Ananya Sikand: Today we’re joined by aqui Thami, whose talk will reflect on building cultural and community infrastructures from the margins through Sister Library, Bombay Underground, Bombay Zine Fest, Dharavi Art Room, and her wider artistic practice. Speaking from her position as an adivasi person,¹ aqui traces how art becomes a site of healing, memory, and collective survival amid the ongoing realities of caste violence, racism, displacement, and erasure. Moving between personal narrative, grassroots organizing, publishing, pedagogy, and studio practice, she considers what it means to create space outside institutional permission and what communities teach us about care, authorship, and belonging. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, her presentation is an invitation to think together about culture as something lived, shared, and continually rebuilt through relationships. 

aqui Thami: I want to start with this image of our kids with parallel universe (2023), a work we made for Chemould Prescott Road, one of the oldest private art galleries in India (fig. 1). It was a big shift for us—from the street into a gallery. It was wonderful that they made space for us to explore what a parallel practice and universe look like.

I also want to say sewa to you all. This is how we, in Thangmi Kham, the language of my people, say “I see you.” I want to acknowledge my ancestors, elders, and spirit guides; the sky above me, the land below me, and the air and water surrounding me; and you, for bringing us together to witness each other even though we are in faraway continents. 

I am aqui; Thami is my people. Here are images of the lands that I come from and that made me (figs. 2a–b). These lands are governed by caste, specifically the Nepali-speaking caste Hindu community. The hierarchy of caste ensures that Indigenous peoples are cast outside of it. A marker of our community is our language, which stems from other Indigenous languages rather than from Indo-Aryan ones. According to Hindu scripture, Indigenous peoples are without souls; therefore, we are outside the philosophy of karma whereby we can be reborn into a higher caste order in our next life depending on the karma of this life. Thus, we are completely absolved of the possibility of being reborn—manifested in the way that we’ve been treated for many decades—subject to genocidal and ongoing violence. We are among the world’s most endangered communities, consisting of approximately 30,000 people with 10,000 speakers of our language. 

My mountains are also consumed by tea plantations. The British started the one I am from. My great-grandparents were sold into the plantation as slaves, and my family is still there—they’re survivors of plantation and militarized violence. Because my parents are land defenders, I was able to leave my home, land, and community at age 15. I grew up in the mainland and had to parent myself at a precarious age, as a young teenager, especially because native children are among the most trafficked communities in South Asia. If you go to any red-light district, for example, Kamathipura in Bombay, you will see Indigenous and Dalit girls and women—our bodies are treated with disgust in the mainland. Having survived all of this, it makes sense why I wanted to create safer spaces.

People come to Bombay because it is the so-called city of dreams. But there’s also a huge gap between how we experience our city and how the city is outside of us. As artists, we are allowed to be in a space where we are outsiders and to live in the city of outsiders. Bombay Underground began as a refusal of and resistance to this separation. Because we were made to feel like we shouldn’t exist in certain spaces, we started creating others where we could gather, think, talk, be together, and collectively care for each other as well as the city. 

Bombay Underground is a space of collaboration with grassroots movements, such as Indigenous resistance movements, which often have no funding so there’s no communication of what’s really happening in the Northeast or in other regions—or even in other parts of Bombay. We collaborate to make posters and zines, to collect funds, and we take to the streets. We work alongside bookwallas, the booksellers of Bombay, because as the city has shifted and changed, it’s become more pristine and untouched by people like us. Bombay fed me culturally; it gave me the possibility to dream, to read and learn, and this happened in the street with the bookwallas, who recommended books to me. Though they may not have formal educations, they know their books. They used to say, “If you liked bell hooks, then you’ll also like Patricia Hill Collins.” That is how I learned. To see these booksellers thrown off the streets and replaced by big fancy bookshops is very sad. So we bought books from them to create neighborhood reading spaces, and this is how Sister Library came to be. 

Through Bombay Underground, we started Bombay Zine Fest (fig. 4), now in its 10th year. Zine Fest is completely independent, without external funding or advertisement. Everything is from the ground up and via word of mouth. We’ve been very blessed to have thousands of people coming to Zine Fest and we [my collaborator Himanshu S and I] always find places to host us. Himanshu and I have built a lot of things together because we come from precarious backgrounds and don’t have the same relationship to art practice, fame, and wealth that others we know do. 

