Prior to sealing their collaboration, RongRong was working in Beijing and inri in Tokyo, each engaged with action and performance in their respective practices. inri came to photography via Ken Domon’s photobook Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples (1963). She studied the medium in university and began her career in 1994 as a photojournalist, though she quickly felt the limitations of making studio portraits for a newspaper. Three years later, she went freelance and began investigating her interest in the human body. During this period, she came across the experimental dance company H Art Chaos and captured their lead dancer, Shirakawa Naoko, in a series of black-and-white gelatin silver prints (fig. 1). In the artist’s own words, that experience “catastrophically transformed my ideas on the value of photography as artistic expression.”¹ In the late 1990s, she produced another series—this time in color—of the singer-actor Bitō Momoko throwing red paint around a room and furiously maneuvering her body as she smeared her pent-up feelings on the walls, the floor, and herself (fig. 2).

In 1993 in China, RongRong, who had taken up the camera after being denied admission to the arts academy in his hometown, was taking photography classes at an art school in Beijing. He had moved to what would become Dongcun, or East Village, then a far-flung corner of the capital in which migrant workers and artists on the periphery of society could afford to live. There, he connected with a group of artists whom he pictured performing various actions that flaunted decorum. For instance, he photographed Fen-Ma Liuming (b. 1969, Hubei Province) serving an audience steamed fish for lunch while naked. The residents of Dongcun were determined to make a life out of their squalid surrounds. Though RongRong had only lived there a year when the police raided the village, his stark and tightly cropped images of the place and of his friends’ ephemeral experimentations became enduring representations and symbols of Chinese avant-garde art of the 1990s.

In 1999, when RongRong traveled to Japan to open an exhibition, inri saw a picture from his Wedding Gown series (fig. 3). She instantly recognized the profound loneliness in his work and wrote down what she saw in a few characters that she gave to him. Likewise, several days later, when inri showed RongRong some of her prints, he immediately understood that she was grappling with the same personal and aesthetic questions through photography and performance. When RongRong returned to Beijing, he repeatedly invited inri to visit. Feeling uncertain about how she would continue with photography, she took a risk and went. The weeks they spent taking casual pictures proved transformative for both, who had felt stagnant and discontented with their individual practices at the time. Finding their experience together to be exceptionally illuminating and regenerative, inri relocated to Beijing in 2002. Together, she and RongRong began to move in front of the camera at various landmarks, setting in motion a partnership (figs. 4–6).

Recognizing that the critical attention they were receiving was entirely from the Western art circuit, RongRong&inri wished to show their work to people in China. In the 2000s, with influxes of Western capital following a series of open-door economic reforms, spaces for contemporary art sprouted up in Beijing and other cities, but few exhibited lens-based works. This was the era of the point-and-shoot camera and the photo lab. Despite the growing presence of images in people’s lives, there were limited opportunities to discuss what they did or to consider aspirations for the future of image-making and its limitations. In fact, RongRong&inri worked against the common perception and misconception that the camera is truthful, that the images it produces are objective, and that photography is therefore not artistic.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, photography was situated in an awkward position both in China and abroad. Calligraphy, ink painting, oil painting, metalware, sculptures, and ceramics were the exhibiting and collecting focus of state art museums; with few exceptions, photographs were not included within the parameters of their holdings. Most viewers, whether accustomed to looking at art or not, did not know whether or how to approach photographic images with aesthetic inquiries—a result of the convergence of Chinese and Western artistic hierarchies. This stood in contrast to the very existence and missions of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (public, opened 1995) and Museum Hanmi, Seoul (private, opened 2003), not to mention other organizations in East Asia that were exhibiting lens-based work. RongRong recalled the conundrum in a 2018 interview: “When I saw the state of Chinese photography, there was no home for [it] and Chinese photographers. In the beginning, when I wanted to do exhibitions[,] . . . I realized that my earliest works really couldn’t be exhibited in China.”²

For major collecting institutions in the Western European and American circuits—key sites and audiences for East Asian art—Japanese photography from the 1950s–70s and select Chinese avant-garde works from the 1990s became representative of the region’s photo-history. If exhibitions on photography in China were sparse, publications on Chinese historical and contemporary photographic practices were lacking even more. For curators abroad who were in a position to exhibit and acquire photography, publications served as a primary source of knowledge acquisition and a means of engagement with scholars and artists based around the world. The lack of infrastructure to support discussions around lens-based activities happening in China would only grow more problematic beginning in 2010, as the increasingly widespread use of smartphones launched an explosion of images. On how they could interrupt the status quo as artists, RongRong said, “It is a matter of imagination.”³

inri and RongRong agreed that their next endeavor would be to create a space dedicated to photography. The design of the physical space, the experience such a place would offer, and the purposes it could serve first came out of the circulation of photobooks among their friends, who brought back titles that were then only available for sale abroad. In 2007, they opened the first photography museum in China, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Caochangdi, an arts district on the outskirts of Beijing. “The Centre is an extension of our career as artists, an experimental basis for the photographic medium,” inri explained of their ambition.⁴

The challenges of realizing the Centre were many. Opening a space for art is a project that typically calls for capital funding, which they lacked. So, the artists reached into their own savings. Fellow artist and early supporter Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) designed the building. Equipped with galleries, a library, a darkroom, and living space for artists in residence, the architecture models a new ethos of exhibiting art in China, one deliberately positioned as more approachable to audiences and artists outside the conventional fine arts circuit (figs. 7, 8). It also provides, in a single point of entry, access to all of these facilities, something that had not previously existed in China. In 2008, immediately after the Centre opened, the financial crisis hit. As surrounding galleries folded one after another, RongRong&inri worried that their newly operational facility would also be forced to close. In 2010, amid rapid and extensive overhauls of the capital, the Centre faced the threat of demolition, which the artists tactfully resisted. Even more astonishing is that for the first 10 years of its existence, admission was free. The public’s appetite for photography drove the artists to funnel profits from the sale of their own work to the museum through several periods of financial difficulty.⁵

In 2008, amid the financial crisis, RongRong&inri, taking an expansive understanding of identity, organized the Three Shadows Photography Award to seek out and foster contemporary Chinese and diasporic photographers. Acutely aware of the pulse of culture, they put out annual calls on the museum website and social media channels, meeting younger generations in the places where they access information and share their work. In addition to creating opportunities for emerging image-makers, RongRong&inri saw connecting other parts of the world to the Chinese contemporary art scene as a key mission of the Centre. They designed the artist-in-residence program in part to bring photographers from abroad to Beijing to develop work and expose domestic audiences to artistic currents elsewhere. They believe in the importance of facilitating in-person encounters and gatherings, a conviction that has only grown in importance. RongRong&inri’s efforts echo a global history and active practice of artists establishing spaces intended to show and further develop works by peers in the face of a deficit in reliable public and private support.

RongRong&inri’s 2012 work in MoMA’s collection, a selection of 16 prints from the series Tsumari Story, was made during a turning point in their joint career. Invited to participate in the 2012 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, the artists—at the time based in Beijing—went to central Japan, where they lived in an agricultural village for two years. They saw this as an opportunity for the two of them to return to photography and for the team they had cultivated to operate the Centre independently. They immersed themselves in the distinct seasons of the region and composed what would become Tsumari Story over 10–20 sessions.

Upon their arrival, the artists set out to perform a couple that had abandoned contemporary life, but in Tsumari, the environment sets the terms of living.⁶ The region is known for its intense snowfall, which shapes habits and alters foot traffic throughout the long winter. When the snow melts, it transforms into powerful currents that tumble into rivers. Water also takes the form of rice paddies, springs, fog, gorges, the coastline, and the humidity-laden air. Its abundance characterizes and sustains life in the region. The tension between nature’s inclinations and human settlement rises to the surface here. The terraced paddies of Tsumari are highly intervened. They form the basic units of satoyama, a particular configuration of land and people that is the result of centuries of forestry, irrigation, and settlement in mountainous terrains. The interior spaces are no less artificial. Due to severe population decline, uninhabited homes have become a common sight in Tsumari. One of them, Shedding House in the village of Tōge, was restored by the artist Kurakake Jun’ichi (b. 1967, Tokyo) and some 3,000 students from Nihon University College of Art at the 2006 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale as part of a larger effort to revitalize the region. Almost every wooden surface of the seemingly unfurnished house has been carved by hand. Slanted dashes cover the beams and window frames. A circle of linear indentations radiates from the center of the floorboards. This house sets the stage for Tsumari Story (2012–14), in which the two artists meditate on a way of existence at the mercy of nature, which they have come to realize circumvents human intervention.

This new experience of time and space struck the artists, who until then had been running the Centre full-time in a rapidly changing city. As inri reflected, “Humans are part of nature, not making nature. In nature, we felt compelled to examine the body and the relationship between our bodies.”⁷ In addition to young people leaving for larger cities, inhabitants of agricultural towns like Tōge have faced declining birthrates, which have altered the social fabric in palpable ways. In response to the villagers’ enthusiasm for the presence of their children, RongRong and inri invited their three sons to participate in their sessions. Seeing in them the vitality and resilience that they wished for their work to take on, the artists shifted the premise of their practice from one of performing human degeneracy to an origin story rooted in the local habitat and lore. In Shedding House, they move to meet each other again (figs. 9–16).

The story begins with a couple bowing to each other in an empty farmhouse, where they have taken shelter in the aftermath of a snowstorm. Clothing loosens from their bodies as they move around the house and out into the fields. In one moment, the woman collapses on the floor. In the next, the man suspends himself upside down from a supporting beam. When they take off their clothes, their bodies become indistinguishable. In the bathhouse and in the blizzard, they gaze at each other, never looking away. Three children come in and out of the pictures as the seasons change. They stare out of the windows when snow collects and run outside to the paddies come summer. A viewer familiar with the area would readily recognize the Echigo Mountains, which are visible on a clear day, as well as the famed Hoshitoge paddies, which are a stone’s throw from Shedding House.

In total, the series includes 75 gelatin silver prints, the artists’ preferred medium. The 16 images in MoMA’s collection are unique in their finish and dimensions. This crisp interpretation on 9-by-12-inch photo paper represents the earliest iteration of the series and was printed by the artists for gallerist Peter MacGill, their friend and supporter. In the process of making this version, RongRong&inri realized that the story was one they could share with the public as a discrete work. In successive iterations, they employed techniques that had become newly available to them that blur the image. The foggy surface re-creates and accentuates the atmosphere engendered by the air.⁸ Though they make up a series, the images in Tsumari Story are not fixed in a particular order, enabling viewers to arrange them as they like and opening them up to different possibilities. For the photobook format, the artists selected a picture of their children looking out of the house as the opening image, followed by images of the couple bowing to each other. In exhibition contexts, they have adapted the scale of the images relative to the space. For the 2012 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, for example, they combined multiple large-scale inkjet prints on pieces of fabric that were suspended from the ceiling of a former gymnasium. Each frame distills the artists’ entanglement with each other, their clothes, the house, the water in all its forms, and the village that welcomed them. Each presentation reinvents the story—its characters, their fates, and what the environment has to offer.

In 2015, RongRong and inri relocated their family to Kyoto and reoriented their practice to the new place, inspired by their experience in Tsumari. In this storied city, they continue to create opportunities for those who come after them. That same year, Three Shadows established a second location and launched the first edition of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen—a coastal city important to the history of Chinese avant-garde art. The goal of this collaboration between Three Shadows and the Rencontres d’Arles is to showcase global contemporary photography to Chinese audiences and provide opportunities for emerging Chinese curators and artists. Though the Festival has become a major platform for artists and independent curators, its ability to draw or engage local audiences remains a challenge—as is the case for many other festivals and fairs.⁹ Three years after the pandemic began, RongRong&inri established a residence in Kyoto and named it Jifei-an (即非庵), taking from Buddhist-Taoist thinking that everything is at once distinct and simultaneously connected. The artists have framed this space as one for intimate gatherings and experimental creation, continuing to foreground relationships in a new world.

In examining the state of photography in China in 2026, there are now a number of spaces for presenting and thinking through photographic imagery. Since 2007, some state museums have begun collecting and exhibiting photographs for their sociohistorical and aesthetic value. As of 2026, there are three photography museums founded within the state-funded system.¹⁰ Also since 2007, many private contemporary art museums that exhibit lens-based works have opened across the country; the Shanghai Center of Photography (2015–23), now defunct, made photographic images the center of its programming—as has the Xie Zilong Photography Museum in Changsha (opened 2017). However, public funding for art made outside of the academy system has never been robust, and private funding, which until the onset of the pandemic primarily came from real estate wealth, has grown more cautious and reshuffled following the collapse of the China Evergrande Group beginning in 2021.¹¹ The subsequent closure of several real estate–backed museums, the sheer amount of funds allocated to state art museums, and the recent creation of new institutions backed by technology companies all throw into relief the survival of an organization like Three Shadows. At the symposium held for the Centre’s opening in 2007, inri presciently remarked, “It’s already too late now, but if we didn’t do it now, then there would be no way to do it later. . . . Our future as artists is very clear. . . . What we can do today, we will do. We must act now.” ¹²

inri’s words, particularly their urgency, continue to resonate in today’s quickly shifting, multipolar funding landscape. The uneven infrastructure belies the fact that photographic images permeate contemporary life in China. As much as interactions in the physical world, private snaps of everyday life, Facetuned selfies, studio and on-location photo shoots, carefully crafted carousels, and editorialized footage of events in entertainment and politics that will only be experienced digitally also make up life. People are simultaneously consumers and makers of images, and the speed at which these images are created, circulated, debated, and forgotten sets the pace of life. 

Inching toward 20 years, Three Shadows continues to bridge Chinese contemporary art and the global art circuit at a time when other avenues have seemingly dissolved. In the pictures that make up Tsumari Story and the designs of Three Shadows’ programming, the artists’ joy in having an interlocutor and their keen interest in exchanging ideas with the world are apparent. Creating and yielding spaces in their aesthetic and social acts, RongRong&inri demonstrate what commitment looks like and what can be accomplished in the face of apparent lack. The leading question the artists pose to themselves is what they can do for future generations. Always exploring with sensitivity and receptiveness, they reveal for us a way of existing in present circumstances with hope.

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With two images, I preface this speculative meditation on artistic (re)mediations of encounters with curators and with the curatorial. Both are paintings by Svay Ken (1933–2008), who began painting in 1993 at age 60, without formal training, having worked since the 1950s in a luxury hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In his autobiography, he wrote that he became an artist “in order to have money and be able to give offerings and do good deeds,” referring to common Buddhist practices.¹ Despite his unusual beginnings, Svay Ken is widely celebrated as among the “first” contemporary artists in Cambodia.² 

An untitled painting made in 2005 depicts two museum curators who, portrayed with cameras in their hands, are visiting from a major museum in Japan (fig. 1). They are keenly photographing paintings by Svay Ken, which hang in two rows in the upper half of the canvas. The curators were conducting curatorial research for the 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, a major exhibition held in 1999 at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum that sought to convey what its curators described as “the free form of expression corresponding to the situation of each Asian region.”³ While greedily documenting Svay Ken’s singular practice, the curators appear in the painting to be completely ignoring the artist himself, as well as his wife, Tith Yun. The visitors look away from their hosts and rudely point their elbows sharply toward them. Curatorial research is presented here, from the artist’s perspective, as being instrumental, extractive, and perhaps even hit-and-run.

