robbed of their agency, with no rights of their own. As such, they want to be free.[2]” Through this entry-point, Ndiritu led us into a meditative awareness – first of the body and then - slowly helping us contemplate the future led by an imagination of our youngest offspring inhabiting it.

     

    Rosenthal followed by introducing us to her work with seminal performance and installation artist Allan Kaprow who resisted institutions and  famously noted, ‘The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.’ In Kaprow’s, ‘18 Happenings in 6 parts’[3], 1959, an evening of seemingly random but carefully choreographed activities were staged. They required the participation of both the audience and the performers to complete the piece. This interdependence, co-learning and habitation has in many ways informed the methodologies she has experimented with at the museum with her colleagues. Be it new modes of welcoming and hospitality with Otobong Nkanga or the Wanwu Council with Zheng Bo. Rosenthal later suggested that the institutions need to be recalibrated to become actants, so that like Kaprow’s intention with his work, something ‘new’ can be birthed each time over.

     

    The conversation also consistently returned to the structural framework of the museum and its rigid, (sometimes violent) limitations. Ndiritu asked what is so wrong with our institutions that it needs external pressures (and protests if I may add) to enact modes of repair, inclusivity, accountable representation and change. Rosenthal cited the conservative structures perpetrated by decades-old rigid modes of ‘caring for art objects’, and the bureaucratic and administrative challenges with respect to funding and policies. She suggested and I quote, “It is a constant transformation that needs a constant rolling over. We are in a time where change is very likely”. A cruel optimism perhaps?

     

    To an audience question on what is the one thing she would change in the Gropius Bau, Rosenthal offered the possibilities of organic, fluid, adaptive structures – to incubate and let something grow as it comes along instead of the expectation of planning something to the very end. Perhaps this is an impulse the hub also adapts this year, as do we all, particularly in the light of the political upheavals, social shifts, calls for accountability and recuperation; as well as the vulnerabilities aggravated by this time of contagion. A note that I believe will linger on the ensuing conversations in the coming days.

     

     

    [1] Barthes refers to the history of oriental monasteries, their rules and social relationships. Barthes also uses the fiction by Thomas Mann, André Gide, Émile Zola, Daniel Defoe, and often refers to Proust to further illustrate these ideas.

    [2] https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropiusbau/programm/journal/2021/grace-ndiritu-ways-of-seeing.html

    [3] Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts - 9/10/11 November 2006 (Hardback). Steidl Publishers, with

    Allan Kaprow (artist), Stephanie Rosenthal, Eva Meyer-Hermann and Andre Lepecki.

  • Mario D'Souza in Conversation with Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal

    Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal

    Mario D'Souza in Conversation with Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal

    Mario D’Souza: Gropius Bau has transformed since you assumed leadership in 2018. It has produced several path-breaking exhibitions, evolved into a true public space and has generated new audiences across the board. In retrospect what are the key moments and learnings from these past years?

     

    Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal: Since taking over the directorship of the Gropius Bau in 2018, the programme has been rooted in the idea of “the place” and “the space”. The place where the Gropius Bau is located is on the border of the areas Kreuzberg and Mitte, and it is a site with a loaded history. A remnant of the former Berlin Wall runs adjacent to the Gropius Bau’s entrance, the building is opposite the House of Representatives and next door to the Topography of Terror. The programme responds to Berlin’s charged histories by asking how artistic practices approach borders, the body, the land, caring, repairing and healing. It was essential for me to begin my programme with the films of Ana Mendieta, which have so much to say about connecting the human body to the earth body. As well as Crash, a survey of Lee Bul’s science fiction influenced works. From her earliest feminist performances in public space, she has been questioning restrictive boundaries, whether in terms of gender norms or the division of Korea. Showing her oeuvre in spaces that look out onto the former Berlin Wall was incredibly potent.

     

    When I speak about “the space”, I am referring to neo-renaissance architecture. The building opened in 1881 as a Museum and School of Decorative Arts. Having found out that there were studios in the space since its earliest days it made total sense to revive this tradition and see the Gropius Bau as a place for art production. One of my first projects was to initiate the In House: Artist in Residence programme in 2018. Since then we have welcomed Wu Tsang, Otobong Nkanga, Zheng Bo and SERAFINE1369. This really is central to our idea of artists being at the core of everything that the Gropius Bau does. I have personally learnt so much from these artists’ visions: Wu Tsang’s appreciation of the light in the space; Otobong Nkanga’s deep understanding of how extraction impacts the land and the body; Zheng Bo’s embracing of more-than-human futures: SERAFINE1369’s sensibility towards and ability to voice alienation.