Here’s a picture taken outside the Dharavi Art Room, where kids document lived experiences and histories of migration of women in Dharavi (fig. 5). Storytelling about family typically happens from the male perspective, but women live very different lives. So far, we’ve worked with over 10,000 children, and the Art Room is a space that is loved by the community. Early on, we used to move from one space to another, from the Maharashtra Nature Park to the bus stop, but as our kids got older, we noticed that the girls were uncomfortable in such public spaces. Our current space, where we’ve been for the past 10–12 years, was offered to us by one of the parents. It’s just above their house. Over the years, we’ve seen our kids growing from little babies, whose elder siblings would carry them to the Art Room, to finishing university—we’ve been with them throughout. 

Being in Dharavi, and coming from precarious backgrounds ourselves, we understand what it means when people from outside come to spaces like this, and how uncomfortable it can be. We specifically created the Art Room for the women and children of the community, because they lack spaces where they can go and do whatever they want. The Art Room is a safe space—the kids know they won’t be abused here. We have a library and art classes, but more importantly, it’s a space of possibility where they can transcend and dream beyond whatever they’re facing. We go on field trips to museums, etc., to show the kids that Bombay is also their city. Something you notice in Dharavi is that locals never leave—or if they do, it’s only to go to their villages.

Over the years, the Art Room has become an artist-run center and community archive. Because Dharavi is in the center of the city, it’s prized real estate, and there’s a lot of changing hands in who the owner or so-called owner of the land is. People are always living in insecurity or being displaced. Our community in Dharavi, our kids, are told that they “live like cockroaches so it’s better to move far away.” These are the kinds of things they are told as their houses are being demolished. When they grow up and can return to Dharavi, they can look back at the images they were working on, at the exhibitions they made in the space, and remember what it meant to them and what Dharavi looked like to them, as opposed to what they are told it is. The Art Room has also become a space where people with differing ideologies and religious beliefs can come together to see each other as collaborators and friends rather than blindly participating in acting out against each other. 

Here’s an image of women with whom we did a photography project (fig. 6). They wanted to hold cameras and explore their neighborhood, which resulted in a series of exhibitions and a publication. It was the first time they came together in a space that many of them had never had access to—they hadn’t been to school and/or they were married off at a young age. The Art Room gave them a space where they could sit together and understand what it means to exist in community—which they’ve never had the luxury to do before. B-Town Kids was another program we initiated that looked at storytelling as a means of reclaiming history from the ground up (fig. 7). It was a photographic exchange project for kids age nine and under in Basel [Switzerland] and Bombay. As an artist, I’ve always had the possibility to really understand others and break oppressive structures using the tactic of togetherness, and that’s central to the work we do. 

Turning back to the bookwallas and the discrepancy I was seeing between knowledge to be shared versus knowledge for specific groups of people, I realized that the containing of knowledge is by design. Sister Library (figs. 8a–c) started with a practice of reading women exclusively, and later expanded into a full-fledged library. It was not easy to build Sister Library—I experienced resistance from feminists, communists, Marxists, and leftists as well as the expected resistance from the right. Sister Library allows for the breaking down of hierarchies, borders, and other palpable lines of difference. Many women like me live their lives in Bombay as completely invisible. It’s almost like we don’t exist. But in Sister Library, we sit with each other, listen to each other’s voices, and always make space for those who don’t usually get to talk about their experiences. 

Sister Library also has a press—we are the only risograph press in South Asia—and we make zines and newspapers.² At the moment, these are on hold because of funding. Our money goes to whatever needs the most attention, and presently, that’s the Walking with Savitri Mai Fellowship, which supports young girls pursuing education. This Fellowship honors India’s first female teacher, Savitri Mai, who started the first school for girls. Savitri Mai walked from her house to her school every day, carrying a spare sari, because people would pelt her with stones and rubbish. When she was asked how she felt about this, she said, “I feel like they’re throwing flowers at my feet, because I know what my goal is.” In celebration of her work, our Fellowship supports young girls from school through university. We’ve now had five girls finish university, and it gives me great pleasure to share this because I used to be one of them, someone who came from a family in which nobody had ever gone to university before.

We also have other Library events, such as our annual feminist school, Sister Residency, which we began last year and through which we’ve hosted two Indigenous women artists, and Sister Radio, etc. We also offer crisis support—often, because of militarized violence or the climate crisis, the people who suffer the most are Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous women—so we send support immediately. Sister Library is not just a place where we sit together and read; we center pedagogy and community.