In this work, equally as conspicuous as the curators’ narrow fixation on the paintings rather than the painter, is the nakedly perturbed expression on Svay Ken’s lined and weary face. The artist’s knitted brows, clenched jaw, pursed lips, and slight squinting of one eye convey his tense feelings of discomfort with the encounter. Although slightly more inscrutable, Tith Yun also appears wary and withdrawn. Her eyes, like the artist’s, do not quite meet ours; instead, the couple stares vacantly off to one side, as if lost in the uneasy, perhaps unhappy experience of hosting these unfamiliar international curators. 

By contrast, in I in Hotel Room (2004), the artist stares confidently, calmly, and contentedly at viewers of the painting (fig. 2). His wide eyes meet and hold our gaze even while he is also hard at work polishing a shoe, one of his duties as a hotel employee. In this painting, the green background visually links Svay Ken to all the surfaces and objects around him, including the walls and floors of the hotel bathroom and bedroom. With his head grazing the upper edge of the picture, the artist dominates the scene, his prominence in the composition implying that he gladly reigns over this domain of green. Here, we see a happy and self-possessed man who is proud of his work, which he does to support his family and facilitate his devotional practices. 

In many of Svay Ken’s paintings, the setting is rendered in a conspicuously flat and uniform green. This verdant background serves in one work as a stage for the artist’s discomfort and humiliation while meeting with international curators (fig. 1) and, in another, for his dignity and assurance while carrying out humble manual labor (fig. 2). The discrepant compositional function of the green background in the two paintings emphasizes the starkly different affective tenor of these two moments in Svay Ken’s long life. The color commingles fern and celadon, reflecting the naturecultures in which Svay Ken lived and worked. During the artist’s lifetime, these environments and contexts had shifted from easeful and peaceful to violent and pained and back again. I in Hotel Room portrays the artist harmoniously at one with his workplace environment. In the painting depicting the museum curators, however, the green background operates instead to separate the artist from his camera-wielding guests. The empty expanse of green marks a gulf between the artist and the curators that is not only spatial but also symbolic. The painting suggests that Svay Ken’s first encounter with curators was undignified, perhaps even injurious. 

That the same shade of green background can invoke congenial harmony in I in Hotel Room and hostile isolation in the painting depicting the museum curators suggests that for Svay Ken, the experience of being an artist vacillated between divergent emotions. The green also reappears in several of the paintings seen hanging on the wall in the painting of the curators. This suggests that the use of green was a constant in the artist’s practice, while the experience of interacting with curators was an unusual interruption. 

When the two museum curators from Japan visited Phnom Penh in 1998, it was the first time Cambodia had been included on the itinerary of the then-emerging class of international curators in Asia.⁴ Their visit came less than two decades after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime, which between 1975 and 1979 had killed a vast majority of Cambodian artists along with a substantial portion of the overall population. With these circumstances in mind, it is therefore unsurprising that Svay Ken was palpably uncomfortable. 

In the years since then—and particularly after the participation of several “Cambodian artists” in biennales and other major international exhibitions during the 2000s and 2010s—Phnom Penh has become a regular stop for curators on research trips in the region. This opportunity is welcomed by many but may nevertheless remain an ambivalent experience. Svay Ken was certainly proud of attracting the curators’ attention and being included in the Triennale—as he would later boast, “In 1999 my name was known throughout Asian art circles”—but his pleasure was tinged with distress, as intimated in figure 1.⁵ 

This visual record of Svay Ken’s encounter offers a rare insight into how it might feel for an artist to meet with curators—who are often strangers—visiting from a distant and unfamiliar location, and how this uncomfortable experience might manifest in an artist’s practice. Such encounters with curators often initiate larger and more amorphous engagements with the curatorial: a mode of practice and province of discourse that encompasses not only studio visits and exhibition-making, but also many other kinds of relating and mediating between practitioners and publics. 

* * *

Artistic practices narrate, mediate, and sometimes fabulate histories: This is as well known in Southeast Asia as it is elsewhere.⁶ Curators present and occasionally misrepresent artistic practices: This too is clear in this region and beyond. And artists can also be curators: This phenomenon has taken on special prominence in the history (and historiography) of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, particularly since the 1970s.⁷ 

But how do artists represent and even historicize the curatorial and the experience of being curated? Beyond visits to artist’s studios and the preparation of museum exhibitions, in what ways does the curatorial manifest? What image of curation is immanent in artistic practice? These questions, seemingly straightforward enough, may elicit a surprising realization. Despite the inescapable ubiquity of the curatorial in global discourses on contemporary art, including in Southeast Asia, curation is rarely made visible within artistic practice. 

In this short essay, by focusing on accounts of the experience of being curated that appear within artworks—rather than in written form—I propose that artistic practice can also constitute a form of critical and (art-)historical commentary. This claim is prompted, in part, by the influential and widely cited Southeast Asian art historian and curator T. K. Sabapathy who, as early as 1979, recognized that with art, “critical activity need not necessarily be defined in terms of, or limited to, literary forms.”⁸ 

As well as rejecting the false binary cleaving theory from practice and creativity from commentary, with this statement, Sabapathy is also insisting on the intelligence and criticality that inheres in artistic practice. His notion of “critical activity” positions the work of an artist or a curator as always already a dynamic and vital intervention in the world: Never only a static object, but instead a perpetually unfolding activity. Moreover, Sabapathy does not disavow the importance of textuality, which he calls “literary forms,” but he nevertheless affirms the need to transcend the textual even while encompassing it. These qualities of Sabapathy’s “critical activity” are also paradigmatic of the curatorial.

My discussion here addresses artists’ encounters with the curatorial, but in a forthcoming book titled Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices, I discuss a wider array of ways in which artists engage with the art-historical within their artworks.⁹ I argue that art-historically engaged modes of practice proliferate globally but take on particular importance in Southeast Asia, where art history as an academic discipline remains relatively nascent and where, since the 1960s, many foundational texts on modern art have been written by artists (and more recently by curators). 

Although I have argued elsewhere for the need to “deprovincialize” Southeast Asia’s art, in this essay I have chosen to draw exclusively on sources emerging from or explicitly related to the region, and thereby to center and amplify work being done in and on this part of the world.¹⁰ Like many commentators and practitioners engaged with Southeast Asia, I view the region not as a fixed geography but instead as a dispersed imaginary that is—in the words of curator and art historian Patrick D. Flores—“in the process of constant forming” and always contingently connected with “the vaster world of which it is a vital part.”¹¹

* * *

In the paintings discussed above, Svay Ken mediates his early encounters with curators; by contrast, more recently another generation of artists has mediated their own experiences and understandings of the curatorial. 

Curators are individuals, often working for institutions; in Southeast Asia, many of them feel that they must “play different roles” to “build our own infrastructure” through various forms of what Bill Nguyễn calls “engagement, facilitation and attention.”¹² In turn, the curatorial is a method, a practice, and a mode of thinking. In Flores’s articulation, the curatorial is “able to simultaneously particularize and generalize.”¹³ Thus, the curatorial may be practiced by curators, but it nonetheless transcends the individual and the institutional. 

An exemplary case is 82 131 39, an installation initiated by the Hanoi-based Nhà Sàn Collective (est. 2013) in homage to their predecessors, an artist-run collective space called Nhà Sàn Studio (1998–2010), which was also located in Hanoi (fig. 4). Although the installation is credited to several makers, chief among them is Mẹ Lương (Lê Thị Lương): Her kitchen table—whose physical dimensions inspired the title—is at its heart, and she curated the accompanying cookbook, which is illustrated by other artists.¹⁴ Beyond this physical facticity, the installation imaginatively mobilizes the kitchen table, cooking equipment, dishes, and stools as a fertile allegory for the hospitality and affective labor that underpin artistic and curatorial practice. 

The installation was made for and first shown in the 2017 exhibition Spirit of Friendship, which focused on “artist groups” like Nhà Sàn Studio and Nhà Sàn Collective. The curators Zoe Butt, Bill Nguyễn, and Lê Thiên Bảo describe the project as seeking “to highlight the role and contribution of artist friendships in furthering the development of experimental languages in Vietnam, since 1975.”¹⁵ A text made to accompany 82 131 39 begins by introducing Nhà Sàn Studio: 

Considered one of North Vietnam’s most resilient independent art spaces, over the last two decades Nhà Sàn has continuously shape-shifted and endured the challenges brought about by both the artistic and social landscape of Vietnam, never once ceasing to maintain its status as a ‘home for the arts’ and a haven for the odd ones out in Hanoi; having nurtured generations of artists, while always keeping its doors open to those inspired enough to step in.¹⁶

This statement insistently and insightfully aligns resilience with nurturing, emphasizing hospitality as a cornerstone of creative practice and community. These enmeshed qualities—which are both affective and embodied—are then related to the curatorial, as the text continues: 

As the status of art and artists in Vietnam today continues to be challenged (i.e., more and more we see artists responding to both past and present historical issues with their work), similarly the practice of the curator is expanding as a necessary role. The specificity of the sociopolitical and educational contexts of Vietnam means that a curator is to take on a myriad of other roles besides just an exhibition maker—as a study partner who shares knowledge, researches and debates with artists; and a mediator who negotiates and connects artists with the public, the authorities and other agents in the cultural field. It is no longer about what or who to curate, but rather, how.¹⁷

With this context of the enlarged and layered function and reflexivity of the curatorial established, the culinary materials used in the installation are explained as being not only supplementary to curation, but also more profoundly connected to the practice and discourse of the curatorial: 

Nhà Sàn Collective proposes a different look into the (grand) history of Nhà Sàn by presenting one of the often undiscussed micro-histories of Mẹ Lương (wife of Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng, one of the cofounders of Nhà Sàn Studio) and her kitchen space. Lovingly called “mẹ” (mother) by all, Mẹ Lương welcomes, cooks and tends to all artists, visitors, or any passersby; her motherly presence maintaining the organic and family-oriented soil upon which Nhà Sàn exists and flourishes. Her kitchen space is . . . enabling the more private and humble, but no less significant chitchats to take place. Inviting Mẹ Lương to use her kitchen space and self-curated cookbook as source materials, Nhà Sàn Collective metaphorically points to, and reiterates, what it means to make art and to be artists in the context of Vietnam today, while continuing their own legacy in further complicating and opening up our (as well as their own) perceptions of the other forms that art, art history, and curation can take.¹⁸

This statement makes clear that 82 131 39 is not only an artistic mediation of the curatorial, but also a meditation on the corporeal and maternal labors of sustenance and care that underpin all forms of creative and critical practice, including the work done by artists and curators. As well as prizing “more private and humble” exchanges within creative communities, the installation positions that practice as productively contingent and perpetually fluctuant. 

The installation was positioned near the heart of the Spirit of Friendship exhibition, with Mẹ Lương’s cookbook displayed on the same wall as paintings and other more conventional artworks (fig. 4). This unassuming yet effective gesture proffers the possibility that although artists’ encounters with curators may be fraught—as Svay Ken’s paintings make palpably plain—they offer abundant potential for affinities. Respect, sincerity, hospitality, care, and sustained engagement may be some of the necessary foundations for the curatorial to be experienced—and artistically mediated—as generative, and even generous, as opposed to extractive. 

* * * 

The labors and cares of artists and curators often overlap. As noted above, the figure of the artist-curator has been particularly prominent in Southeast Asia and important in the development of the region’s contemporary art and its dispersal into other discourses, including those in the North and the West. Nhà Sàn Collective epitomizes an increasingly prevalent mode of practice, one that is both artistic and curatorial. The distinctions between these modes of “critical activity” have begun to dissolve in recent years. But what are some antecedents of this conjoining of the artistic and the curatorial? How have artists mediated their own practices in contexts without well-developed infrastructures? 

Svay Ken offers some answers to these questions. When he began painting, less than 15 years after the end of the genocide that annihilated Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals, the country still had almost no galleries in which to exhibit contemporary artworks, almost no art market, and almost no other infrastructural supports for “critical activity.” The memory of violence—which Svay Ken also painted early on (fig. 5)—was still fresh. 

In stark contrast to painted scenes of violence, I Showed Guests at the Swimming Pool My Paintings (2001) offers a record of Svay Ken’s early experience of showing and selling his artworks to guests at the luxury hotel in which he worked (fig. 6). 

In a substantial and detailed autobiographical text, Svay Ken recalls the scene: “When foreign guests came now and then to swim in the pool of the hotel, I would take my pictures and try to show them to them. Some guests were annoyed and didn’t want to look, but others who loved art looked at my paintings and smiled, praising the pictures.”¹⁹

Looking at I Showed Guests at the Swimming Pool My Paintings, it is impossible to discern whether the pink-skinned man to whom Svay Ken is showing his painting is a guest who feels “annoyed and didn’t want to look” or is instead someone “who loved art” and was “praising the pictures.” What is unmistakable, however, is that the artist is resolute in his determination not only to make art, but also to make it public, to mediate its reception, and to textually annotate these procedures. 

Thus Svay Ken was a curator of his own artwork. That he chose to memorialize and historicize this experience among all of the other moments that made up his turbulent life indicates that it was meaningful to him. The curatorial was, for Svay Ken, not only a form of “critical activity” but also a kind of becoming, even of liberation. From him, we still have a lot to learn.

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1.

As one’s eyes dart between the formal contrasts in this silver gelatin print by Sabelo Mlangeni, observing the ways the image’s compositional differences never quite settle—elliptically forming and unforming in accordance with what figures or details the viewer momentarily foregrounds—we might take note of a quiet antagonism that labors within and beneath its visual field, one that interrupts the logics of identification that cohere the genre of portraiture. There is, in other words, a syncopated visual music in Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township that emerges in the dynamic correspondence between the socio-material embodiment of the three photographed figures and the docu-realist aesthetic framing of Mlangeni’s camera. This tension raises more questions than answers as to who these figures are and what their relationships to each other might be. The image belongs to Mlangeni’s series Isivumelwano (2003–20), which documents wedding ceremonies and marital festivities throughout South Africa (and also in neighboring states such as Mozambique, Lesotho, and Eswatini). In the process of looking, we are prompted to refract the image through our own internal virtual archives of wedding celebrations, a cross-referential activity of visual recall that perhaps yields no further clarity. 

Among the three figures that confront us, who might Mbulelo be? Has Mlangeni positioned them in the center, or are they the figure on the left, who appears to stand out the most due to their relatively taller height and femme-adjacent presentation? This figure’s black, tight-fitting cross V-neck, which features a campy lace sleeve, and luminescent jewelry to match, forms a striking optical tension with the relatively normative loose-fitting white shirts worn by the other two figures, who are unaccessorized. It is at this moment, through Mlangeni’s choreographed conflation of aesthetic form and social signification, that the regulatory logics of gender and sexuality become foregrounded as organizing principles in the visual field. The effeminate figure in black forces a double take, one that destabilizes the presumed normativity of the neighboring figures. As if emanating a kind of irruptive, radioactive matter, this figure produces a semiotic disturbance in the texture of the composition that subverts the (colonial) association of bridal femininity—and by symbolic extension, virginal purity—with racial and chromatic whiteness. Such exorbitant matter and its disorderly effects have, in recent history, gone by the name of “queerness.”¹

Yet, if indeed Mlangeni’s image invites a reading of these three Africans as corporeal figurations whose desires, expressions, and practices counter the structures of compulsive heteronormativity, there remains the unanswered question if what we see here is a glimpse of a “queer” African wedding.² If so, might we be looking at a fragment of the wedding’s stylish guests? Or alternatively, might one, or even two, of these figures in fact be the newly wedded couple? 

