Iftikhar Dadi: South Asia constitutes one of the largest populations on the planet, and is significantly uneven and diverse in its social formations. Dozens of languages are used, numerous religious and vernacular practices prevail, and there are gross, persistent, and perhaps worsening disparities in wealth, education, and access to resources. The region faces tremendous political and imaginative challenges in envisioning itself as a shared geography in which exchanges of peoples, ideas, and goods are routine. It also has a sizeable and growing diaspora, scattered across the world, which increasingly cannot be conceived of as being separate from \u201chome\u201d in a globalizing world. <\/p>\n
[..] South Asia\u2019s publics form a fractured palimpsest; the misconceived image of the region\u2019s citizenry as an undifferentiated mass ignores all the complexities of society and self. Through classificatory technologies, colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reformulated traditional communities and established new hierarchies and subjectivities in place of those it inherited. The independent nation state has generated new social groupings since the mid-twentieth century, but this top-down process has been contested and redirected by major transformations on the ground such as hyper-urbanization, and the claims of marginalized peoples for justice and representation (appeals routinely suppressed by state violence).<\/p>\n
[…] The discourses and practices of modern and contemporary art play out against the backdrop of the \u201cpopular.\u201d In South Asia, the latter domain is immense, and constitutes a number of overlapping fields existing in productive tension and collaboration with each other. It encompasses tribal, folk, and artisanal practices6, incorporates diverse media and methods, and embraces \u201cbazaar arts,\u201d including religious and secular posters and other street-based forms. It also gestures toward widespread and continuous grass-roots social and political mobilization. The relation between high art and popular visual culture in South Asia is multiply determined, and cannot be reduced to theoretical dualities such as elite and kitsch, or to conceptions of the postmodern formulated in the context of late capitalism. More here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Iftikhar Dadi: South Asia constitutes one of the largest populations on the planet, and is significantly uneven and diverse in its social formations. Dozens of languages are used, numerous religious and vernacular practices prevail, and there are gross, persistent, and perhaps worsening disparities in wealth, education, and access to resources. The region faces tremendous political … Continue reading Iftikhar Dadi: Curating South Asia – Guggenheim Museum<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5378,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5377\/revisions\/5378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}