From here on, I’ll share works I’ve made and projects I’ve been involved in outside of Bombay Underground, Dharavi Art Room, and Sister Library. Recently, I co-curated a museum exhibition on zines and comics.³ It was the first time that this museum had allowed art objects to be held and touched. We had over 1,000 zines, and this particular section had zines, posters, and films made by women (fig. 9a). It was a celebration of the underground. I also made Chapa Ghar (2023, 2025; fig. 9b), in homage to a form of the press—to the xerox shops that you see all over Bombay, where I learned printing and printmaking. It is so freeing to be allowed to use a machine to make that I wanted everyone to experience it. But it also makes you rethink what making is, because when you look at self-publishing and zine-making in the Subcontinent, the practice is very different from in the West. In South Asia, you have to collaborate with the man, usually Dalit or Indigenous, who works in a xerox shop and who might be a collaborator in solidarity with the movement because he’s making space for such work.

For the last two years, I’ve been working outside India because of some violence that I suffered that made it impossible for me to work in Bombay. Pā āsha (“to knit” or mending a broken stitch in Thangmi Kham, 2023; fig. 10a), is a ceremony that I did in Berlin about how all of us are woven into each other’s lives, and how if one stitch comes undone, everything unravels. Ceremony to bear witness (2020; fig. 10b) is from a ceremony that I did for a gallery in Delhi, where I was a witness—recalling, remembering, and honoring people who were killed by the military every single day for a period of three months.

Mountain Girls (2023; fig. 10c) is a shrine to Heidi. When I was working in Switzerland, I saw Heidi—the book and character—everywhere; she is like a mascot. I related to her because I was also a girl taken away from my mountains, so I created this work as there’s much curiosity about shamanism, and I invited people to make their own altars.

In Breathing with my baje (2024; fig. 10d), I was thinking about the violence of not being allowed to feel fear as expressed in the militarism of the Gorkha Regiment—in which my grandfather was enlisted and from which he never returned. Each prayer flag was a screen print of a Gorkha Certificate, which is necessary to enlist in the military. These government certificates are only issued to the Kirati peoples as it is thought that Kirati men feel no fear. I immersed the prayer flags in a mix of hormones that our bodies produce when we feel fear, and then I put them up so that when the wind touched them, that fear was dispersed. Usually these flags disperse prayers, but I wanted to bring out the fears of so many young men whose lives were lost in wars designed by the West. Early on, I looked through archival images in museums to find pictures of my grandfather, but all I found were war images. I wanted to take away the affects of war from these photographs, so I replaced weapons with everyday objects (fig. 10e) so that all of the images felt like I was looking at my grandfather. I just wanted to allow these men normalcy for a brief moment.

i see you (2024; fig. 11) is a body of work that I did with a camera from the 1940s. Indigenous women, especially those from plantations, are among the most photographed people in the world. My grandmothers were photographed a lot because it was thought that we would become extinct, so I wanted to explore these archives and play with the idea of what it means to be frozen in the past, because there’s always the expectation that we are exactly as we have been archived to be. 

AS: As you’ve been speaking, your words “If you’re not working with the community, and you’re not sharing resources, then what are you doing?” have been ringing in my head. Thinking through these words, your presentation, Burning Tite-Pati,⁴ and Esther Syiem’s words—specifically, “There was always a sense of something that had to be done for the community in terms of retrieval, recordings, anything that would make these stories come alive”⁵—has made me wonder about your relationship with orality. Can you reflect on this?

aT: Orality is very important to me. I didn’t realize how much I longed for it until I could create it. I’ve always felt the way education and learning are designed outside of Indigenous cultures is not working because one learns in isolation—with a book in a library where you have to be quiet and can’t speak to anyone or express what you’re learning. Whereas, for us, we come together, learn together, tell stories, and learn through song and ceremony. I did both, because I was always both in my community and outside of it, and it was difficult to just be by myself.

At Sister Library, we have a reading circle, which is an exercise in listening and in reading. So, as part of it, someone holds a text and reads it as much as they want and then they pass it along to somebody else, who carries on the reading. And this is important because it allows us to make space within ourselves to hold other people’s voices, and every time someone is speaking or reading, you can feel how a certain thing is being conveyed by their intonation and by how they hold each word in their mouth. And it’s such a special feeling; it’s truly a gift to experience that. You can see how their bodies change and soften, and how their faces change and shift while they are understanding a certain thing, while they are reading. And as you witness this, something also happens to you, and that kind of learning is so intimate and valuable, yet it is typically not allowed. Somewhere along the way, I think the non-Indigenous world gets disconnected. When you’re kids, you do connect, but as you grow up, you become more isolated. It’s been a gift for me to be able to bring this practice back into my life and my community. It also makes you want to do better without being forced to do so. You sit together, think together, and when you’re not able to think and process a certain thing, you bring it to the community, and everyone helps you think it through. I think that’s beautiful. 