2. 

South Africa is the only country on the African continent that currently recognizes marital contracts between same-sex couples. This juridical exception is due to a combination of economic, historical, and geopolitical factors stemming from the termination of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the country’s subsequent reintegration into the capitalist world-system following decades of international boycotts and sanctions. The country’s neoliberal, progressive rebranding as a multicultural “rainbow nation”—amenable with an expansive outlook on human rights that includes sexual orientation—was based on a structural disavowal of decades of racial capitalist degradation and violence.³ These systemic forms of material, psychological, and spiritual denigration continue into the present day. Although discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has been constitutionally protected since the state’s liberal democratic makeover in the 1990s, same-sex marriage was not legalized until 2006. 

Mlangeni’s image is set in the Thembisa township, a spatial artifact of an apartheid-era policy that dispossessed indigenous Africans of their land and enclosed them as proletarianized units of racialized labor in surveilled and resource-extractive death zones. This social fact necessarily complicates potentially innocent readings of this image and the series to which it belongs as unfettered celebratory scenes of black love and kinship. That Mlangeni’s image, like Faith and Sakhi Moruping, Thembisa Township (fig. 2), is dated 2004—that is, before the legalization of same-sex marriage in South Africa—further gestures toward some of these depicted ceremonies as social-performative scenes wherein subjects refuse the recognition or valorization of their unions within the juridical confines of the postcolonial state.⁴ Therefore, while some images in the series materialize queerness as the warm, anticipatory illumination of an irreducibly utopian not-yet future, Mlangeni doubly situates such visions of Afri-queerness within and against the ongoing future-aborting machinations of settler coloniality and racial capitalism.⁵ It is precisely this visually articulated entanglement—authorized by Mlangeni’s fidelity to documentary ethics and a self-consciousness about the photographic apparatus’s subjective mediation—that lends his images their qualities of historical truth and affective potency. 

Importantly, Mlangeni’s Isivumelwano series does not only document queer marital unions. In fact, most of the pictures render conventional heterosexual couples. That being said, I suggest that Mlangeni’s work allows us to witness the enduring constitutive animations of what Hugo ka Canham has termed the “riotous deathscapes,” within which black working-class South Africans exist. Regardless of their sexual orientation, these individuals queerly articulate their historically undermined attempts at forming and sustaining bonds of intimacy, kinship, and commitment.⁶ Therefore, my use of “queerness” here exceeds identitarian ascriptions. Rather, it names processes and relations that unsettle and exceed the racially gendered and sexualized means through which the colonial-capitalist matrix of power reproduces itself on a global scale.⁷

Indeed, throughout Mlangeni’s series, we observe a multitude of black working-class, Afri-queer, and Afri-indigenous disidentifications, creative appropriations, and outright rejections of the colonial-bourgeois genre of the “white wedding.”⁸ Here, the wedding ceremony is projected as a revelatory social stage where contradictions of race, gender, sexuality, and private property are woven into turbulent convergence. Their inseparable articulations are determined by the ever-shifting structural configurations of the South African postcolony, as well as the neocolonial world-system to which it is interminably subjected.⁹

3. 

The rhythmic oscillation between joyous sociality and structural violence indexed in Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township recalls a series by Mlangeni titled Country Girls (2003–9; fig. 5–8). In the scores of monochrome images that make up the project—all similarly shot over several years on analog film—we are given mediated access to loosely connected countryside communities of queer South Africans living in Mpumalanga province. Like Thembisa, Mpumalanga bears the unhealed geological, metaphysical, and societal scars of racial capitalist brutality due to coal mining and industrial agriculture. Yet, in Mlangeni’s series, we’re still able to hear the impossible thrums of black queer social life—wayward forms of social relation composed in the wake of the recursive catastrophe of coloniality.¹⁰ Such anarchic social geometries do not arise in a vacuum, but rather are intergenerationally sustained through forms of reproductive, system-antagonistic labor embodied by what Joy James calls the “captive maternal.”¹¹

In Country Girls, a figure like the queer activist Bafana Mhlanga might approximate such a labor function. During a recent conversation, Mlangeni spoke of Mhlanga’s profound formal and informal organizing efforts, which provided the refuge-like conditions for the intimate, subterranean gatherings so movingly depicted through his camera lens.¹² In Bafana getting ready for work (2009; fig. 5), Mlangeni captures Mhlanga from behind with a towel wrapped around his waist as he inches towards an open door. The interior space is humble—a pot on a table, some objects on a dressing stand, a sheet lazily draped over a couch that might have just been slept on. The composition retains an atmospheric, soft-focus blur—as if Mlangeni took the image in a quick, improvised instant. Centering Mhlanga’s modest space and modest work through modest means, Mlangeni’s sensuous interior image alludes to a more capacious understanding of love, an “anoriginary” conception that precedes and transcends its institutionalized reification by wedding ceremonies or marital festivities.¹³ This is a socially and temporally dispersed, non-individuated kind of love; a stubborn love of people who colonial modernity has long rendered valueless, unlovable; an ungovernable love that maintains an aversion to Power, no matter the cost; an intoxicating love, ever so determined, that seeks out and architects the birth of liberatory possibility.¹⁴

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Carlos Quijon, Jr.: Can you walk us through the decision of choosing ruangrupa (ruru) for the Exhibition Histories book series? Of course, with the recent developments in ruru’s practice, talking for example about their artistic direction of documenta 15, the book has turned out to be a very timely historicization and mediation of the collective’s practice. I am wondering what the considerations were in writing about ruru’s practice at this particular historical moment?

David Morris: We can recall that conversations toward the book solidified around 2018, when farid rakun came to visit Afterall and spoke with exhibition studies students, and we started exploring the idea of archiving and historicizing ruru—the whys and the hows of it. It quickly became clear that this presented a number of challenges to the kind of research we do, practically and intellectually, and this seemed like a good place to start. As with most of the Exhibition Histories publications, the book developed quite organically from there, in a slow-burn way and across many conversations with our editorial collective and ruru friends and network, until it felt “ready.” (We often describe the Exhibition Histories process as a kind of simmering, slow cooking with multiple pots on at once.)

In short, when the documenta plan was announced, we were already some way along. If anything, it diverted our book plans since, understandably, documenta 15 (d15) took up a lot of the ruru bandwidth—although how things played out in Kassel made the need for a deeper analysis and understanding of ruangrupa’s work seem all the more urgent. 

Wing Chan:  In the book itself, ruru’s participation in d15 takes up maybe 2 percent of the overall page count. What interested us more are these questions: what kind of collective activism is ruru evocating? Where did it come from? How has it kept ruru going for decades in Jakarta and beyond? Personally, I feel ruru’s stories can teach us a lot about why it is important to not do things alone, about genuine, sustainable ways of relating to one another. It’s timely in this world full of wars.

Arianna Mercado: After 2022, so much of the conversation around ruru and their process suddenly became only about d15 and its aftermath. There was much to be said about ruru and how they operate in global and local art ecologies that goes way back to before d15. In the process of making this book, we felt that it wasn’t necessary to just continue adding to the conversation around d15, hence it is only briefly covered in the book. Ruru has been working through lumbung, through ideas of sharing and reciprocity, since their inception, so we felt that it was necessary to highlight this immense body of work by focusing on their support systems and the infrastructures they have built in Jakarta, Indonesia, and beyond.

When Wing and I were first doing the research before we went to Jakarta, it was a lot of, “OK, so let’s put ourselves in their shoes in 1998. What did their life look like back then? What pop culture media were they consuming? What was circulating in universities and in more artistic circles?” We watched a lot of movies, especially romcoms, like Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (What’s Up with Love; 2002). We read some of the books that were banned at the time—Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind (1980), for example. We also listened to a lot of music of their time. We wanted to put ourselves in the shoes of ruru to think about their dreams, aspirations, and lives before even trying to understand their practice.

CQJr: I am interested in how you imagined the structure of the book. Of course, the book is about ruru’s 25-year history, so for the most part, it takes ruru’s practice as a frame through which a possible history of the interfacing between art, exhibition, and history (in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, in Asia, in the global contemporary, etc.) can be written, understood, or—even as a baseline—be made legible. Because of the apparent “centrality” of ruru in the development of contemporary artistic discourse in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia (i.e., how almost all practitioners active in the contemporary art ecology of Indonesia were once part of or have worked with ruru), I am wondering if there were considerations around how to foil this narrative of centrality. 

DM: ruru’s 25-year lifespan is the longest timeframe we have attempted in the series, and this was among the creative challenges we had in making it legible to a wider audience (we hope) as well as in opening up larger questions about “art”, “exhibition”, “publics” and their interconnected histories, geographies, economics, ecosystems, etc., and the difficulties and possibilities they create for researchers, art historians, artists and institutions—what methodologies they demand or suggest. 

At some point early on, we were thinking it could be productive to constellate ruru with other different but comparable initiatives in the region, to look at all of them together, which might have worked to “decentralize” ruru and foreground a regional narrative—this is an approach of some earlier books in the series. But for this book, we took up a different challenge in trying to develop a kind of “institutional history” of ruru with the idea that perhaps a method would develop that could then offer an approach for other kinds of institutions, whether quite similar to or very different from ruru.

WC: Contributions to the last chapter of the book, namely Enin Supriyanto’s interview write-up and Nuraini Juliastuti’s essay on jamming, offer a long view on sustainable collective practices shaped by the sociopolitical climate in Indonesia and globally since the 1970s.¹ We hope that people who care about ruru—and ruru themselves—will be informed by these perspectives. In addition, Melani Budianta’s research on ruru’s economic models from 2000 illustrates how ‘centrality’ could be a myth.² I’d like to believe that our writers have introduced some new focal points.

There are things that repeatedly emerged that we just picked up on. For example, people will say, “Oh, ruru is a boys club!” So Arianna and I would debrief and ask what they really mean? People would say, “Oh, ruru, they were a product of Jakarta.” When you hear this more than two times, three times, four times, you start to build a vocabulary about how to describe ruru and the narratives that counter these descriptions. Somehow, along the way, we also identified the writers that we wanted to commission to talk about these things. I think what is quite interesting about the ruru book is that the commissioning or the identification of the writers or artists happened throughout the entire process—rather than at the start of the actual research. It doesn’t matter how many books we have put together before. No formula applied neatly to ruru. Everyone—scholars, artists, ourselves—were learning. Our team learned by doing.

CQJr: How did you engage with the scope and address of ruru’s practice? I am imagining that looking at ruru’s practice would necessitate looking at it in relation to various coordinates and geographies and publics and ecologies and addresses: “Indonesian,” “Southeast Asian,” “Asian,” “global contemporary,” and so on. How did you deal with this editorially? 

DM: I remember being very struck by how it was almost like there were at least two versions of ruru in circulation. Or, there were two in particular that we were thinking about from early on. What have they meant to people locally in their immediate context? And what have they meant to their wider publics, beyond Jakarta, beyond Indonesia? We were thinking about how to “translate” in both directions—people locally knew one side of the story, and people outside Indonesia (or even, outside their local Jakarta neighborhood) would know another. It’s a story that has many sides, but these are two parts of it we tried to bring together. They have such a presence internationally, such a currency, and it’s not really my sense that they’re much more concerned with that than with building their local infrastructure, with thinking about the next generation—you know, they’re very committed to that. I think that to some extent, there’s a calculation of using the international footprint as a way to consolidate the projects they have in and across Indonesia.

AM: It’s hard to specify the who’s of ruru’s address, because on the one hand, Jakarta (and Indonesia as a whole) is a really important part of the work that they do—on-the-ground and as material. But I do think that in extending their networks internationally, they give people different understandings of how to work, the ways in which you can work equitably or do things with your friends and  build something together.

In the process of doing research for the book and commissioning writers, I personally felt that the idea of placing ruru within conventional narratives of “Southeast Asian art” seemed less and less appropriate—or necessary. When we visited Jakarta, the impact of ruru in the building of arts infrastructure felt very clear and palpable. Their documents, archives, and personalities have a somewhat mischievous nature, but in speaking to ruru and their collaborators, it was really interesting to hear about their efforts to build projects outside of Java, about how important upskilling is and how they engage with students and practitioners outside art fields. All of these plans and ideas are not very known or talked about in the realm of “global contemporary art,” partly due to language barriers, but perhaps also due to conceptions of what a “global contemporary art practice” might look like. We hoped through the book to be able to communicate the breadth of their practice and how it escapes these labels.

CQJr: Lastly, in terms of the category of the series Exhibition Histories: How do you make sense of ruru’s inclusion in this series? Did you see it as a case study that extends the categories of the “exhibition” and its “histories”? Is it a critique and maybe a move toward doing away with this framework? What were the kinds of conversations that you were having in relation to Exhibition Histories as a discursive formation and the book’s entry to the series?

WC: I think in terms of the series, from the book FESTAC ’77: The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and RAW Material Company, 2019) onward, the Exhibition Histories framing is already not containable. Because the FESTAC book was already blurring what is actual historical material and what are new commissions. Visually they are treated pretty much the same, which means that the chronology is very blurry for a book on exhibition history. 

If the ruru book is not part of Exhibition Histories, if it were placed in a bookshop, it would be grouped under something like relational intelligence instead of exhibition histories.

DM: We were also looking back to Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (published by Afterall Books in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2018), which was already starting to rethink the parameters of “exhibition history” in a comparable way. I think we’ve kept that descriptor even though in practice it’s become pretty expansive. FESTAC and Chimurenga were so amazing. It was a massive learning on my part—and on all our parts—in terms of how to take a very different approach to historical research and publishing. 

FESTAC was a massive Pan-African festival that contained exhibitions as part of it. It was important to think about the whole thing and that’s where the focus must be. You miss a lot if you’re just talking about one of the exhibitions that were part of it. (They had a lot of really interesting exhibitions as well as the expansive presentation of artistic work from across the continent and diaspora there were dedicated exhibitions on contemporary Nigerian art; African architectural technology; Pan-African books, fashion, science, plus film and performance programmes, a huge conference . . . and still more!)

The way that “exhibition” was always understood by us is as a point where art meets a public, where it becomes a collective activity. With ruru, the idea of “art” is put into question—and while the “exhibition” is not where they’re coming from either, it’s still about practices of coming together.

I think there’s something to be said for the analytic—there’s something that it does when you put it in a framework of exhibition history that is, to me, still productive. 

For one thing, it helps with people who are more invested in the exhibition as form, allowing them to reconsider their assumptions. In the part of the world where we live and work, there are more parts of the art ecosystem that are more invested in a certain idea of exhibition’s white-cube lineage. There’s a certain strategic value to saying, “Well, this practice has equal, and in my view, much more relevance. And if you want to talk about the history of exhibitions, we need to talk about this.” And perhaps the more things you put in this “box” of exhibition history that don’t look like that, the more stretchy and expansive the term can become. It allows a bit more openness to thinking about “exhibition” and “history,” both of which are, in the case of ruru, tricky terms.

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Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: For me, Mumbai has always been a working-class city. That’s its defining character. Any city that grows because people come there to work develops certain things: functional public transport, cheap food, spaces you can access without feeling excluded. Rent is expensive, of course, but life around you feels reachable. That accessibility shaped my childhood. I was constantly out—taking buses and trains on my own by age eight or nine. That kind of mobility gives you agency that stays with you, especially for a girl in India (fig. 1).