     

    One of our main objectives has been to open this space architecturally, discursively and socially. To learn how to become a hospitable and welcoming space that supports encounters with artworks and ideas, plus functions as a meeting place for the diverse communities and neighbourhoods that make the Gropius Bau so vibrant. At the heart of the building is a vast atrium and we are delighted that this space is truly open, you can enter free of charge and enjoy ambitious installations. The space has hosted works by Lee Mingwei, Chiharu Shiota, Yayoi Kusama and currently the sound-installation Àmà: The Gathering Place by Emeka Ogboh.

     

    Mario D’Souza: We occupy a very strange, volatile time – the covid-19 pandemic continues to rage in several parts of the world; citizens continue to resist and protest against oppressive governments and climate catastrophes are more frequent than ever. It is perhaps impossible to imagine art divorced from these realities. How can institutions re-frame exhibitions to be more situated in their regional contexts and ground realities, rather than play into the formula of the ‘international exhibition’?

    Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal: We were able to re-open our doors in 2020 after the first lockdown with the exhibition Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, and there was an enormous sense of gratitude that permeated the building. It was tangible that visitors were so ready to embrace the gentle way that Lee Mingwei’s artworks create space for connection, for reflection, for encounters between strangers. Many visitors had taken part in his participative work during the first lockdown, Letter to Oneself (2020). Lee Mingwei asked people to write letters to themselves and post them to the Gropius Bau addressing their pandemic experiences, their worries, their hopes. We received letters from all over the globe. This project was a rethinking of one of his key early works, The Letter Writing Project (1998), which was on display in the exhibition, and this work contains a proposition that is indicative of Lee Mingwei’s understanding that an art institution can be a place for reflection and connection.

    Following a second period of closure, when it was possible to host visitors again in spring 2021, local audiences absolutely embraced the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, this was so inspiring, especially for the artist. The pandemic has also presented an opportunity for Gropius Bau to meet new international audiences as much of our discursive and curatorial programme has found digital forms. We have even welcomed Ana Prvački as the first Digital Artist in Residence.

     

    Located in Berlin, the Gropius Bau is in a city with such diverse art scenes and benefits enormously from the fact that artists from across the world choose Berlin as the place for important periods in their practices or even completely locate their studios here. Choosing to be local is simultaneously choosing to be international. Exhibitions like Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air by Akinbode Akinbiyi, curated by Gropius Bau’s Associate Curator Natasha Ginwala, showed his rich black and white photographic depictions of life in Johannesburg, Lagos and Berlin. The artist has been based in Berlin for decades, documenting in particular the neighbourhood Wedding with incredible nuance. Our current exhibition by Zanele Muholi is experiencing enormous resonance with local audiences. Berlin is a city with rich queer histories and presents and it is important for such powerful work documenting LGBTQIA+ life and activism in South Africa, to be shown here. It is through embracing the local and the international that solidarities and resonances can be formed and felt. This in itself can feel like the beginning of a healing process.

    I am also interested in how healing has a material dimension and how artistic practice is at the nexus of this understanding. Working with the artist and designer Hella Jongerius on her exhibition in summer 2020, Woven Cosmos, saw her healing objects on display. The exhibition was a deep exploration of the role that weaving, as a process and a practice, has to play in rethinking and starting to heal human-material relationships, which has vast repercussions for this moment of climate crisis.

     

    Mario D’Souza: You’ve invited Grace Ndiritu to collaborate with you for the presentation at ECH. Tell us about how you and Grace came together?