This is also how Sister Radio was born. It began during COVID as a practice of care calls between Indigenous sisters everywhere, because we were so isolated; and though we were consuming a lot of media, we were not seeing ourselves in it as Indigenous peoples—especially as, for example, those from my community don’t necessarily believe in medical institutions. It was a time of fear for us, not just fearing for our lives, but a different kind of fear. And so, it started as care calls, and then it became a space where we’d share so much. I thought that it was important for the rest of the world to listen to these conversations. Because I feel like we have a sense of responsibility to share what we’ve not been allowed to share. So, I hold orality in very high regard.⁶

AS: I’m thinking about a word that you’ve used—“tactic”—and of orality as a tactic; your pink posters that you posted across Bombay as another tactic; and do-it-yourself (DIY), doing-it-together (DDT), and don’t-do-it (DDI) as still other tactics in your practice. Could you speak on this?

aT: These are philosophies and life practices that have sustained me not just in art, because for me, art and life are intermingled. It’s a very Indigenous way of doing, where things can’t be separated from one another. A lot of my work is just me doing it myself and learning while doing. But there is something to be said about DDT, which I practice a lot. And then there’s the practice of DDI, and so of being very mindful of not participating in certain things. I get a lot of criticism for it at times, but I’m also flexible, I allow myself to understand things, and I’m always open to conversation. DIY, DIT and DDI are practices that I live with and by, and they’ve held me.

Lucy Gallun: Could you talk more about the works from your own art practice that exist more as individual pieces and how you have created space to weave that practice into the work that you’re doing in Bombay and with community in a particular location?

aT: I love making work in Bombay because everything is so instant, and everything is made there, and I know everyone. It’s been my home outside of my lands, and I basically grew up there, but it’s also a city that expels people. It’s like a whirlwind, and you have to be inside of it and move at its pace or you get thrown out of it. And being an outsider, an Indigenous person from the Northeast, a person of the borderlands—therefore not Indian—there’s a lot of tension there. 

I don’t get any art grants from India, and everything that I have gotten to practice my work, or to be able to think and learn different things, was allowed by going outside. I was well received outside, and I had the space to speak freely and was not canceled or threatened. There was space [for me]. I think the world at large is now asking questions and seeking answers. They’re looking at Indigenous ways of living and practicing, and so there’s a lot of pressure being put on Indigenous peoples, Indigenous thinkers, Indigenous culture workers. But at the same time, it’s also, for the first time in many years, that we’ve had the space to look at each other, collaborate with each other, reflect with each other. So, I’ve had the privilege of working with Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island, from the Sami, and from the Arctic as well as with Indigenous peoples in Australia and Africa. It’s an exciting time for me, even if art institutions have no space or very limited space for us. 

There is an alternate space, an underground even. Things are happening. And those sparks are important not just for us, but also for the larger art ecosystem, because it’s not just what happens within bigger museums and institutions that is culture, it’s also what’s happening outside of them, which is more exciting to me. It has to be both. And this is not to say that it’s not hard. It’s immensely hard for me to navigate white Western spaces, because I don’t have any blood memory of these realities or of the community in such spaces, where disposability is valued, where you move from one thing to another in a very fast-paced way. Or rather, I am part of a community of a different kind, one in which we hold on to everything and rebuild every broken thing so that we don’t have to dispose of it. So, these are challenges that I’m now navigating by myself in the Western world, which is difficult, but here we are.

LG: Another aspect is the work you’re doing as a founder and organizer of various initiatives and spaces, and the ongoing community activities that are part of them. How have you balanced or given space to your own work alongside these efforts—or how do you think about the relationship between your art practice and your work?

aT: All of these things are a different kind of learning for me, because I used to be very involved. I’d go to Dharavi every day, but now I have some distance, and I think it’s because now I can see that a lot of children have grown up, and some have graduated from the J. J. School of Art and now are teachers at different schools. And I also want to see how it organically shapes into being what is required in the city. And it’s interesting for me because it’s a space that came out of my heart because I desired a space like this and then we built it together; but it’s also a space of the city that the city has embraced, and it flows and is shaped into what the city requires. I talk to the kids every day. We have a lot of video calls, but it’s also about shared responsibility, and we function using a very organic model that comes from love and responsibility, because we don’t have any paid staff. Everyone does the work because they really love the space and they want the space to exist and function.