I also grew up in a very political home. My parents are Ambedkarite, Marxist, anti-caste people who fought hard for their education, and their politics shaped everything in our house. My family has been in Mumbai for a couple of generations, so our relationship to the city is deep. Even with the gentrification happening now, it is still hard for me to be angry at Mumbai. There was a time when the city felt like it was truly ours. We could sit by the sea, go to the aquarium, the museum, the planetarium. My parents took me everywhere, and that exposure shaped me into someone who is always thinking and asking questions.

Mumbai also gave me a visual language. It did not come from galleries, because there were not many accessible ones then. It came from the trains, the sea, the political culture of Maharashtra, the literary tradition of essays, theater, poetry, and also from the vibrance of the music we grew up with. There was a kind of freedom in those moments, even if it was never fully available to Dalit girls in the same way. That tension between what we desire and what we can access has shaped how I look at the world.

MV: You were also growing up during an intense political moment in the city, with violence unfolding around you while the country projected a very different public narrative. As your political commitments deepened, how did this dissonance shape your sense of responsibility as an artist? 

SNS: I was born in 1992, so all the politics of that time were simply the atmosphere of my childhood. Babri happened shortly after I was born, the Bombay riots happened right after, and the 1990s and early 2000s were ripe with bomb blasts and communal tension.¹ It became normal for us. You would be waiting for a train or a bus, hear that a blast happened somewhere else in the city, and then you would just go home. Everyone who grew up in Mumbai in the ’90s lived with that kind of violence.

At the same time, mainstream media kept presenting a very liberal idea of unity and diversity. Those were the images painted everywhere, even though the reality around us was completely different. When I think about it now, it feels absurd that this is what we accepted as normal. But that environment shaped how I thought about culture and what it means to make something that cannot be twisted or misunderstood later. 

As someone from a marginalized community, I’m never only an artist. I’m always thinking about the past that shaped my family, the present I’m trying to make sense of, and the future I want to help build. My work has to hold all of that. That’s why I don’t respond immediately to events around me. My practice needs time to research, to understand what already exists, and to be intentional about how I represent myself and my community.

I also know now that I am someone who needs to be liberated. I’m part of the community I’m speaking from. For me to work honestly, I have to understand what my own body carries: my grandmother’s experiences, my sisters’ experiences, my friends’ experiences. All of that moves through me, and processing it takes time. I’m always thinking about posterity. I don’t want a future where culture looks back at us and gets it wrong. I can’t control how the present sees us, but by making the work I make, I’m putting something into the present that I hope the future will understand clearly. There should be no mistake.

MV: I’d like to turn to the portraits in your new series Educate, which takes these questions around representation into the lives and lineages of Dalit women. How did that project begin, and what does “educate” mean for you in this context?

SNS: Educate is the first part of a three-part series I began about a year and a half ago. The title comes from the first word in [the slogan] Shika, sanghatit vha ani sangharsh kara—which is usually translated as “educate, agitate, organize.”² But shika is often misunderstood, and it actually means “learn.” “Educate” in English can sound like teaching others, but I’m thinking about learning in a much broader sense: the knowledge systems Dalit communities have built, the violence students have endured, and the determination with which they continue to pursue education. I’m not trying to glorify that struggle; I’m trying to understand what this pursuit of knowledge has meant over a very long time.

For us, learning has always been taken seriously as a way out of poverty and caste oppression. Even if literacy rates are lower than the national average, the numbers themselves are remarkable given what people have been put through. Culturally, there is a very specific emphasis on education. At our events, there are always books, pamphlets, translations. At Chaityabhoomi on December 6, people spend their hard-earned money on literature and art.³ These are things supposedly meant for the elite, yet everyone wants to learn something—or at least to hold onto that aspiration.

All of this brought me to Mukta Salve (fig. 3). In 1855, when she was only 14, she wrote “About the Grief of the Mahars and Mangs” in the Marathi journal Dnyanodaya. It’s one of the earliest published anti-caste texts by a Dalit girl. The essay is painful, but it’s also full of a sharp awareness that education is the only way out of enslavement. Ambedkar repeated her points about half a century later. So for me, Educate has to begin with Mukta Salve.

MV: Instead of depicting Salve directly, you’ve chosen to paint her “descendants,” the people in her intellectual and political lineage. How did that idea take shape for you?

SNS: When I looked at the few visuals that exist of Mukta Salve, there’s really just this one image that circulates. And it doesn’t sit right with me. Beautiful as it is, it feels like it’s coming directly from the lineage of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)—those soft, “divine” upper-caste aesthetics rooted in colonial art pedagogy. Ravi Varma painted women from oppressor-caste households into these ethereal, gentle embodiments of “sacredness,” and those images went on to define what an “ideal Indian woman” or “goddess” looked like (fig. 4). That visual language wasn’t built from our lives; it was built from theirs.

So when I look at that image of Mukta Salve, it doesn’t feel connected to who she might have been, or what she wrote, or the conditions she was writing from. It’s an aesthetic that isn’t ours. I did think for a moment, “Should I try to paint her?” But what would be the point of that? For me to sit here and imagine her face… I don’t know what that activity does or what it gives to the work, or to us as a culture.

I instead began thinking about Dalit women and girls who are pursuing education now—the people who are carrying her legacy forward. And I wanted the portraits to be a space of release for them, not a re-creation of a historical figure we can’t accurately imagine. That’s how I started painting my friend Divya, who is doing her PhD in New York (fig. 5). The titles themselves will hold that connection between her and Salve, something like Divya in lieu of Mukta Salve, or Mukta Salve’s Divya. The two women are tied together in the work—not visually but conceptually. Divya becomes a way of thinking about what Mukta Salve made possible and what it means for Dalit women to pursue knowledge today.

MV: In the portrait of Divya, the pose of rest feels central. Rest has a very specific lineage in Western portraiture, often idealized through the bourgeoisie. How were you thinking about rest in this context?

SNS: Divya wasn’t posing at all. I spent the day with her, waiting to see when she would finally stop moving. And, at one point, she just sat down. If you look closely, there’s a scowl on her face. It’s not rest. It’s a five-minute break in a full day of labor. That moment is important because portraiture usually puts something on a pedestal: dignity, beauty, power. Here, I wanted to put that tiny, vulnerable pause on a pedestal. That’s the release I’m talking about.

The patterns in the painting do specific work too. The couch pattern comes from the crops grown on Divya’s family’s land. They are literally what she rests on, generationally and materially. The blanket is the exact sari her mother wears in a photo Divya showed me. Divya doesn’t like keeping direct references to her home because the distance becomes too painful, so I brought her mother in indirectly, through pattern. Because her mother is central to Divya’s rest.

And the vulnerability of her pose exists only because of my relationship with her. This is based on a photograph, not a sitting. If she were sitting for me, the softness would disappear, and it would become labor again. That’s why it matters that she wasn’t performing. She was simply tired. And my work is to take that moment and magnify it.

MV: When I visited your studio, you were also working on a portrait of a woman in a bathtub. It felt like a very different kind of scene—still intimate, but coming from another set of questions. Could you talk about what you’re exploring there?

SNS: Yes. That portrait is still very unresolved. It’s of my friend Hrithik, who’s doing her PhD in Minneapolis (fig. 6). She had just moved to the US, and we were talking about how suddenly you have bathtubs everywhere. In India, you don’t. A bathtub is such an aspiration— a marker of “you’ve made it.” And then we started talking about bubble baths—how much guilt there is because of the water, and how strange it feels to allow yourself that kind of pleasure. And from there, we were talking about what we allow ourselves as Dalit women, and what we don’t.

She’s very young. And right now, she’s in this moment of “I’ll do whatever I want. I’m going to have fun. I don’t care what anyone says.” And that takes a long time to arrive at. It might look like normal “young person behavior,” but for her it’s new. She has become young now. That also happened to me—I came into my youth when I was older. When I was younger, I wasn’t young. So for her, this portrait is about exercising agency, claiming the right to live her life as a young person, on her own terms. And for me, it’s also the first time I’m painting someone in this context.

MV: That question of agency feels connected to what you were saying earlier about the series as a whole. Not just rest, but how Dalit women navigate their own representational constraints. How does that come through in this portrait? 

SNS: All of these portraits are not only about repose. They’re also about morality and respectability politics, and how those things get imposed on Dalit women’s bodies. Shailaja Paik writes about this: the way Dalit womanhood, through the anti-caste movement, starts to carry an imposed masculinity.⁴ We become bodies that are supposed to represent endurance, sacrifice, honor. You never want your body to trigger the tabooed memories of the kinds of labor Dalit women were historically forced into. And that’s a huge burden, because that same body also has desires, sexuality, pleasure. But you cannot express that. You cannot be playful. That’s what we mean when we say, “I didn’t get to be young when I was younger.” Within the anti-caste movement, there is so much respectability politics. Someone will always say: “This is not how someone from our community behaves. You represent serious things, so you must always be serious.” There is no space to be fully human.

And you know, it’s uncomfortable for me too. There are moments when I’m painting and I think, “What am I doing?” These women are simply feeling something, and it doesn’t look overtly political. It doesn’t look radical. But there is a radical edge to it. While I paint, my body has to stay aware of that tension—not only the need to challenge Brahminical patriarchy and Brahminical supremacy, but also the need to challenge ourselves. Art cannot just make us feel represented. It can’t only give us images of Dalit women that confirm what we already know. It also has to push us to ask, “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”

As someone shaped by the anti-caste movement, I have to ask whether I am ready to tolerate women from my community enjoying themselves. Because the moment Dalit women experience pleasure or softness, it’s dismissed as frivolous or unserious. And that dismissal sits on top of generations of emotional, physical, and intellectual labor carried disproportionately by Dalit women. They have carried entire communities, yet are not afforded their own humanity. That’s the challenge this series is trying to hold. If you had told me four months ago that I would be painting someone in a bubble bath as part of Educate, I wouldn’t have believed you. It feels wild. Because the histories around education for Dalit communities are full of violence—the use of water against us, the violence in schools and universities, the experiences of Dalit students navigating institutions designed not to include them. Those histories shape what we imagine “education” is supposed to look like, and you wouldn’t expect these portraits from that imagination. 

MV: Especially when you place them in the lineage of Salve’s writing.

SNS: Exactly. To then say Mukta Salve’s Hrithik—that is an immense claim. And yet while the rest of us are tense, she is there, having the bubble bath she deserves. She is in bliss. 

MV: Which was the point of Salve’s writing—to carve out the right to live differently.

SNS: This is what I mean when I say my work is about creating the moments we want in the future, in the present. If the goal is equity—that all of us get to enjoy our lives—then shouldn’t we say that we deserve that enjoyment now? That’s the dialogue happening in my head while I make this portrait. 

MV: Alongside these portraits, you’re also making an installation for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that comes out of Educate and its focus on water, violence, and learning. How did that work grow out of the same questions?

SNS: Last spring, as I was thinking about different aspects of Educate, I started thinking about how water has been used as a weapon and a tool of segregation against Dalit students (fig. 7). Shailaja Paik also writes about this in her work on Dalit women’s education—how, when the British tried to include oppressed castes in schooling, caste Hindus were furious. Their main argument was that if their children studied with us and drank water in the same spaces, their children would be polluted. Water became the most contested site.⁵

And it continues. There was a case recently of a boy who drank from his principal’s bottle and was beaten. There was Indra Meghwal, a little child in Rajasthan who drank from the common source in school and was beaten to death by his teacher.⁶ I was thinking about the violence that water holds, of water as an archive. I was also thinking about Ambedkar’s experiences in school—No peon, no water—where he could only drink if a school official (peon) poured water for him from a height, and if that person didn’t come, he had no water. Water is the site of humiliation and the site of resistance. After Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s legendary Mahad Satyagraha in March 1927 at Chavdar Tank, the local caste Hindus were infuriated and decided to “purify” the water using panchgavya (a mixture of cow urine, cow dung, milk, ghee, and curd). Polluting the water in this way was preferred to the mere thought of human beings from a different caste touching it.⁷ An infuriated Dr. Ambedkar decided to burn the Manusmriti shortly after, on December 25, 1927, at Mahad.⁸

Inspired by this, I wanted to use that same material, water, to destroy the Manusmriti. I started working with unfired clay tiles, roughly A4 or letter size, so they read as “documents.” I went through the Manusmriti and picked verses that specifically talk about education and what should happen if someone from an oppressed caste dares to study, what punishments are prescribed. It was a very painful process to read and select those texts.

I developed these slabs and began printing the verses on them with henna, using a screen-printing process on the wet clay so the text would be very clean and legible. Then I built an installation where water slowly drips onto the tiles (fig. 8). As it keeps dripping, the text dissolves, the clay collapses, and it literally turns to mud.

I also made the tiles as a walkway (fig. 9). You have to step on them to enter the space. It feels like stepping on dry leaves—there’s this very soothing, ASMR-like cracking sound. It’s calming. You hear the water dripping, you feel this relief in your body. And then you look down and read what you’re stepping on, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s the experience I wanted: the calm and the violence arriving together, in your body.

Over time, as people keep stepping, the text becomes less legible. I’m completely okay with that. In fact, I think some of these texts should never be archived. They should not exist. I don’t need to give you evidence of the atrocity; the fact that I had to create them just to destroy them should tell you enough. And this is coming from someone who cares deeply about archives, who loves holding on to pieces of history. The work at Kochi via Conflictorium displays only the walkway tiles on a 6 by 10-foot floor space.

MV: You’ve talked about wanting people to encounter this installation alongside the portraits from Educate. How do you imagine that relationship between stepping on the tiles and then seeing these images of Divya and Hrithik?

SNS: I’ve been thinking about the tiles and the portraits as two different but connected bodies of work. Any time someone wants to access the work in Educate and the portraits of rest, bliss, and release, I want them to do this act of stepping on the Manusmriti first. You shouldn’t be able to just walk in and enjoy the leisure of Dalit women without confronting what has been done to us. The tiles become a threshold, and you have to embody that act of destruction at least once. We have done this kind of work—a thousand times over, in a hundred different ways—before we allow ourselves a moment of rest. So as a viewer, at the very least, you have to do this much. 

And, as an artist, I also have to be careful not to reproduce that violence endlessly. The water only needs to be poured once. I don’t want to spend my life making and remaking these tiles so that they can be destroyed over and over. As much as it gives me pleasure to destroy the Manusmriti, I also have to liberate myself. 

The post “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”: Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar in Conversation with Maya Varma; Part I appeared first on post.

In looking at photographs of live models, plaster casts of Greek sculptures, and students on the website (figs. 1a and 1b) of the Sir J. J. School of Art (JJ) in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), one notices how the condition of the body and labor in relation to art is a haunting presence in 20th-century photography. Shot between the 1930s and 1990s by three notable photographers—Homai Vyarawalla (1913–2012), Foy Nissen (1931–2018), and Raghubir Singh (1942–1999)—the photographs I’ve chosen to highlight in this essay articulate the interface of art and labor over a long and unwieldy terrain.¹ I also analyze how these images capture the unstable status of student artists and its correspondence to the precarious trajectory of JJ.