     

    Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal: Grace Ndiritu is an artist we are working with within the context of an extensive forthcoming exhibition examining caring, repairing and healing that will open in September 2022. I was intrigued by Grace Ndiritu’s participatory performances entitled “Healing the Museum”, an unfurling work that brings non-rational approaches to the museum and it was in conversation with one of the co-curators of the forthcoming show, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, that is became clear we had to work with Grace Ndiritu. Last year she contributed text to the Gropius Bau Journal, published in two parts it addresses the Western philosophical frames that create so many problematics that underpin many museum practices. Instead of staying in a cul-de-sac, she proposes how shamanic practices may allow museums to become spaces of welfare and wellbeing for audiences, staff, objects, communities and more. I am intrigued to speak with Grace Ndiritu at Experimenter Curator’s Hub, opening a dialogue about our practices and being curious as to our positions as an artist and a director who are both deeply questioning institutional structures.

     

    To return to the question of the local and the international and how fruitfully entangled these ideas are, I have to think back to November 2021 and a public programme that Grace Ndiritu spoke at, Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing. Inspired by the title of Emeka Ogboh’s installation Ámá, which means “village square” in his language, Igbo, the Gropius Bau hosted performances, conversations and workshops approaching the diverse fields of care, repair and healing practices. These holistic dialogues are ongoing and form points of departure for the group exhibition opening this autumn that will examine these urgent topics. Grace Ndiritu made such an apposite point that if healing was easy then every person and every institution would be doing this work. We are in the process of taking the concept of “Healing the Museum” seriously and giving this uncomfortable work the space and consideration is needs in order to redefine Gropius Bau for the twenty-first century.

  • Mario D'Souza in conversation with Grace Ndiritu

    Grace Ndiritu

    Mario D'Souza in conversation with Grace Ndiritu

    Mario D’Souza: My first question is about your incredible and provocative book of interviews - Dissent Without Modification that brings together your research and interviews with progressive, radical women artists and thinkers who started their careers/education at the turn of 1990. With humor and compassion, it meanders and takes us on a journey where a lot is to be discovered. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the processes through which you gathered these incredible voices and their many contributions? How did you imagine this book?

    Grace Ndiritu: Thank you Mario for your kind words. My book began when I took the radical decision in 2012 only to spend time in the city when necessary, and to otherwise live in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities. This decision led me to reside in both Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such the 'Burning Man' in Nevada, a Hare Krishna ashram and the 'Findhorn' New Age community in Scotland. But also to meet the radical women in my book. After a particularity poignant conversation with artist friend Monster Chetwynd one night in Glasgow, I began recording these conversations as long-form interviews. In them I could feel free to wander from subject to subject no holds barr. So whether we were discussing controversial subjects like inter-racial relationships, money, gun control or data hacking, I thought it was important that the conversation felt as natural as possible. It took years to record all the interviews and find a publisher in the form of Bergen Kunsthall, but I think fact the book came out in the midst of the pandemic and at the height of social unrest; when a lot of the interviews in the book had already touched on those subjects eight years before; shows how today's socio-political issues are cyclical and that we desperately need new answers. Ultimately, I hope my book will inspire different generations of (women) artists and thinkers to question the meaning of  their lives and their place in the society and world in general.

    Mario D’Souza: You have occupied some of the world's top museums and institutions, and have ‘retouched’ their objects and architecture with your shamanic and spiritual practice. Introduce us to your Healing the Museum project and its methodologies and hopes.

    Grace Ndiritu: In 2012 when I took my radical decision live in nature, I also began creating a new body of works under the title Healing The Museum. At the time I was feeling disheartened with the kind of exhibitions I kept seeing and so felt 'sacredness' of art spaces needed to be re-activated. Museums were dying and I believed that most modern art institutions were out of sync with their audiences’ everyday experiences and the widespread socio-economical and political changes that have taken place globally in the recent decades. I saw mediation and shamanism which I had practiced myself personally from a young age) as a way to re-activate the dying art space as a space for sharing, participation and ethics. From prehistoric to modern times the shaman was not only the group healer and facilitator of peace but also the creative; the artist. My most ambitious shamanic performance to date A Meal For My Ancestors: Healing The Museum: included staff members of the U.N. NATO & EU parliament, activists, and refugees at Thalielab, Brussels (2018) and a new upcoming performance Labour: Birth of a New Museum (2021) at Nottingham Contemporary which will involve a group of pregnant participants and which will initiate a new generation of art viewers on concepts such as environmental and indigenous justice and lineage and legacy while still in the womb.  This shamanic performance will speak to one central urgency: how to leave the planet better for future generations.

