The Raqs Media Collective is here in dialogue with Kaushik Bhaumik, a historian that shares with them some thoughts about imagining art as a place. Thanks to the exhibition Sarai Reader 09, curated by the collective, this conversation became public and involved almost 110 artists, and non-artists, that submitted a proposal through an open call. A proposal to think about what constitutes the artistic practice, to think of art as a place that becomes a different place every time. The title of the show makes reference to the Sarai Reader book series, which has been, over the years, widely recognized as a site of critical and creative thinking.
Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) follows its self-declared imperative of kinetic contemplation to produce a trajectory that is restless in its forms and methods, yet concise with the infra procedures that it invents. The collective makes contemporary art, edits books, curates exhibitions, and stages situations. It has collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors, and has made films. It co-founded Sarai, the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, in 2001, where it initiated processes that have left a deep impact on contemporary culture in India.
Khirkee Voice was proposed as a Public Art Intervention in the form of a ‘community newspaper’, in response to the Coriolis Effect: Migration and Memory Residency at Khoj in 2016. Soon after this, Khoj commissioned us to produce the publication as a bilingual quarterly. Based in the neighbourhood of Khirkee Extension in South Delhi, the project
Landscape as Evidence: Artist as Witness, conceived of by myself and Khoj International Artist’s Association and in collaboration with Anand Grover, takes the form of a staged hearing with Honourable Justice Yatindra Singh, lawyers – Anand Grover and Norma Alvares, and artists – Navjot Altaf, Ravi Agarwal, and Sheba Chhachhi. The petitioners, myself and Khoj,
The project I Never Ask for It treats survivors’ garments as witnesses to their assaults, asking women to share their stories through the clothes they had been wearing. This artwork consists of a social media campaign, exhibitions of the garments, workshops, and street performances. In the street performances, Walks Towards Healing, members of the Blank Noise inform the public and invite passersby to add their testimonies and join the walk.
Khirkee Voice is a quarterly publication produced and distributed in the urban village of Khirki Extension, south of New Delhi. The population of Khirki is largely constituted by immigrants, especially from Somalia and Afghanistan, that face discrimination and struggle to integrate.
The Museo Travesti del Perú and the Histories We Deserve
What if a museum and its discourse become a space to generate an alternative history of a State, that makes its myths and storytelling seem like they belong to a false and constructed legacy that needs to undergo a serious deconstruction? This is one of the questions that Miguel Lopez is trying to answer in this essay that emerges from a series of discussions and interviews with Giuseppe Campuzano, the philosopher and drag queen that founded the Museo Travesti del Peru (Transvestite Museum of Peru) in Lima.
We have invited the group Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer; shortlisted with their project Printed City for the first Visible award), to answer an interview in which we go through their personal history; that they very much based around the idea that publishing can be one of the most accessible and democratic tools to spread empowering artistic projects and their outcomes.
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