This essay marks four phases in twentieth-century Bombay. It touches upon the nationalist heyday of the late colonial period, coinciding with the interwar years and the eventual onset of deindustrialization in the postcolonial city as evidenced by the Great Textile Mill Strike (1982–83). In doing so, it delineates the popularity of the Shiv Sena, the ethno-regionalist, right-wing-organization-turned-political party, from the 1960s to the ushering in of neoliberal reforms and state-sponsored violence in the early 1990s. The photographs discussed showcase the distressing circumstances of the city’s working poor as they came knocking on the doors of the art school. They represent a departure from prior illustrative studies, many of which depict the laborer as inseparable from their craft. These earlier visual renderings not only are rigid caste-based occupational studies, but also commodify and group people and goods for the colonial economy.² While the unnamed subjects of these types of images are categorized as “Santal Mother, Girl, or Man,” “Fishwomen [sic] of Bombay” (the native Koli community), or “Palanquin Bearers, Bombay” (who were mainly Dalit Mahars), the bourgeois photographers who took them are identified and thus accorded authorship (figs. 2 and 3).³

In the 20th century, as live models at JJ were placed in conversation with plaster casts of Greek sculptures, the worn human forms of the models underscored the stark valorization of art over labor. The photographs that capture this dichotomy evoke the continued incongruence between outmoded colonial art instruction and the parlous position of both fine artists and laborers at JJ and beyond.⁴ While nationalist sentiment swept through many aspects of life in the 1930s, the influx of Eurocentric methods extended unevenly to the temporary hiring of live models to proclaim an “authentic” Indian art. These live art sessions disembodied the model by decontextualizing and romanticizing the absented adivasi (tribal) figure or pious, religious woman as the symbolic native type, untainted by the trappings of colonial modernity (figs. 4 and 5).⁵ Anonymized men and women assembled as native types bore witness to the canonization of carving, painting, etching, and setting in stone—that is, to the colonial practice of classifying and essentializing select communities.⁶ While live models and art students were interminably devalued and alienated during deindustrialization, some of them, as seen in photographs by Vyarawalla and Singh, resisted being cast as the marginal figure by returning the subaltern gaze.

JJ was established in 1857 by cotton and opium merchant Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859) to provide relief to and upskill displaced migrant workers in what was a ruthlessly competitive colonial market. However, it eventually cultivated only a preferential, cultured class.⁷ On the one hand, though JJ facilitated commissions for artists to design sculptural forms in city structures, a detachment from and dismissal of Indian artistry steadily grew among the Indian art circuit in the late 19th century for various reasons, including the difficulty in cultivating a sustained patronage.⁸ As artisan and agrarian populations were compelled to migrate in large numbers to Bombay and engage in laborious work in textile mills, construction, shipping, and other manufacturing industries, their lives were upended on an unprecedented scale by colonial expansion.⁹ On the other hand, while opportunities may have been available to some prospective students to apply to JJ, many of those gaining acceptance fell by the wayside as they faced extraordinary difficulties there, with only a handful later succeeding as fine artists.¹⁰ However, with concerted endeavors over time, JJ’s reputation improved, and students from other regions were able to avail of dedicated scholarships and thus to enroll.¹¹

JJ was premised on the bourgeois, individualistic apprenticeship structure that developed in response to industrialization in England and Europe from the mid-19th century onward. As with other colonial art schools in India, JJ exacerbated a sharp divide between traditional, familial, and community-based workshops and the colonial education system, which mandated English as the language of instruction with prerequisite training in geometry and arithmetic at the admissions stage.¹² These “reformist” requirements, along with education fees, systematically disqualified and disbarred poor and caste oppressed artisans, thereby separating the field of craft from that of art. Even though craftspeople were considered important practitioners and knowledge-makers, they were viewed as mere copyists and only brought to art schools to exhibit their artistry and wares and assist students (fig. 6).¹³ Subsequently, an exclusive echelon of elite, caste dominant “gentleman” artists burgeoned as “intellectual tastemakers” at the colossal expense of artisans.¹⁴ Despite preliminary efforts to integrate them into the student body, artisans were apprehensive about foregoing their more dependable, albeit paltry agricultural earnings for non-remunerative education.¹⁵ Over time, their absence was transferred, disincarnated, and disseminated by illustrated publications circulated at JJ.¹⁶ Hence, in the photographs taken at JJ by Vyarawalla, Nissen, and Singh, displaced migrant workers make spectral appearances as live objects in art education.

Colonial art schools promoted scientific drawing via human anatomy lessons, and for this purpose, plaster casts of Greek sculptures were favored over live models.¹⁷ In the late 1930s, JJ student and photographer Vyarawalla pictured her contemporaries Rehana Mogul and Mani Turner creating a sculpture exemplifying such principles, including clarity of view and precision of measurement (fig. 7). In this striking photograph, Turner (on the far right), bends forward with calipers in hand to ascertain the proportion of her subject’s upper leg. His waist is also cinched with a measuring tape. For Vyarawalla and her classmates, who came from a host of backgrounds, JJ was extolled as an artistic abode for experimentation in photography and freedom for women.¹⁸ It was also projected as the ground for the reinvention of Indian artists, including women, at a time of soaring nationalism in late colonial Bombay.¹⁹ As a female photographer and student, Vyarawalla cancels the male gaze and gives space to her female subjects, downgrading the male model’s status and labor. 

Returning to the photograph, Mogul looks up, decidedly satisfied with her sculpture of the live, male model. While the work is not life-size, it is strategically located within the composition and thereby rendered the tallest figure. Thus, it is given prominence and a larger-than-life stature in the high-ceilinged JJ studio. Just as he posed for hours for the sculpting session, the model was forced to stand still as a photographed subject; nonetheless, he looks straight at the camera, holding our gaze.²⁰

The live model enacts the queries of renowned British industrial design educator Henry Cole (1808–1882). After the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a world’s fair that heralded the colonial empire as the global pioneer in processing and harboring goods from around the world, Cole interrogated the worth of artisans. He questioned whether artisans should be expected to function as automated machines as per their employers’ demands, whether the commercial aspect of their labor could be compromised for skilled creations, and whether manufacturers recognized this and, moreover, were willing to invest money in educating artisans in order to foster a more skilled labor force.²¹ In figure 7, however, there is a split—the live model, who is no longer an artisan and thus deterritorialized, is at the service of Vyarawalla, Mogul, and Turner’s education. Yet, he does not entirely subdue himself to the machinery of sculpture-making and photography.

Vyarawalla directs a twofold production in which the live model has been relegated to a specimen, while Mogul and Turner are enhanced as artists. The deskilled laborer is utilized as raw material for a sculpture and thereby demarcated from the artists, who pay him no heed. Thus, a neat and graded symmetry unravels itself. While both Mogul and the sculpture as a finished product occupy the foreground, the model and Turner are arranged in the background to demonstrate various stages of sculpting. The two female sculptors are on either side, absorbed and tending to their respective props, one artificial but more exalted than the human male model. 

The model is not lionized like a permanent fixture of JJ, such as the plaster casts of Greek sculptures or the students’ sculpted figurines, but instead beckoned to JJ whenever there is a need for his muted and sampled presence. He represents an eerie and curious amalgam of the “native type” and the Greek ideal but still stands out.²² His look, which evinces personhood and a cynical consciousness, defies and pierces the composition, as he does not conform to an anonymized live model. ²³ His gritty stare reflects the long-standing labor networks of caste, kinship, and village through which single male workers, like him, navigated the workplace and neighborhood in a fluctuating economy.²⁴ In this regard, the long stick that he holds—archetypal of idealized “native type” imagery—comes into view in figure 8.²⁵ The man’s encounter at JJ underpins the grave situation of “mobile incarceration,” whereby badli (temporary) workers would have been picked from designated spots in the city and brought to the school to earn an income.²⁶

A formalist and painterly rendition of a sketching session attended by mostly male students, with a few female students scattered across the class, is framed by Vyarawalla in figure 9.²⁷ In this image, a sari-clad woman seated on a raised platform encircled by the students models with her hands clasped on her lap and her body on silent display. Though this is the only photograph of a live, clothed female model discussed here, women often modeled nude at JJ.²⁸

The Postcolonial Moment

Forty years later, three male students engrave busts modeled after a middle-aged man sitting slouched on a raised platform (fig. 10), a scene captured by Foy Nissen, the prolific photographer, writer, and amateur historian of Bombay who was of Danish origin. This oblique composition captures the static disembodiment of the alienated model, who stares vacantly into a clutter of half-open and half-closed window shutters.²⁹ An unaligned and haphazard path of abject unemployment and deindustrialization stretches out before the live model, whose corporeal presence is as bereft and hollow as the sculptures underway.³⁰ He ekes out a living as an expendable live model, a still life always in supply. At the same time, we can discern some changes in the student composition at JJ in the late 20th century.³¹

In 1955, steps were taken to make the art school more inclusive, with 5 percent of seats reserved for candidates from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds (“Backward Classes”) based on an entrance test.³² Following an arduous struggle by the diverse political base of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (Unification of Maharashtra Committee), the State of Maharashtra was formed along linguistic lines, with Bombay as its capital in 1960. However, from the late 1960s onward, the Shiv Sena’s regionalist but wide socioeconomic membership, goaded by its middle-class leadership and driven by increasing financial instability in Bombay, violently advocated for and took direct action to secure ethnicity-based job reservations for the local Marathi population.³³ Since 1970, JJ has instituted monthly scholarships and fee exemptions for students, thus attracting a broader pool of applicants.

However, in 1984, the year in which Nissen’s photograph was shot, Bombay was marked by two imbricated major events: The nationwide imposition of the Emergency (1975–77), when emergency powers were applied across the country, paved the way for the brutal sundering of robust labor politics and history in the city.³⁴ This was ramified by the Great Textile Mill Strike, which accelerated neoliberal reforms.³⁵ After this labor stoppage, mills in the city shuttered, driving more than a hundred thousand workers into casual, informal employment. In this atmosphere of economic uncertainty, scores of disenchanted Marathi workers were galvanized and girded by the right-wing, anti-migrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Shiv Sena.

Color and a Postmodern Critique 

The pall of deindustrialization hangs heavy in the downcast eyes and static body of the elderly live model captured by Raghubir Singh in figure 11.³⁶ A dire juncture at JJ is presented via this photograph of an emaciated, aging man who, seemingly diminished and disenfranchised, is clad in an oversized kurta, dhoti, and turban. His frail and bent frame is at odds with the plaster casts of classical, nude Greek male sculptures symbolizing Eurocentric ideals of the male form that surround him. Moreover, the color photograph offers an incisive reading of the problematic continuation of this “educational” tradition and artisanal and scholastic disempowerment at JJ well into the late 20th century.³⁷

Singh composed this aberrant scene to unsettle notions of colonial grandeur and to foreground its oppressive hangover in the lackluster confines of JJ. The ongoing, ill-fitting presence at JJ in 1991 of casts of Greek nude sculptures tells us of its unrelenting durée in the postcolonial city. Singh has orchestrated a disharmony between these two teaching aids—the live model, an “ethnographic type” (again holding a stick) of which he was critical, and Greek sculpture—and that of art students, who represent a third category. The students are not portrayed as dutifully immersed in a conventional classroom setting; instead, like the model, they stay on, compelled to “wait” and remain on-site.

The young male student pictured with slumped shoulders and his hands on his back evokes restlessness and unease. He is seemingly caught unawares, despite the reassuring hand of a friend on his shoulder. The intrusive photographer draws us in, setting up a trenchant triangular network of gazes as he inhabits the place of student-artist and intervenes as scathing outsider-spectator—in effect, creating a visual critique that extends beyond the male student in the photograph to encompass the general dissent among students and alumni regarding outmoded education at JJ, among other issues. He constructs a postmodern critique, arresting the apparent friction at JJ by transfixing the male student’s consternation and awkward stance within his own field of view.³⁸ Both the institution and its students faced numerous obstacles well into the 20th century—including the unaffordability of art materials, a dearth of faculty, low attendance, outdated teaching methods, a lack of residential facilities for students, and even an attempt to close the school.³⁹ The apparent wariness of the confounded student and the constrictive environment speak to the repeated demands of students and alumni to revise syllabi, upgrade infrastructure, and introduce English-language tutoring. In the course of time, some of these measures were undertaken.⁴⁰

The continued veneration and aegis of objects over labor at JJ tie together labor and education through the disparate gazes and positions held by the photographed subjects whom Vyarawalla, Nissen, and Singh capture and bring to our attention. Their photographs unfold the dynamics and impact of art education and labor beyond the precincts of the art school, highlighting the convergence of social inequities and the scarcity of resources.⁴¹ They infer a narrative of the reverberating consequences of colonial knowledge and the concomitant making and entrenching of hierarchies, in which the resources necessary for artmaking became privileged enclaves unto their own, with hardly any public or private intervention. The indigent labor of the city has continued to serve as live models well into the present day, as demonstrated by photographs on JJ’s website (figs. 1a and 1b).⁴² Disaggregated, disarmed, and appropriated by art schools, artmaking, and the accumulation of capital in the city at large, the below-minimum wages paid to said live models were recently upgraded.⁴³

The JJ studio portraits encapsulate interconnected points of disproportionate modernity in a city teetering on the precipice of chronic unrest. They are distinct traces enunciating the poignant state of affairs within the school’s lofty walls and sunlit, capacious interiors for live models and students. Though monumental scale allows for the bodily autonomy of labor and studenthood in Vyarawalla and Singh’s photos (figs. 7, 8, and 11), in figure 9, by Vyarawalla, they are dwarfed and made a diminutive spectacle of. The photos by Nissen and Singh (figs. 10 and 11) show a consistent decline in both sitters. Together, as apparitions, they carry the burden of coerced historical experience, enduring the industrial capital model upon leaving a stagnant rural economy. Thus, the drawn-out process of mill closures, the protracted affair of deterritorialization and depoliticization of the urban poor, and the hastening of liberalization and right-wing propaganda—enabled by the Emergency—were inextricably coterminous with the pedagogical inertia of JJ. ⁴⁴

The post Laboring and Learning: Live Models and Art Education at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in the Long 20th Century appeared first on post.

Ashamallah was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba or “catastrophe,” a paradigmatic rupture that would change the course of history and redefine the trajectory of Egyptian nation-building.² Her life thereafter has been decidedly marked by events that punctuate the making of modern Egypt. Like many Egyptians, her sense of time is structured by presidential eras (Nasser, Mubarak), wars (the Six-Day War, Al Naksa, the War of Attrition), and agreements (Camp David, Oslo). These sweeping, large-scale, political shifts have reverberated in Ashamallah’s private life. Indeed, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization policies impoverished her formerly middle-class family, and her brother’s martyrdom in the 1967 War of Attrition is a tragedy that has deeply afflicted her. 

Ashamallah grew up in Desouk, a provincial town in the Egyptian Nile River Delta region of Kafr-el-Sheikh, amid rural traditions that continue to influence her painting and drawing today. Though her Christian family was not originally from this region, they lived in Desouk because her father was assigned there to oversee life insurance policies. At home, her father’s library was rich with literature, which she pored over. Outside, she climbed sycamore trees, befriended the local livestock, and sang folk songs with the neighboring children. She planted rice and other seeds on her aunt’s land, fascinated by watching how plants grow and yield fruits for picking. Today, her imagination is still populated by the creatures, real and invented, that inhabited her early childhood. 