     

    Mario D’Souza: You will be collaborating with Stephanie Rosenthal for your presentation in ECH, whom you've worked with before. What are some of the things that bring you both together?

    Grace Ndiritu: Stephanie Rosenthal has been critical in publishing both my essays Healing The Museum and Ways of Seeing: A New Museum for Planet Earth on the Gropius Bau online journal this year. I think she instigated this process because she felt they were particularly relevant to the precarious time we are living in. Whether it's the recent Covid pandemic, the restitution of objects back to Africa or long term issues such as climate change, museums have a lot to add to the debate.

     

  • Mario D'Souza in conversation with Mikala Tai

    Mikala Tai

    Mario D'Souza in conversation with Mikala Tai

    Mario D'Souza: I wanted to start with the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and how it radically reimagined Australia’s relationship to Asia and reinvented the Asia Pacific region for local and international audiences. Perhaps you could give us a brief overview of the various artist-led projects and curatorial models that invigorated this nourishing regional exchange?

     

    Mikala Tai:  4A is an extremely special space – small and scrappy but ambitious and impactful. Throughout my time as a Director I was lucky to be able to dedicate time to looking at how Australia’s shared future within the Asia Pacific region is informed by its shared past. Artists such as John Young and Jason Phu worked with historians and community members in the country town of Young to research Australia’s largest racially motivated riot which occurred on the goldfields in June 1861 and targeted Chinese miners. The process was conceptually rigorous but also deeply personal. I will never forget the afternoon we stood on the unmarked land where the riot had originated, its topography still undulating from the mining that had occurred. This research and fieldwork informed commissions by both Young and Phu that sought to bring this somewhat obscured moment in Australian history to a mainstream audience. Their works teased out moments of benevolence and generosity that occurred during the riots – both sentiments that remain critical to contemporary conversations about race and identity.

     

    Australia’s engagement with Asia is long, from Makassan seafarers and the First People’s of the top end to today. For the exhibition ‘Jogja Calling’ we looked at the recent engagement and exchange of Australian artists and those based in Jogja. Many Australian artists have ventured to Indonesia under their own steam and worked for a period of time in the artistic Javanese city and we approached a few of them, Abdul Abdullah, Briony Galligan, Reko Rennie and asked them to nominated an Jogja based artist that had come to be a professional influence or friend. The exhibition was as much about the work they produced but a shared collection of experiences and friendships.

     

    Mario D'Souza: You moved on from being Director at 4A to assume position as Head of Visual Arts at the Australia Council for the Arts. What are the aspirations and motivations of Mikala, the curator and researcher, as she embarks on this managerial and capacity/support building role?

     

    Mikala Tai: I was, and I think much of Marc and my presentation for the Curators’ Hub examines,  becoming frustrated by the bounds of being a curator. I was increasingly feeling that I was working that the very edge of my curatorial practice but not necessarily having the impact that wanted. Covid exacerbated this and while there was a brief moment of thinking that structures were being toppled and new scaffolding being constructed there was quickly a reconfirmation of the status quo. And, while arts and culture were doing everything to questions how and why humanity continues on certain paths, they need allies to translate this into policy and priorities. So for me a role at Australia Council suddenly made sense. Well, at least for now, I am sure I will return to being a curator.

     

    Mario D'Souza: You invited Marc Goldenfein from ArtsPay as a collaborator to the ECH. ArtsPay was also supported by the Australia Council’s Re-imagine: Sector Recovery Initiatives in light of far-reaching effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. What holds your belief in these models – where technology and the funding from common people – can come together to support the arts?

     

    Mikala Tai: ArtsPay, which Marc is the brains behind with Lara Thoms and Alistair Webster, is a simple idea that has the potential to structurally upend arts and culture. It places artists at the centre throughout everyday life, the key decision makers in the industry and centres artistic problem solving. The fact that you could tap your credit card and, without you or the vendor spending an extra cent, could support the arts is extraordinary. These kinds of models are exciting and hold the promise of a new future and structure for the arts.

     

     

  • Mario D'Souza in conversation with Marc Goldenfein

    Marc Goldenfein 

    Mario D'Souza in conversation with Marc Goldenfein

    Mario D'Souza: ArtsPay aspires to provide long term sustainable funding to independent artists and small arts organizations. This will indeed be crucial support, particularly with the slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. What are the possibilities and challenges you anticipate in building an ArtsPay user base?

