Writing on Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
With an audience that was welcoming and curious, I had an invaluable opportunity to share my learnings on the history and art of Southeast Asia (SEA) not as a presumed expert on the region but as a student, a specialist critic, still grasping at the diversity of SEA countries. Previous editions of TAKE on art magazine have given me great editorial freedom to review exhibitions and biennales from this part of the world which, in my view, is often overlooked in the international sphere save for the discussions on global art markets. Speaking in Baroda not only permitted the possibility to share what I have learnt but to also have my views tested, challenged and discussed within a safe but intellectually rigorous space in the presence of stalwarts from the Indian art scene.
Understanding art from any particular region requires for its entangled historical, socio-political, religious and cultural narratives to be contextualised in a manner that allows regional and international audiences to access its coded references and significance. Since my move to Singapore in 2008, I naturally encountered art that emerged from specific local circumstances. As an Indian hailing from Nigeria, I was evidently not a native of the region and I certainly did not come close to speaking any of the languages. Therefore, writing about regional art competently required considerable reading on my part that would enable me to transcend an artwork’s obvious formal imperatives. I familiarised myself with regional history and the cultural, economic and political shifts of various countries, their anti-imperialist struggles and burgeoning nationalist ideologies that indeed many Southeast Asian artists critique.
This story is from the July - December 2016 edition of TAKE on art.
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This story is from the July - December 2016 edition of TAKE on art.
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Complete Love
It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.
Delicate Animals
The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.
Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story
India’s love affair with handwoven cloth shows no signs of abating. Open any fashion magazine or newspaper and weaves get ample play. Designers up and down the country extol the virtues of weaves, proudly brandishing their innovative work with weavers to contemporise motifs and palettes. This is laudable but hardly surprising.
Technologies Of Elegance
As soon as you enter the exhibition space in Bikaner House, the display ahead sort of takes your breath away. It’s a carefully crafted mise-enscène, filled with dangling screens, suspended sequins, overflowing jewellery boxes, glass displays, and more. And yet, in spite of the exquisite setting, and the props that inhabit it, your focus never wavers from the clothes, which form the essence of the exhibition.
why do artists write on art?
once, there were newspaper reviews. they connected art writing to the artist and to an audience, with immediacy.
The Body of the Crime
How can critical spatial practice today make invisible crimes visible? Let me be clear by giving an explicit environmental meaning to this singular question. The invisible or the less visible crimes of environmental violence are those committed against nature and subaltern social groups for the accumulation of capital. In the conflict between the economy and the environment the cost of capitalism is an increasing output of toxic waste. The fact that nature is still cheap is not a sign of abundance but “a result of a given distribution of property rights, power and income”1. The evil twin of the territorial scale displacement of people is the massive displacement of pollution to other nations. As animals mark their territories with stinking urine, humans claim territory by polluting the earth.2 Human species have come to appropriate the earth through pollution.
Future Imaginaries for When the World Feels Like Heartbreak
I awoke the day after the United States election and my heart hurt. I felt devastated and afraid. My breath seemed to be constricted. Stepping outside was like stepping into a land in mourning. People looked sad and tired and depressed. I went to the wrong campus searching for the class I was meant to guest teach. When I began to come out of this stunned stupor, I started to realise that my silences, my inaction, my disbelief in the depth of what Michelle Alexander calls racial indifference, coupled with renewed and blatant white nationalism, had led to this moment.1 In the weeks since that day, there has been a huge amount of mobilising in the face of renewed white supremacy and corporatocracy. Mobilising for what, precisely, we cannot yet be sure. But it doesn’t look good. And everyday it seems to get worse. What has become clearer and clearer, for me, in the wake of the election is the deep entwinement of the twin formations that are often treated as separate phenomenon. That is, white supremacy and ecological disaster. I want to make a case in the brief space here that racial and environmental justice cannot be separated, but are part of an entangled matrix of capitalism and colonialism that is killing the majority of the inhabitants on this earth.2.
Creative Ecologies
Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.
409 Ramkinkars Sculptural Installation and Theatre
When Ramkinkar was asked whether he privileged sculpture or painting, he said “I ride two horses at the same time”. He rode a third horse as well and this was performance — theatre and song — which he loved with equal passion. The project, 409 Ramkinkars, proposed the aesthetics of installation as a prompt for theatre. And the other way around — theatre as a prompt to conceive an installation.
Unspoken, not Unforgotten
Writing on Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia.