Against Canonization 

When prodded about the imaginative tropes in her work, Ashamallah sings a song that the village women would sing in a processional held at night during the lunar eclipse. Her artwork, which contains elements from Egyptian folklore and Pharaonic motifs—often hybridized alongside figments of her own imagination—offers novel interpretations of traditional forms. Ashamallah’s apartment is filled with paintings, and one that stands out is Hathour and Her Egg (1995), a large, prominent portrayal in her living room of the Pharaonic goddess Hathour (fig. 1). Ashamallah has been consistently preoccupied with the female figure and feminine prowess, as is evident in her depiction of Hathour, mother of all the Pharaohs and a goddess who represents the sky, motherhood, fertility, beauty, music, and joy. When asked what inspires these figures, she recounted a pivotal discovery: that the female mantis eats her partner by decapitating it after they have mated. Though Ashamallah did not elaborate further, it makes sense that the violence and beauty inherent to the natural process of mantis-mating could have inspired her to depict insect-like creatures as well as women with plants or other creatures inside their bellies. For Ashamallah, the female body is the touchstone of creation, the alpha and omega.³
 

It is challenging to attach Ashamallah to a particular school or “ism”—Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism. Instead, she weaves in and out of these styles at whim, eluding categorization by reworking forms that present her unique worldview. Though she received highly formal Beaux Arts–style training, she often surrenders her traditional education to follow the lead of her imagination. Her compositions present the world as she remembers it: full of trials and tribulations and marked by the simultaneity of euphoria and desolation. As an artist, her confidence in her own vision has always been steadfast. She recounts being on a field trip in middle school and visiting the Fine Arts Library. When her friend asked her, “Have you seen Picasso?” she responded, “Who is Picasso? I am Evelyn Ashamallah.” 

Her politics are seldom explicitly manifest in her artwork, though on certain occasions, she has illustrated specific political events, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre or the ongoing genocide in Gaza (fig. 2). Nevertheless, most of her paintings and drawings are not didactic. When looking back on her body of work, it is difficult not to read certain pieces as parallels to the large-scale political transformations taking place in the background at the time they were made. Compositions featuring peasants tilling their land or astronauts (fig. 3), aliens, and UFOs evoke societal changes such as the 1952 Land Reform Law, which redistributed Egypt’s arable land, or the establishment of a national space program in 1960. 

As a young artist, Ashamallah found herself caught in the 20th-century gestation of a new republic. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1973 and then moved to Cairo. There, not yet fully embracing her painting practice, she worked as a journalist for Rūz al-Yūsuf, a weekly political magazine that had just begun distribution in the Gulf countries. Her first piece, published in August 1973, was on the bride economy between the Gulf and Egypt. As an investigative journalist, she shed light on cases of newly wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who would come to various rural places across Egypt and purchase young girls to bring home as wives. After this fearless debut, she earned a living by writing similar political, investigative editorial pieces until a disagreement with her editor led her to find work elsewhere. In 1977, the Egyptian government issued a warrant for Ashamallah’s arrest for her alleged involvement in leftist political activity. Forced to leave the country until they were no longer targets of the Egyptian state, she and her husband, journalist Mahmoud Yousri, moved to Algeria, where they lived in exile for six years. While she would not return to journalism, she was always involved in her husband’s editorial work and has remained an avid writer. Later in her practice, she began incorporating her writings into her artwork.

During one of our interviews, I asked Ashamallah about her relationship to politics after the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, in which she played a prominent role as a leading dissident and organizer. She discussed how, in retrospect, almost fifteen years later, she sees “how naive and blind we were, how we didn’t understand anything.”⁴ Now, after a lifetime of involvement in different political groups—ranging from leftist to Marxist to Socialist to Communist throughout regime changes and political fluctuations—Ashamallah wants her artwork to be free of political determinations and social burdens. As she explained to me, “They’re free to politicize whatever they want. For me, what do I do? What is good for me to do? I paint. Let me paint.”⁵
 

Exile and Early Drawings

In our discussions, Ashamallah referenced multiple times how the farmers’ fields inspired her developing visual language as a young girl.⁶ Despite this, she did not demonstrate interest in landscape painting while a student in Alexandria. Instead, she preferred riding the tram all day long and watching—and drawing—the hustle-bustle. It was not until she arrived in Tiaret, Algeria, in 1977 and encountered the topography of the agricultural province that she began drawing landscapes. Before traveling to Algeria, she had never seen such majestic hillsides. Given the flat, agricultural lands of her childhood, she was captivated by the different elevations in her first landscapes, which are often rendered in flat compositions with multiple planes stacked on top of each other. This compositional structure has remained present throughout her work, as she still typically divides the surface—whether cardboard, canvas, or paper—into sections that she then populates with original forms.

Landscape in Algeria (1980) is made of quasi-organic, geometric shapes that are common in her other illustrations from this time (fig. 4). Inspired by local crafts within the Amazigh tradition, Ashamallah borrowed certain forms that suited her desire to blend human figures with bushes, and trees with architecture. This hybridization is a constant throughout her artistic practice, whereby people are depicted with plantlike traits, and animal-creatures float in boundless spaces, undisturbed by the laws of perspective or gravity. 

In Algeria, Ashamallah’s husband only found sporadic work as a schoolteacher, and so they struggled to make ends meet. Though she never stopped drawing (“not even for one day”), it was a rare joy for her to receive colors, and when she did, she gravitated toward the saturated tones that she would later use in her acrylic works. 

When they moved from Tiaret to the capital of Algiers, Ashamallah developed a tight-knit community of friends from the political, intellectual, and artistic milieus across the Arab region—Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, of course, Algeria. She was influenced by many of the conversations that took place at this time. The Algerian modernist artist Mohammed Khadda states in his essay “Elements for a New Art,” which he wrote fresh out of the Algerian War (1954–62) in 1964, “Our country is taking the socialist path, and the artist—like the worker and the peasant, has a duty to participate in the edification of this new world, in which man will no longer exploit man.”⁷ Though Ashamallah never directly references Khadda—except for in a side conversation in which she notes his calligraphic forms with admiration—it is clear that Ashamallah shares some of the concerns he waged in the formation of the new independent Algeria. She was inspired by the goings-on around her and has spoken extensively about the importance of her time in Algeria in her personal life and artistic trajectory.

In 1984, Ashamallah returned to an Egypt that was fundamentally different from the country she had left: one that was rife with economic disparity, increasingly common sectarian clashes, and a new age of political repression under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, determined to support her children and continue making art, Ashamallah engaged with formal cultural apparatuses, staging exhibitions in state-run venues such as the Cairo Atelier (1986), among others. In the 1990s, she served as director of the Mohamed Nagy Museum in Giza before becoming director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. In 2011, she left this post, emphatically exposed the corruption within the Ministry of Culture, and took to Tahrir Square. 

The Rural Trace

Now, as Ashamallah has lived longer in the dense urbanity of Cairo than in its rural environs, she continues to derive inspiration from the landscape that defined her youth. It is there that she identifies the “Egyptian spirit” in its truth and essence. This portrayal of the rural as the “essence” of the nation, and the peasant as the “true Egyptian,” defined art historical, literary, and political debates in Egyptian modernism throughout the 20th century. In 1911, the newly established Egyptian Faculty of Fine Arts opened with a European curriculum and the following aim: “After having taught the students the conventional rules of each art, the professors shall endeavour to develop in them a taste for a national art, that which should become the expression of the modern civilized Egyptian. This will be thanks to what is available to them through the remarkable examples they see of Egyptian monuments and relics and of the Golden Age of Arab art.”⁸

Egyptian modernists responded to this prompt by representing the rural Egyptian, a figure that could potentially unite a heterogeneous population seeking a national identity.⁹ As did the artists Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), Seif Wanly (1906–1979) and his brother Adham Wanly (1908–1959), Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Mahmoud Naghi (1888–1956), Hamed Owais (1919–2011), and Injy Aflatoun (1924–1989) before her, Ashamallah identified the rural condition as the ultimate, defining feature of Egyptian society. Like them, she occupied an insider-outsider position, portraying the peasant from close proximity though never fully occupying the role herself. 

In the scramble to locate a static Egyptian national identity, images of peasants and the agricultural landscape they tilled—an unchanging constant across dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of rule—became a fixture in Egyptian artistic representation of the 20th century.¹⁰ From Mahmoud Said’s 1938 portrait Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a Printed Dress) to Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1930 sculpture Au Bord du Nil (On the Banks of the Nile) or Injy Aflatoun’s 1963 L’Or Blanc (White Gold), the Egyptian modernists were obsessed with portraying the “ordinary Egyptian” in a rural setting. There is no doubt that this practice was highly influential in Evelyn Ashamallah’s work, with some of her early works portraying women as abstract, organic figures that resemble Mokhtarian sculptures. 

In 1986, Ashamallah borrowed from the tropes of peasant representation (for example, the jagged portraiture of Hamed Oweais and the rural stereotypes of Ragheb Ayad) in Portrait or Analysis of the features of the Egyptian peasant, a profile sketch with a pseudo-Pharaonic phrenology (fig. 5). While this portrait borrows from Ashamallah’s antecedents, it also demonstrates the germination of some of her signature features: the almond-shaped hollow eyes and large skull. Over time, she further developed her own typologies of representation, departing from the rural depictions typical in the work of earlier Egyptian modernists.

In her 1990 drawing The Peasants’ Hope, Ashamallah employs the signature stacked composition she used in her early Algerian landscapes to completely recast a tired and pernicious rural trope (fig. 6). In the left of the composition, a woman with curly hair and an earring in the form of a striped bird diving downward is rendered in closeup profile above an underworld inhabited by part-sea part-human creatures, who swim toward a twirling structure at the surface. Above it, a central figure is positioned in the typical Pharaonic stance, wherein the feet point in one direction, and the body and head face the viewer. This figure also wears bird-like jewelry as well as a snake on its head. On the right, the artist stacks three figures on top of each other to make one hybrid creature: a crouching man, a bird-woman, and a flower-child. Each figure in this totemic trio relates to a figment from Ashamallah’s memory. Free from the stereotypical tropes that were common in the work of her predecessors, Ashamallah portrays what she knows about Egyptian peasants. Perhaps her renderings are acts of subversion, but it is more likely that they are forms of fantastical futurity, pointing to a time when humans, animals, land, sea, and sky will have all collapsed into an incongruent harmony.  

Throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, Ashamallah dove further into the interspecies realms that had long populated her imagination. In the work from this period, we can begin to identify recurring motifs, including femininity, motherhood, and birth, which are conveyed by pregnant creatures or by characters contained in eggs, and womanhood in the form of reptilian beings with full breasts. These works almost always contain an unbridled articulation of humor and whimsy. As time progressed, Ashamallah depicted her figures with more limbs, tails, and fins, and she portrayed their encounters with even more levity. In her droll renderings, she would imagine conversations between different species that, as she has stated, “are not so easy to understand.” In her painting Balance (1993), we see her signature saturated colors deployed in the portrayal of four figures spilling over four quadrants of a composition (fig. 7). A turnip-headed red boy lies on his stomach and swings his feet next to a blue star creature with red lips, who smiles directly at the viewer. On the bottom of the composition, another red boy balances a reptilian figure in his mouth and an upside-down pyramid on his foot. As in Ashamallah’s other works, the composition is split and stacked, with each section containing a creature floating in its own respective world, yet brought into conversation with the other creatures in their whimsical portrayal.

In the fall of 2024, Ashamallah’s largest retrospective opened at Azad Art Gallery in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. Titled The Harvest of a Lifetime, this exhibition was organized by decade, demonstrating Ashamallah’s evolution as an artist and offering unfettered access to her phantasmagorical world.¹¹ In some ways, Ashamallah’s ongoing legacy fits squarely into an art historical evolution of Egyptian modernism that draws key articulations from the rural. However, her representations offer something much more alluring than those of her predecessors. In reading her paintings and drawings alongside her writings, her exile, her political engagement, and then her disengagement, it becomes clear that her imagination is her antidote to the injustices that she has borne witness to throughout her life. She knows that this world-building is not entirely her own creation, as it follows the folktales and customs that surrounded her as a child. Now, looking back on a life laden with the contradictions, affiliations, and disaffiliations not uncommon to those navigating the rubble of the 20th century, Ashamallah consciously returns to the land, still, still invigorated by the potential of its promise (fig 8). 

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Paul Galloway: An aspect of your work that intrigues me is that it is steeped in the visual culture of India—and Mumbai, in particular. Can you give us a bit of information on your upbringing, and how the rapid changes you witnessed growing up in the 1980s–90s impacted your development as artists?

Sameer Kulavoor: We grew up in the northern suburbs of Bombay, a small world in the 1980s–90s. But things changed very fast after 1990. That’s when the government introduced economic liberalization that created major changes that meant, suddenly, there were brands we had never seen in India—like McDonald’s or Levi’s or MTV. A lot of younger people also started getting more interested in what was happening outside the country. So, I think [that] that period of the ’90s was very critical to a lot of these cities around India, not just Bombay. The farmlands gave way to more housing apartments and infrastructure. The road that used to be kind of like the grazing patch for donkeys became a major thoroughfare, and today there is a metro line passing [through] there. And our family was unique because we come from a Hindu-Muslim interfaith marriage.

Zeenat Kulavoor: Our personal background also shaped our perspective. We come from an interfaith family—a Muslim from South India and a Hindu, a Gujarati from Bombay—and there was a class difference between our parents as well. Growing up in that environment taught us acceptance at many levels. Even language played a role: My maternal side used the Gujarati language and script, while my father’s side spoke Beary Bashe—a dialect that is a mix of Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu, but it has no written script. At home, we spoke English, mixed with Gujarati and Beary Bashe, while outside, we used Hindi in daily life. Later, at art school, we picked up Marathi, which we now use regularly to maneuver the city. And after I married my partner, whose Mangalorean family speaks Tulu and uses Kannada, the linguistic mix expanded even further. This multicultural and multilingual context is inseparable from who we are and inevitably influences how we see and create.

PG: Can you give me a sense of your professional lives before you started Bombay Duck Designs? Sameer, you worked in advertising, right?

SK: Before I got into art school, I used to do a lot of cartoons and illustrations for my college magazine. Between 1998 and 2000, during the dot-com boom, I joined a design team on a website. I ended up learning a lot of software, and I started to understand animation using Flash. At that point I continued freelancing with advertising agencies working for brands. Simultaneously, I was also involved with the indie music scene in Bombay. That led to me designing album covers during that decade for friends and the circle. I continued freelancing until 2008, when I formalized Bombay Duck Designs. 

ZK: Pre art school, I was drawn to scripts and languages through my family and loved collecting everyday objects and visual ephemera—labels, wrappers, tickets—elements that later informed the Everyday India project. At art school, I majored in typography, which brought these interests together, and focused extensively on Urdu—a natural choice given my background and fascination with scripts carrying layered histories. After graduating, I worked on Urdu-related projects with various agencies before freelancing with Sameer. We began with an album cover and soon moved on to larger projects, including one of the early large-scale independent music festivals of India, where we designed everything from the identity to the stages and environments.

PG: I think the name “Bombay Duck” (a commonly eaten fish native to the waters in and around Bombay) perfectly encapsulates your design ethos, which is rooted in the everyday culture of India. This ethos comes across in your amazing zines, and I wonder . . . what drew you to that format? 

SK: I think it came from a general frustration with how design projects work. Many times, I felt that a certain thing I had created for a commercial project wasn’t doing the idea justice. That drew me to the medium of zines, where I could talk about something that means a lot to me without compromising on how I’d like to express it. In a sense, self-publishing laid the foundation for my own art practice.