    Marc Goldenfein: Our hope is that we can help to create stability for the arts sector by providing a new source of funding that fills gaps in the current funding landscape. Payments is a trillion dollar industry and there is a big opportunity to make a big impact, if we can win the support of businesses around the world. The ways we can support the arts through structural interventions are endless, but right now we are focused on building the user base and re-distributing the profits from payments back into the arts ecosystem. There are lots of challenges, fierce competition and new technologies, but we think that our point of difference is strong and that our customers will always want to support the arts and be part of the community that we are building. 

    Mario D'Souza: The most common question people ask is “Why should we support the arts?“. What are the strategies being employed at ArtsPay to create an understanding of the arts – particularly for common people?

    Marc Goldenfein: One thing that I think has come out of the pandemic is a greater awareness of the precarious situation of many artists and small arts organisations. I think the community recognises how hard they have been hit, and there is greater awareness that we need new, innovative types of support if the sector is going to survive. 
     
    Mario D'Souza: ECH has hosted a range of diverse ideas, but a payment processing startup is a first. How do you hope to introduce/represent the profit for purpose fintech at the gathering?

    Marc Goldenfein: Payments is not a sexy topic, but I’m hoping that we will get to discuss and explore how the funding might be delivered and what a new arts foundation could look like from a global perspective. 

     

  • Mario D'Souza in conversation with Rattanamol Singh Johal

    Rattanamol Singh Johal

    Mario D'Souza in conversation with Rattanamol Singh Johal

    Mario D'Souza: Can you tell us a little about your ongoing research?

     

    Rattanamol Singh Johal: I am currently completing my doctoral dissertation, which seeks to historicize the development of postmodern art practice in metropolitan India during the 1980s and 90s, specifically through the lens of artists who took on installation, performance and video.

     

    Mario D'Souza: You’ve worked with and are interested in artist-led, independent institutions and movements; and you’ve also worked with large-scale museums on the other end. How do you imagine the relationship and possibilities between the two in an economically vulnerable post-pandemic world?

     

    Rattanamol Singh Johal: Unfortunately, in real terms, the connection between these different nodes of the contemporary art ecosystem - if one might refer to them as such - is becoming increasingly tenuous. Independent art spaces everywhere have struggled to keep going, cutting down on staff and programming, in some cases to an extent that fatally compromises their ability to fulfil their mission and commitments to the artists and communities they seek to serve. Large museums have also been affected in multiple ways, and the size of their endowments determines how they are navigating these choppy waters. Many are operating at a severely reduced capacity with limited future prospects. Still being very much within the pandemic, and in the midst of enormous political and social turmoil, it is difficult to say how these challenges will be effectively addressed across the board. However, the question of possibilities compels me to join calls from various quarters for collective creative thinking around collaboration, cross-pollination, consolidation (not in the manner of mega gallery mergers) and care between and among institutions and individual actors. We already had a strong sense pre-pandemic of the deeply problematic structures and skewed power relations that operate across the art world. The last thing we should want is to go back to that normal.

     

    Mario D'Souza: You’ve invited Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research Center as a collaborator for ECH. What informed that choice?

     

    Rattanamol Singh Johal: The unseen and little discussed aspects of curatorial work involve creating infrastructures, context, and community within which practice can take root and through which knowledge is produced and shared - Dar Jacir's work is exemplary and inspirational in this regard.

     

     

  • Mario D'Souza in conversation with Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury

    Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury, Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, Bethlehem.

    Mario D'Souza in conversation with Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury

    Mario D’Souza: It’s been a tough year with the pandemic, the raid and the vulnerable situation of integrity, freedom and rights in Palestine. What is Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research’s imagination of the future/s?

     

    Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury: We are very used to operating under extremely difficult circumstances, so we already had all the skills in place to manage these difficult times. We imagine a time when our community can gather together in Dar Jacir with no restrictions from the occupying power.

     

    Mario D’Souza: Community Practice and frameworks of learning have been key to the center. What changes do you anticipate to these structures in the post-pandemic landscape? 

