What would it mean to inhabit South Asia without the arterial blockages of weaponized border zones? To reclaim the multiplicities of storied selves and carve futures premised upon living cultures, civilizational undercurrents and complex material lineages that defy the social and aesthetic divisions between artisanal and artistic vocabularies. Building critical regionalism in the subcontinent has long occurred 'against the grain', through acts of artistic alliance-building in a geopolitically fragmented and socially stratified South Asia. Its creative denizens have for long acted as infrastructures in bridging shared historiographies, communal relations, and indigenous cosmologies. They have extended urgent solidarities while composing a bedrock of hospitality, as well as sustaining the transfer of experiential pedagogy in a climate of unfolding state aggression, manufactured animosities, and military belligerence.
The exhibition (Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young Artists' Voices curated by Salima Hashmi and Manmeet Walia is an assembly of vibrant artistic resonances that are shaping alternative maps of this regional neighbourhood. Beyond the conventional art curriculum and gallery circuit, they have grown away from well-rebearsed notions of hieruial art, socially engaged projects, and relational objects. Instead, they are manifesting situated itineraries. cross-genre methodologies, and public encounters that perform as time stamps of the untravelling prewm Since the exhibition is being held in London, one is reminded of the pioneering steps of artist organizers such as Rasheed Aracen. Araeen boldly envisioned systemic transformation from within the imperial soil accompanying the British black arts movement and Black Panthers, undertaking radical publishing and composing writings such as Preliminary Notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO (1975-75) which continue to resonate with renewed insights today. It is a significant pursuit for the artists presented in this ensemble to share their panoply of perspectives from the subcontinent and its diasporas against the backdrop of historic efforts of the likes of Araeen. This is particularly relevant decades later in a post-Brexit environment where diversification of culture once again faces austerity, racial violence, and conservatism.
Salima Hashmi posits Faiz Ahmed Faiz's ruminations on the role of artists in her essay, to which I m entwine James Baldwin's reflections on the creative mind wrestling in this interregnum of overwhelming destruction-genocidal wars, the rise of technocratic governance, and rampant effects of climate emergency, "Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelan, to make freedom real. Today, there is a new form of reckoning with the aftermath of colonial oppress and imperialism, as youth leaders and civic movements from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal have in recent years confronted the present avatars of authoritarianisen, extreme sutionali political corruption, and ethnic violence. The coloniality of power is recognized thessugh a continuous of hegemonies, the policing of peoples' freedoms, exploitation of earth resources in favour of multinational conglomerates, and lingering methods of divide and rule. The artists who are exhibiting here are realizing their vision within this palpable atmosphere.
In mobilizing storytelling as a technology, these practitioners offer fresh approaches to documentary poetry and as Saidiya Hartman has called in, critical fabulation, via modes of engaging with and remaking the document(s) of speculative history-telling, While Hartman is addressing the specificity of black existence there are pathways into oppressed subjecthood, buried events, familial archives, and environment forces which are marked here around sentient geographies from Kashmir to the Bengal delta, northern Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. Moonis Ahmad contributes to these terrains deliberating on the parad in Kashmir around ecological precarity, tourism, unfreedoms, and living in a state of exceptio We know that the creative act does not operate in isolation but rather within matrices of volatility, building an aesthetics of the shifting ground and an unsteady horizon to Chittagong, Palash thesacharjee entwines familial heirloom stones, migratory carrents, and coastal borderlines with flows of river Karnaphuال Hema Shiruni's intricate works approach textiles and found materiale is relay cyclical experiences of social dispossession, internal displacement in Sri Lanka, as well as temporary sheltering under armed struggle and civil war.
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