ZK: The first one we made was Zeroxwallah zine, which talks about Bombay photocopy shops. I remember [that] when we started making this book, it was simply because the subject, the format, and the effort excited us. We decided to make about 50 copies, show them to people, and see how it went.

SK: Our college was very close to Fort (a neighborhood in the city), which has a high concentration of photocopy shops. And we found it fascinating because all of these shops have the same branding and color scheme. Every one [of them] sticks to yellow and black; every one [of them] has a similar way of using bold type. So, the idea of creating a photocopied zine that talks about photocopy shops felt very meta and interesting. 

PG: What did the people working in these shops think when they were printing this book about themselves?

ZK: While photocopying the first few pages, they didn’t understand what we were doing. Eventually, when we were binding the book together, they asked, “Why are you doing this? Who’s going to buy this?”

SK: We took pictures of the exteriors of certain shops from that area, and the workers spotted rival shops. “These guys are our competitors . . . why have you featured them?” And then there is this very interesting phenomenon where people in India use the [company name] “Xerox” as a verb or a noun “Can you xerox this?” or “Please give me a xerox of this sheet.” The Xerox company objected to the use of their name on shops, and so shop sign makers simply repainted the X with a Z.

PG: A theme that comes across in much of your work is a focus on taxonomies of visual culture of India—an indexing of commerce and architecture and social life. What is it about this everyday visual experience that fascinates you both?

SK: When you look at any city, you’re trying to decode [its] layers. So, the first thing that you see is shop or road signage. And then there are walls covered with graphics, posters, or public art; building facades and surfaces that may be of a certain material—brick, concrete, tiles and so on—or construction sites covered by metal sheets, debris protection fabric, or blue tarpaulin sheets. There are several layers depending on your vantage point. While it may seem like absolute chaos to someone who is not familiar with it, for us it became a way to understand the logic and chronology of how things form. When your senses are overloaded, you want to break it down into understandable parts. 

ZK: We’re simply trying to make sense of the country and the city in our own way, and that comes out in the form of zines, artworks, and murals. Take the blue tarpaulin sheet, or tadpatri as we call it locally, for example.

SK: The blue tarpaulin sheet is omnipresent when you’re going through the daily rigor of life in Bombay. But no one has the time or the mental bandwidth to dwell on these things. 

ZK: Yet, you can look at this piece of blue plastic and see that it’s significant. It reflects socioeconomic conditions, ways of living, and the resourcefulness of people who adapt and creatively use this material.

PG: Your practices make me think of others who have tried to tackle the complexities of urbanism. In his research for the font Gotham, typographer Tobias Frere-Jones photographed thousands of building addresses and signs across Manhattan, documenting the diversity of letterforms in the wild in order to distill vernacular typography into one typeface that would represent the ethos of New York City. You two take an alternative approach and embrace the diversity and wide range of not only typefaces and languages but also visual cultures that you find. I think that, in a way, that’s an embrace of chaos. 

SK: We never consciously set out with the idea to embrace chaos, it just happened. The other aspect to this is that there is currently a politically rooted attempt to homogenize culture in India—like imposing Hindi in the South Indian states, for example. Such impositions or blanket rules, we feel, are dangerous. It becomes a responsibility to show people the richness of this so-called chaos. There is a lot of work to be done to make Bombay and India more livable in certain parts, but this aspect of plurality or multiplicity is part of our DNA.  

PG: In the dramatic structures of your Metromorphosis project here, we see the churn of history, architecture, and community that happens in all urban environments sped up, with chaotic accretions and evidence of past lives. What do you think we risk losing when we pursue order and homogeneity to its furthest extent?

SK: Architect and academic Rahul Mehrotra in his text about Metromorphosis notes a kind of emulation that is commonly occurring: “The presence of the ‘edifice complex’ in Manhattan, New York, that grew naturally out of the accumulation of capital then circulated around the globe. Singapore wanted to be the Manhattan of Asia and then Shanghai wanted to be the Singapore of China. Politicians and Capitalists in India want to make Mumbai Shanghai and then, for example Nasik aspires to be Mumbai and the small towns near Nasik then aspire to be Nasik and so on.”¹ Homogenization can consume culture and texture—and not just within India. This loss of identity in design is a complicated issue and needs a nuanced understanding and more conversations. We talk about this in our work, trying to show people that the richness of what India is is at risk in this flattening of everything from architecture to graphic design. 

PG: I think your interest in the visual taxonomy of India functions similarly to the many efforts across the world to preserve endangered languages. Particularly with [the exhibition] Everyday India, it’s like you’re documenting a visual dialect. Is this something that you see as a mission for yourselves?

SK: Recognizing multiplicity and plurality is a recurring factor in our work—while also not getting nostalgic or sentimental about the past. And I think we want to keep that factor alive in our work, especially in this atmosphere, where there is a real risk of things being wiped out. We are excited about the future and how it can be shaped.

ZK: We feel that deeply these days, which is why Everyday India felt so important. It gave us a chance to do something we might not have done otherwise—to make people notice the multiplicity around them. We’re always photographing things, posters, architecture, fragments of design that catch our eye. It’s part of our daily rhythm, something we both do in our own ways. The show allowed us to share that, spark conversations, and see how everyone else was feeling. 

PG: I think a strength of your practice is this idea of looking at the world from the ground up rather than from an aerial view. Because, as you say, when viewed from above, everything becomes flattened, whereas from the ground, everything is rich and full of texture and variety. 

SK: Having such a vantage point becomes important in these kinds of scenarios. We walk a lot. We’re on the ground level a lot. We don’t live in a 40-floor high-rise; we like to be grounded and keep our eyes and ears open to what’s happening at the street level. It’s very easy to find ways to cut off the chaos and have a very comfortable life. A lot of decisions we make in our day-to-day life, like where do you want your studio to be or where do you want to go for a trip—those kinds of very personal decisions are shaped by the logic of not wanting to be cut off from the ground level. It percolates into our daily lives. It’s a habit that you want to live a certain kind of life, to be able to do a certain kind of work. As we grow older, I think, for us, it becomes important to hold on to that.

This conversation stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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The concept of establishing a museum in a remote region of India—one that is not only geographically isolated but also prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes and cyclones—presents a complex set of challenges. Yet, it also offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with the traditional knowledge systems of local communities. Located in Ajrakhpur, just outside the city of Bhuj in Kutch, Gujarat, in western India, the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC), founded in 2016, exemplifies this duality (fig. 1). Conceived as a multipurpose cultural institution, LLDC is dedicated to the preservation, revival, and continuity of the diverse craft traditions of Kutch.¹ Situated on a nine-acre campus, it houses three galleries as well as craft studios and educational spaces that collectively serve as a platform for cultural transmission and innovation.

Tracing the development of LLDC, this essay focuses on how indigenous systems of knowledge informed its planning, construction, collections, infrastructure, and modes of audience engagement. Using LLDC as a case study, it explores how the model of a global museum can be thoughtfully translated to a local context—one that is shaped by environmental precarity, cultural richness, and community resilience.

Building Trust: The Elders as Gatekeepers of Knowledge

The seed of the Living and Learning Design Centre was planted more than five decades ago in a chance encounter between the late Chanda Shroff (1933–2016) and women from the Ahir and Meghwaad Gurjar communities.² In 1969, Shroff traveled overland from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to Dhaneti in Kutch to assist with famine-relief efforts.³ For the fifth consecutive year, Kutch—the second largest district in India—was experiencing severe drought that had resulted in an acute need for humanitarian assistance as many residents faced starvation. Despite these hardships, women arriving to collect food aid remained impeccably dressed and were hesitant to accept charity. They had nothing to exchange for the food parcels they received as they had sold most of their belongings—including valuable embroidered heirlooms passed down through generations—just to survive. 

Their pride and skills caught the attention of Shroff. Recognizing the need for a long-term solution, she asked if they would create embroidered designs on plain saris that she would then sell in Bombay, returning the proceeds of any sales directly to them. The women agreed to participate under the condition that the patterns and motifs would be outlined by Parmaben Balasara, an aarekhni artist and their designated designer.⁴ This was Shroff’s initiation into how traditional crafts, such as embroideries, were not just borne from women who sat in their homes and created them, but rather from a regulated system that relied on the wisdom and knowledge of elders from their community. Without the support of Parmaben, Shroff could not have engaged these communities (fig. 2), and it was through her steadfast support that the initial seeds were planted for LLDC, building trust with the communities through their first organization, Shrujan.⁵

Engaging Communities: The Need for a Mobile Museum

In the late 1990s, Chanda Shroff launched a precursor to the Living and Learning Design Centre through an innovative mobile museum housed in a repurposed bus, initially named the Design Center On Wheels. This initiative was instrumental in introducing the concept of a museum to the rural craft communities of Kutch, many of whom had limited exposure to formal cultural institutions. Rather than imposing an external model, the mobile museum served as a dialogic platform—demonstrating how a museum could emerge from within the community’s own knowledge systems.

The Design Center On Wheels featured a rotating display of specially commissioned panels and garments, showcasing traditional patterns and techniques in contemporary formats, all painstakingly hand-stitched by women from the various communities of Kutch (figs. 3–6) 

Encouraging the use of traditional stitches in a modern color palette and moving beyond clothing and textiles were crucial steps in teaching the women how, through the eye of a needle, to reinvigorate and expand their cultural histories using their own knowledge and experience. Between 1997 – 2003 they created over 1000 embroidered panels and over 600 garments, in a range of designs and colorways, establishing a rich visual archive of stitches and motifs. From 2003 to 2012 the Design Center On Wheels travelled across Kutch, exhibiting a rotating selection of these panels. This mobile museum not only documented craft heritage, but it also inspired renewed interest among younger generations, who began to see their cultural practices as valuable and evolving (figs. 5, 6). 

By visiting more than 100 villages and engaging more than 20,000 community members, the mobile museum played a critical role in the instruction, retention, and revitalization of an intangible cultural heritage. It laid the groundwork for LLDC’s later development by fostering a sense of ownership and participation among artisans and by demonstrating that museums could be truly inclusive and rooted in lived experience.

In 2006, Chanda Shroff was honored with the international Rolex Award for Enterprise for preserving, protecting, and safeguarding the unique embroidery heritage of Kutch and for empowering rural craftswomen. Her pioneering efforts were recognized as “one of the most successful models of social entrepreneurship in her country.”⁶

Building the Living and Learning Design Centre

With the support of the prestigious Rolex award, Chanda Shroff advanced her vision by establishing the Living and Learning Design Centre in Ajrakhpur—a village founded by the Khatri community after the devastating 2001 earthquake in Kutch. The Khatris, renowned for their intricate ajrakh block printing, had previously lived in the village of Dhamadka.⁷ However, the earthquake altered that village’s natural water sources, changing their mineral composition, which negatively affected the quality of the dyes produced there. Seeking better conditions, many Khatris relocated to Ajrakhpur, a site near Bhuj with a more suitable water supply for their craft.

Recognizing the potential of this new site, the Khatris encouraged Shroff to consider acquiring land in the same area, which subsequently led to the procurement of the plot. The location was selected not only for its proximity to the artisans but also for its potential to host a multifunctional campus. Through a process of community dialogue and environmental assessment, the land was eventually prepared for construction. Importantly, the acquisition of this property involved ongoing community collaboration and consultation, outlining the vision and plans for the site, ensuring that the initiative was embraced as a collective effort rather than an external imposition.

The acquisition of the land marked a pivotal transition for LLDC—from mobile outreach to a permanent institutional presence. It signaled a long-term commitment to the region and laid the foundation for a built environment that reflects the values of resilience, inclusivity, and cultural continuity. By embedding the institution within the living context of one of Kutch’s most iconic craft traditions—ajrakh—LLDC reinforced its mission to support and sustain artisan life through meaningful, place-based cultural infrastructure.

The architectural design of LLDC had to emphasize structural resilience, incorporating earthquake-resistant technologies alongside vernacular building practices. In doing so, it addressed environmental risks while maintaining the region’s architectural heritage. The design team, working with local engineers and artisans, aimed to ensure the building could withstand future seismic activity.

Locally sourced materials were combined with reinforced structural systems to create a hybrid approach that enhanced durability while preserving cultural continuity. The campus layout—including galleries, studios, and open courtyards—was designed to support rainwater harvesting and to optimize natural ventilation and lighting, thus reducing reliance on mechanical systems and promoting environmental sustainability. For thermal stability, the design team used bricks made from lime and fly ash. Lime mortar was prepared on-site by grinding lime with sand and cement, and this gauged mortar was used for the masonry work. Natural lime plaster, applied using traditional methods, was used in the interiors of two galleries.⁸

Although Kutch experiences a predominantly hot and arid climate, winter nights can be very cold. To regulate temperature extremes, the building plan incorporates passive cooling strategies. Fenestrations of varying sizes on the west and south sides allow winter sunlight while minimizing summer heat and enhancing ventilation. Shaded passageways offer cooler zones, and rainwater harvesting tanks collect approximately 500,000 liters annually, supplemented by onsite wastewater management.

By embedding resilience into its architecture, LLDC exemplifies how cultural institutions can be both context-sensitive and future-ready. The building itself serves as a pedagogical tool, demonstrating how indigenous knowledge and modern engineering can converge to create spaces that are safe, sustainable, and symbolically rich.

Documenting the Collections 

Alongside the building of the Living and Learning Design Centre, work was begun on documenting the collections in readiness for the gallery displays. Of particular importance were the specially commissioned embroidered panels initiated through the Design Center On Wheels. Each piece was systematically photographed and catalogued, including details such as the maker’s name, community affiliation, and pattern type, preserving the unique identities and cultural significance of each motif, such as the scorpion at the midway point on either side of the central medallion in figure 5. Oral interviews were conducted in Kutchi—a dialect that has no written script—and were later translated into Gujarati and then English. These interview transcripts were also digitized to ensure comprehensive recordkeeping. This time-consuming process could only be overseen through locally recruited teams composed of members of the communities themselves. In doing so, LLDC has been able to capture and contextualize some of the region’s most intricate embroidery as markers of its ecosystems and holistic way of living, heralding a break from previous museological practices. Importantly, many of the team at LLDC are multilingual and have the advantage of being able to speak Kutchi. By sitting with the community members, sharing food, and listening to intergenerational stories of how their crafts have changed over time, they have slowly collected facts, piecing them together over days, months, and years. To date, the communities that are being documented (an ongoing process with varying degrees of completion) are the Ahir (within which are the subgroups of Pranthadiya, Machhoya, Boricha), Meghwaad Gurjar, Sodha and Jadeja, Rabaari (including the subgroups Debariya, Kaachhi, Vagadiya, and Bhopa), Meghwaad Maaru, Jat (Garasiya, Danetah, Fakirani, and Haajani), Rau Node, Mutwa, and Halepotra. 

By actively recruiting staff from within these communities, LLDC has been able to ensure and conserve a granular level of knowledge that has been authentically verified at each stage. This practice remains ongoing, safeguarding cultural heritage through grassroots representation and local expertise. Additionally, the collection continues to expand through the acquisition and donations of personal traditional garments and artifacts from the communities as well as those made for commercial sale and the repatriation of antique garments and crafts from Kutch, previously held in Western public and private collections.