     

    Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury: Our circumstances post-pandemic will not be different. In the summer of 2019, we took time to rethink and reevaluate what we were doing in the years prior and to reimagine more sustainable and impactful structures for our work. Throughout the pandemic period we continued our programs and shifted, where necessary, to online formats. If anything, our connections and relations with artists and community members strengthened in this period and reaffirmed our vision and work.

     

    Mario D’Souza:We’ve had in-depth conversations around Palestinian heritage, culture, arts and learning at the ECH with Reem Fadda. And we look forward to expanding these lines of thought with you, the center and its archive. Perhaps you could shed some light on ongoing research and projects in the making? 

     

    Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury: We have some really exciting programs which we are preparing to launch in the next few months - Intimacy In The Apocolyptic Phase, a residency and public program unfolding in three chapters, curated by Reem Shadid, Kasia Wlaszcyk and Aline Khoury. A food justice and agricultural program curated by Emily Jacir, as well as sound workshops organized by Nicolás Jaar. We also have on-going research projects happening across agriculture, dance and our archive, as well as the continuation of  various pedagogical exchanges with our partners in Dublin (NCAD) and in Italy (Kora, World Music Academy and Scuola di Pizzica di San Vito). Follow our Instagram and facebook for our news!  

  • Mario D'Souza in Conversation with Osei Bonsu

    Osei Bonsu

    Mario D'Souza in Conversation with Osei Bonsu

    Mario D’Souza: You joined the Tate as Curator of International Art in 2019. Of course, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed things down for museums worldwide these past two years, but how do you imagine this role and its possibilities?

     

    Osei Bonsu: I joined Tate in 2019 as a curator of international art with the intention of broadening my knowledge and critical understanding of the role of the museum within contemporary society. With the outbreak of a global pandemic, the role of the museum began to shift in ways that forced many public arts institutions to question their positions and practices as part of a wider discussion around the realities of systemic racism, climate emergency and growing social inequality. In many instances, this process of critical self-reflection was long overdue, but it also provided a unique opportunity to rethink the framework of the modern art museum as a space with a unique capacity to reimagine the relationship between artistic practice and civil society. For a museum like Tate, somewhat steeped in the residues of the imperial past, the impact of the pandemic has allowed us to begin to reassess our role within this wider definition of a museum; among the discussions it has triggered are the museum’s relationship to living artist ecologies, the challenges of global collecting in relation to historically marginalized artists and groups, and alternative models of exhibition making that counter the dominance of monographic exhibitions. I look forward to being part of a new chapter the museum’s history as these discussions continue to unfold and develop in response to the ever-changing global order.

     

    Mario D’Souza: We occupy a very interesting socio-cultural and political moment, where institutions are looking to diversify their collections and expand their understanding of our regions. This also comes with the danger of tokenistic representation and (violently) flat exhibitions. How must we address this, while weighing between opportunity and oppressive structures?

     

    Osei Bonsu: It is true that we occupy an important moment with regards to the role of museums and cultural institutions worldwide. The continued rise of challenging economic and political structures that see little value in the necessity of the cultural industries is still upon us. Simultaneously, we have never been more interconnected thanks in large part to the technological advancements of social media, which has been both a liberating and destructive force for so many. Institutions are now more aware now than they ever have been of the space between what they represent and how this is perceived by a growing audience of visitors, critics, and onlookers.

     

    The desire to expand the museum’s collections (particularly in a Western European context) is rooted, of course, in an imperial desire to understand the world in encyclopaedic terms. In order to think beyond this, we should acknowledge this ideological framework as a social and political worldview that remains very much a part of our present. While museum’s today have a global reach that was built on unequal foundations, they also have the capacity to imagine new form of cultural exchange based on shared values and ideas about the future. The instances of misrepresentation and tokenism associated with museums are many ways in symptom of the museum’s inability to shed the logic of its imperial past. In the future, I believe we will see a great shift towards more equitable models of museum-building and exhibition making, that acknowledge the necessity of curatorial sensitivity, rigour, and care.

     

    Mario D’Souza: You have invited Ndidi Dike to collaborate with you for this edition of the ECH. Tell us a little about your relationship to her incredible mind and practice?