Storing the Collections

The collections at the Living and Learning Design Centre are housed in purpose-built, specialized facilities, with the natural materials of the building and construction serving as active agents, conducive to regulating the temperature and light levels. To ensure the collections are protected from pest infestations, natural preventive methods that use local indigenous insect-repelling herbs are employed. Since traditional Western materials like Melinex are unsuitable for the climate, finely woven unbleached cotton and herb-filled pouches are placed within the storage units, and to minimize contamination, visitors and staff must enter barefoot: No outside footwear is allowed inside the archive.⁹

Programming at the Living and Learning Design Centre

The Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery at LLDC serve as dynamic spaces for the transmission, experimentation, and celebration of Kutch’s rich craft traditions. Designed not merely as a production unit but also as pedagogical and collaborative environments, these spaces facilitate a range of activities bridging traditional knowledge and contemporary practice.

Workshops are regularly conducted in the Hands-On gallery, bringing together master artisans, apprentices, students, and visiting designers. These sessions focus on skills transmission, enabling younger generations to learn intricate techniques such as ajrakh block printing, embroidery, felting, spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The studio also functions as a site for experimentation, as a place in which artisans are encouraged to innovate with materials, motifs, and forms while remaining rooted in traditional aesthetics.

Community engagement is central to the Craft Studio’s ethos. Local residents and artisans are invited to observe and participate in open-studio days, fostering a sense of shared ownership and cultural pride. Collaborative projects with design institutions and nongovernmental organizations create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue and economic empowerment. Through its multifaceted programming, the Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery exemplify LLDC’s mission to sustain living traditions by embedding them in spaces of learning, creativity, and community interaction.

Currently, there are approximately 30 active crafts in Kutch, encompassing textiles, vegetal materials, metals, and pottery. Each craft is maintained and utilized, with traditional techniques adapted to suit the available natural resources. LLDC includes these practices as a central aspect of its programming.

Throughout the year, various programs take place, featuring live and performing arts such as dance, drama, music, and film screenings as well as academic conferences and award ceremonies that recognize the work of local artisans. The Winter Festival is an annual major event bringing together traditional craft communities from across India.

Sustaining the Longevity of Craft: Community and Cultural Resilience

The Living and Learning Design Centre offers a compelling model for rethinking museum practice in rural and environmentally sensitive contexts. The pioneering work of the late Chanda Shroff continues under the leadership of her daughter, Ami Shroff. By integrating indigenous knowledge systems into its architectural design, curatorial strategies, and community engagement, LLDC challenges conventional museological frameworks that often prioritize static preservation over dynamic cultural continuity. Its establishment reflects a deliberate effort to create a space that is not only resilient to seismic and climatic disruptions but also responsive to the sociocultural fabric of the region.

The Centre’s infrastructure—characterized by its use of local materials, vernacular construction techniques, and participatory planning—demonstrates a contextually grounded approach to sustainability and resilience. Furthermore, LLDC’s hybrid functionality as a museum, educational hub, and craft studio positions it as a site of both cultural preservation and economic empowerment. It facilitates intergenerational knowledge transfer and supports the livelihoods of artisans engaged in traditional crafts such as embroidery, weaving, and block printing (to name but a few), each one a complex and historically rich practice unique to the region.

In translating a global institutional model into a locally embedded framework, LLDC contributes to a broader discourse on culturally responsive heritage infrastructure. It underscores the importance of ecological sensitivity, community participation, and cultural specificity in the development of museums that serve not only as repositories of history but also as living systems of learning and innovation. As such, LLDC offers valuable insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to design inclusive and resilient cultural institutions in the Global South.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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Romuald Hazoumè (born 1962, Porto-Novo, Benin) began his artistic training unintentionally. Between the ages of 10 and 12, he made masks as part of a Kaléta group.² Kaléta is a tradition mainly carried out by children that was imported to the Republic of Benin in the mid-19th century by former Afro-Brazilian slaves who returned to Africa and settled in Benin. Group members perform during popular celebrations such as Christmas and New Year’s. Kaléta places a strong emphasis on playfulness and scenic art, typically comprising singers, musicians, dancers, and mask-makers. Unlike most traditional Beninese masks, which are made from wood, Kaléta masks are made from discarded everyday objects or materials, such as plastic jerrycans or cardboard, making them more varied in shape and color and often more visually flamboyant. When I interviewed Hazoumè in the spring of 2025, he reminisced about making Kaléta masks as a youth, unaware that this process would lead him to become a renowned artist.³

Hazoumè’s special connection to masks comes not only from his engagement with the Kaléta tradition as a child but also from his Yoruba heritage, specifically as it relates to being a descendant of Lali Alomavo, who was a Babalawo (Voodoo high priest) and advisor to King Dê-Sodji (r. 1848–64) of Hogbonou (now Porto-Novo). Yorubas use masks in various rituals and cults, for example, the Gélédé, a ceremony that pays tribute to Iyà Nlà, the Great Mother, and to the role of women in Yoruba society. On this occasion, the men don masks, dance, and sing, sometimes playing satirical or parodic games, to entertain and honor the women.

Heir to these legacies, Hazoumè posits his artworks, whether created individually or collaboratively, as celebratory and commemorative objects through which he can address a range of topics. The artist prefers to use plastic for their fabrication, rather than the wood favored by the Yoruba, as it is more malleable and lends itself readily to various formal and conceptual experimentations.⁴ Since the 1980s, he has collected plastic gasoline jerrycans used by smugglers along the border separating Benin and Nigeria, which he recycles and transforms into mask sculptures, thus creating works that evoke both contemporary geopolitical and economic issues and local tradition. These containers, the same ones that he has used since childhood, remain his go-to material. For him, the geometric forms of traditional African masks are visible in the shapes of gasoline cans and other everyday objects, which he cuts and remakes into what he calls “masque-bidons” or “mask-cans.” In this way, tradition is never too far removed and can be illustrated using nontraditional materials. Hazoumè’s masks are, in effect, “traditional” ready-mades.

In Yoruba culture, each mask has a cultural, social, and spiritual personality. Hazoumè builds on this concept to craft sculptures that serve as documentary portraits. For example, he created a notable piece titled Bororo du Niger in 1992 after meeting a Bororo/Wodaabe man (fig. 1). This artwork features a face of a Wodaabe male adorned in the makeup and jewelry associated with the annual Gerewol festival, a beauty contest in which young men decorate themselves and perform the Yaake, a ritual dance to seduce young women eligible for marriage. Another example of Hazoumè’s documentary masks is Aloda from 1996 (fig. 2). During the period he created this piece, Hazoumè was researching Yoruba women’s matrimonial hairstyles, a coded language that functions as a kind of social identity card. In the precolonial era, a woman’s hairstyle commonly indicated whether she was single, of marriageable age, married, unfaithful, or experiencing issues in her household. The Aloda hairstyle represented in this portrait, with its cornrows covering the entire skull, leaving the top of the forehead clear, suggests that the married woman is at peace in her home. While some artworks dwell on ancestral forms and ritual, others—like Petite from 1999 (fig. 3)—take their cue from modern life and the artist’s personal encounters. Indeed, he conceived of Petite, which he composed using a typewriter and a cleaning brush, as a tribute to a secretary he had met in Cuba. He was struck by her low wage of just $6 a day, especially considering he had just spent $110 in a single day.⁵

By using discarded everyday objects, especially those made of plastic, Hazoumè critiques the trivialization of the African mask form since the frenzy that emerged in the West in the early 20th century when Westerners first saw the traditional African sculptures and masks brought back from the African colonies by soldiers, missionaries, scientists, and merchants.⁶ Their presence in the West, and particularly their display in museums, has given them new ethnological and artistic value, distancing them in some ways from their original ritual and cultural significance in Africa. These newly discovered forms captivated Westerners, particularly artists and collectors, and led to their increasing popularity. This growing interest also led to a rise in the trade of counterfeit objects, which persists to this day. As descendants of the Beninese mask tradition, Hazoumè’s works reflect on this frenzy for and ensuing trivialization of the African mask shape through a sarcastic touch that dilutes tradition by using humble materials from consumerist society.

Classical African arts, particularly masks and statues, have been a significant topic of discussion in the relationship between the West and Africa since the 20th century. Does displaying traditional African pieces in Western museums compromise their original nature? Should these works even be housed in Western collections?⁷ Sub-Saharan African visual artists of the 1960s were not concerned with addressing this subject directly, as they were primarily focused on pursuing modernity through new forms. This pursuit was often achieved through a distancing from traditional African sculpture, as seen in the work of Aina Onabolu (born Nigeria, 1882–1963) or Iba Ndiaye (French, born Senegal, 1928–2008). Alternatively, some artists, like Christian Lattier (born Ivory Coast, 1925–1978), and art movements such as the Zaria Art Society (1958–1962) or the Dakar School (1960s–1970s), have sought to integrate or reinvent traditional African art forms. However, this work seldom directly criticizes the Western world’s relationship with classical African art.

Romuald Hazoumè was one of the first contemporary artists on the African continent to work on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masks.⁸ Deeply rooted in his Yoruba culture, Hazoumè considers himself to be a present-day aré. In the days of the Yoruba kingdoms, the arés were itinerant artists appointed to create art for the royal court who spread their knowledge and culture from kingdom to kingdom. Hazoumè claims to uphold this tradition by spreading his artistic vision across localities where his assembled masks initiate larger debates.

The assemblage of mask-cans is the artist’s favorite technique for installations, allowing him to layer his work with meaning. Displayed together, the mask-cans unite their voices and personalities to convey multiple threads. His mask-cans converge, for example, different temporalities and symbolize the irreducible link between individuals and their history. Indeed, the plastic gasoline containers recovered and transformed into masks by Romuald Hazoumè bear traces of the memories of the individuals who owned them, featured in the touches of blue, red, yellow, white, or green paint on their surface. In Benin, transporters and sellers of smuggled gasoline use distinctive marks not only to identify themselves among each other while trading with Nigeria but also to protect themselves, since the transport of gasoline is a dangerous business. According to the artist, the color refers to the consciousness or unconsciousness of the Beninese individual, which is attached to the Voodoo religion. Indeed, as he explains: “During their childhood at home, the fuel transporters experienced Voodoo ceremonies in their backyards before converting to Christianity or Islam. Growing up in that environment, they learned that, for example, red could be a protective color. Each person thus adopts the cult color that is personal to them at home.”⁹ Red refers to the Voodoo cult of Shango, the god of justice, lightning, and thunder; blue to the cult of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea; yellow to the cult of Elegba, the god of encounters and an intermediary between other Voodoos; white to the cult of Damballah, the god of fecundity; or green to the cult of Oduduwa, the creator god. Thus, these mask-cans, through color, represent, for the artist, the faces of the individuals who once carried them. Their assemblage in installations enables the artist to tackle a variety of societal discourses.

For example, in 1997, Hazoumè created his first well-known large-scale installation, La Bouche du roi (fig. 4).¹⁰ Held by the British Museum, this multimedia work is a tribute to the memory of slavery and the transatlantic trade that took place from the 17th to the 19th century between Dahomey, the Americas, and Europe.¹¹ The mask-cans attached to the conscious or unconscious mind of their previous owners illustrate here the difficulty of obscuring the memory of slavery, as it is a deep-rooted history shared by African, European, and American people alike. Hazoumè’s artwork is a life-size representation of a slave ship containing 304 African slaves—each represented by a mask-can—who are crammed together in the ship’s hold. The artist based his reconstruction on the 1789 plans of the Brookes, a renowned British slave ship.¹² At the front of the ship, two masks are arranged, set apart from the rest of the group by a rifle, emphasizing the violence associated with the trade. They represent the characters of Chacha de Souza (in yellow) and the king of the Kingdom of Dahomey, Adandozan (1797–1818), and/or his brother Ghézo (1818–1858; in black), upon whom he depended. Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849) was a major slave trader and the chacha, chief under the authority of the Dahomean king of the town of Ouidah, the hub of the Dahomean slave trade. Together, the king and the chacha were responsible for the slave trade: the king captured the slaves, while the chacha sold them to the Europeans. Both were responsible for transporting slaves to the Americas, and as a result, held the captain’s position at the bow of the ship La Bouche du roi. Through his installation, Hazoumè confronts this chapter in Beninese history. According to the artist, taking responsibility in the present for the future means understanding both culture and the past, however hard it may be.

Even if it tackles a historical subject, La Bouche du roi bears contemporary resonances as it evokes the smuggling of raw materials and goods as well as modern-day forms of forced labor. Looking at his work in the present time, Hazoumè connects it to the current treatment of sub-Saharan migrants in Libya or that of South Asian workers in the Gulf countries, even though he had not yet considered those issues in 1997.¹³

In later works, such as Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (2013), the artist chose to address poor governance in modern nation-states. Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (fig. 5) depicts a pirogue sinking into a sea of mask-cans. On the boat’s deck, a white rat symbolizes the figure of the immoral ruler. The rat wears blinding dark glasses and is seemingly unaware of the disaster unfolding below. The work is a sarcastic political critique of the inaction of certain heads of state, especially dictators, regarding the issues that affect their citizens’ lives.

A more recent work, ASÈ (2024), created as part of Everything Precious Is Fragile, the first Republic of Benin pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, encapsulates the multiple threads in Hazoumè’s practice.¹⁴ This work is built with 540 plastic gasoline jerrycans to form a more than 13-foot-high hut with two opposing entrances (fig. 6). Smoothed on the outside using a process of plastic melting, the structure appears to have been built from raw earth, reminiscent of traditional architecture in Benin. Inside, the hundreds of colored mask-cans encircle and immerse the visitor in a meditative penumbra, barely illuminated by only a few beams of light (fig. 7). ASÈ was conceived as a sacred temple, reflecting the strong imprint of Voodoo religion on Beninese culture. During colonization, Voodoo was fought by Christian missionaries, and then it was banned by the Marxist regime of President Mathieu Kérékou in the 1970s.¹⁵ Despite these attempts throughout time and history, Voodoo has remained a part of Beninese culture. The artist thought of ASÈ as a space in which, upon entering, visitors could meditate, make a vow, and say “ASÈ,” which in Yoruba means “amen” and “so be it” but also “power.” The mask-cans functioned here as signifiers of the psychological connection between individuals and the Voodoo religion.

According to Hazoumè, there is power in returning to one’s history and culture, and ASÈ is his first installation entirely dedicated to traditional Beninese culture and speaks for it, fully embracing heritage as “a contemporary solution.” As the artist noted in 2024: “Today, our biggest problem as Africans is that we look at Europe, and we want to do what Europe does. But we can embrace our culture and be ourselves. When you talk about your own culture, you have a place in the world, which is not the case when you talk about someone else’s culture. Today we have to look at home.”¹⁶

A looping recorded recitation of a panegyric praising Tassin Hangbé, the warrior queen who ruled the Kingdom of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin, from 1708 to 1711, highlights the significance of women’s role and power in Beninese society. Tassin Hangbé is recognized for having created the Amazons, also known as the Agodjé, an all-female military regiment that remained active until the end of the 19th century, when Dahomey was colonized. Through the Queen’s tale, the artwork presents an ode to women, echoing the Yoruba idiom “Iya Alachê” or “Iya ASÈ,” that is, “The woman has power.”

Romuald Hazoumè is an heir to the Beninese and Yoruba mask traditions, embracing both continuity and transformation. His work, which illustrates and critiques various historical and contemporary themes, is often also infused with a sense of humor or parody, drawing from the legacy of the Kaléta or Gélédé. In Hazoumè’s art, tradition and memory are not only preserved but also reimagined through everyday objects. By doing so, the Beninese artist positions himself as a guardian of memory and an actor in the formation of a new consciousness.

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