     

    Osei Bonsu: Ndidi Dike is an artist whose practice embodies the complexities of what it means to be an artist today. Her work addresses the material, cultural and social histories of the global South from a unique perspective. Dike sees value and potential in forms that many would discard or overlook, her work transforms materials in vessels that communicate ancestral knowledge. We met in Lagos in 2019 during her participation in the Lagos Biennale. I had become aware of Ndidi’s work through my research on Nigerian Modernism and became inspired by her unique position as one of the few female artists in a male dominated history. Her work contains an active critique of the social and political challenges that face contemporary African societies. In 2020, Tate acquired her installation, A History a City in a Box, thanks to the support of the Africa Acquisitions Committee. I am looking forward to unpacking (literally and metaphorically), this work as a project outstanding historical and artistic relevance in the context of Tate’s collection.

  • Mario D’Souza in Conversation with Prateek & Priyanka Raja

    Experimenter Curators' Hub, 2019. 

    Mario D’Souza in Conversation with Prateek & Priyanka Raja

    Mario D’Souza: The Curator’s Hub is many things and that’s perhaps its greatest strength. It is a space of learning, sharing and argumentation; of critique and collaboration; it is also an incubator for ideas and impulses; shortcomings, failures and possibilities. It is intimate and offers a space for warm conversations. It hasn’t shied away from acknowledging the political currents of its time. In that light, it isn’t surprising that you adopt a new framework this time – of thinking with and learning from collaborators, colleagues and peers – of possible projects and new ideas. How did this thematic imagination of futures and regenerative/recuperative hope come about?

     

    Prateek & Priyanka Raja: The Curators’ Hub has always been about learning and continues to pursue that motive. Learning from the Hub is multifaceted and as you rightly mention, the strength of the Hub lies in the multiple angles through which curatorial practices are approached. Through the debilitating second wave of Covid-19, when we were all literally fighting for the survival of friends, family and comrades, the power of collective action and collaborative intent was never clearer. It was also important to question and re-imagine all the structures and scaffoldings that we usually depend on. The thought of a future imagination was seeded in a conversation with our long term collaborator Natasha Ginwala in the immediate aftermath, when we were ourselves recuperating. We felt that instead of looking backwards towards exhibitions that curators have made, it was probably important to look forward, to invite a much more expansive and broader, yet deeply connected group of people, through the curators we invited this year. These collaborators, co-thinkers or co-conspirators even, would then further open up new possibilities, explore propositions for a renewed way of looking at our world, including voices that are influential to these curators and with whom they could truly imagine an alternative. It’s possible that some of these propositions may even take form and actualise themselves through the Hub and if it did, it would be absolutely incredible.

     

    Mario D’Souza:While the Hub has brought together a diverse range of practitioners, across research ideas, geographies, institutional structures and curatorial frameworks – over time these have formed direct and uncanny connections; enmeshing in new and curious ways. Was this always the larger intention?

     

    Prateek & Priyanka Raja: A participant such as yourself, who has returned to the hub year after year, recognises these uncanny and curious connections. Yes and no. Sometimes the connections are intentional, and at others the possibilities simply emerge through a collective sharing of thoughts. Although spread across geographies, institutional structures and research orientations, there are connections and overlaps of interest within each other’s practices and in the past we have had several situations where curators have found ways to collaborate together, to build propositions with each other and find ways to circle back to the Hub.

     

    Mario D’Souza: The Hub has always been an in-person gathering. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the previous and the current edition are online – which opens participation to a larger audience, across various time zones. What is missed and what will change in a (hopefully) post pandemic world?

     

    Prateek & Priyanka Raja: Yes this is true. The intimacy of the Hub in person is truly incredible and brings about an immersion in practice that is incomparable. Having said that, even before the pandemic, we were already streaming the Hub online since 2014. The online format adds a certain degree of openness. Anyone can join the Hub from anywhere in the world and last year we saw a wide range of audiences from across time-zones and geographies. What is missed in the online version is the interpersonal connections that is shared as a group inside the gallery, the constructive energies that proximities between people bring together and the absolute dissolution of power structures that we actively pursue at the Hub. We cannot wait to return to a physical form, hopefully next year, but know that the augmentation of the Hub with an integrated online format will continue. We hope to include voices of participants from all corners of the globe, to harness the possibilities that the internet allows and maybe this will in turn enable a new proposition for us.