Elena Pérez-Ardá López: I want to know more about the relationship between you and the big, powerful institutions with which you’ve worked. How was the dialogue and process of working with them? What was the reception?

aT: It’s always a challenge working with institutions. Typically when I work with institutions in India, it is through people that I trust like Nancy Adajania, who for many years has supported my practice.⁷Whereas with the please touch gently exhibition in Delhi, which is not my city, I didn’t really know anyone. When they approached me three years ago, I told them that if I work on a show on zines, then I’m not going to do it without Himanshu, and they made space for that. We also had another friend, Bharath Murthy, a comic maker who runs an indie comic fest, come on board. But it was really hard to put up the show. We wanted people to touch and feel the zines. We didn’t want them behind vitrines. We wanted the zines to be zines rather than art objects. So that was a big challenge. But a lot of people were introduced to zine-making and able to use the copier. People were able to read the words of Dalit activists and Indigenous artists and watch videos, and so it paid off. 

AS: Could you talk a little bit more about funding and how you make all these incredible things happen for the communities with whom you’re building these spaces?

aT: Funding is always a problem for us because I don’t come from money—and I don’t know anyone who comes from money. My community is from Dharavi, so you can imagine when we need money, we’re just like, oh, what do we do now? I’m not very good at going to parties and networking, so I work really hard and put everything that I make back into the community, because where else will I spend my money? All of my travels are only possible because someone else is buying me a ticket to work on an exhibition or to participate in a residency, etc. Friends also support us. For example, someone says it’s my birthday, and I want to give x amount, and that might take care of the rent for the library, etc. 

Recently we held the exhibition fundraiser called Are You My Sister?, and wonderful artist giants like Dayanita Singh and Gauri Gill gave us their works. Up-and-coming artists—contemporaries of mine such as Rajyashri Goody—also gave us work, and we sold some of it. We’re looking at hosting another edition because it was both a provocation and an invitation—because, yes, you are making feminist work, but are you my sister? All the money from such initiatives goes back to the community because nobody is paid and everyone is a volunteer; and after we subtract the monies required for framing, printing, and other exhibition-related costs, the remaining amount goes back into running and sustaining our spaces. 

We always have food and drink, sanitary products in the toilets, because a lot of women facing different precarities come to these spaces, and we don’t want them to have to voice what they might need. We never know if someone has not had a meal in many days, and we want the space to be as welcoming as possible for as many people as possible. We’re also always looking for funding for the school and college program, because as you can imagine, sending kids to college is hard. Our kids go to school and university in the morning, and then they come to the library and use it as a buffer space before they go back to Dharavi. The library is the middle space between their neighborhood and the world outside. So they’re usually chilling in the library—they read, they watch a film, there’s a reading circle or a potluck. We have all sorts of events happening in the library. And then when other people come to the library and talk to them, and they can tell that they are Dalit or oppressed people, they don’t expect them to say, oh yeah, I go to Sophia College [for Women] or SNDT [Women’s University] or Wilson [College]. They’re always taken aback, which gives me so much joy. 

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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When we speak of the Mekong, we are referring not only to a body of water, a river that runs approximately 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from the Plateau of Tibet to the South China Sea, but also to a body of land, a region, a geography of nations interconnected by this shared artery. Traversing China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia before dispersing into the Mekong Delta in the southern reaches of Vietnam, the river materializes what is described as the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Today, the Mekong and the GMS signify a problem of intensifying scale, one woven together by material geography, political governance, development strategy, and climate change. As Anoulak Kittikhoun (former CEO of the Mekong River Commission) has observed, the Mekong operates as a transnational artery of exceptional consequence, sustaining regional economies through rice production and hydropower while remaining among the most intensively “interfered with” waterways in the world, shaped by uneven regimes of management and intervention from colonial hydrology schemes to contemporary dam infrastructures (fig. 1).¹ Alongside these technocratic and geopolitical frames, other epistemologies exist. For riverine communities, the Mekong holds cosmological significance and yields situated knowledge. Animated by spirits, omens, and ritual and narrative traditions, the river continues to be apprehended as a medium of passage, impermanence, and cyclical renewal.

This juxtaposition of the multiple ways in which the Mekong exists as a figure of signification and a lived site gestures to the distinctions one might draw, not uncomplicatedly, between regionalism and regionality. If “regionalism” denotes the institutional pursuit of collective, coordinated identity, “regionality” suggests the more tacit, shared, or parallel worldviews that surface in a contiguous topography. Art exhibitions can be driven by regionalist enterprise, aspiration, and strategy. Artworks as well. But perhaps artworks can reveal more about cross-border affinities and imaginations shaped by shared ecological conditions and practices of worldmaking. To pursue this question, I turn first to earlier curatorial uses of geographical metaphor before shifting from representation to perception through close readings of specific works.

In my 2013 essay “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia,” I examined the ideological work performed by geographical metaphor through the curatorial construction of regional art histories.² Drawing from political geography and humanist spatial theory, I approached terms such as “Asia,” “the Mekong,” and “the Ho Chi Minh Trail” not as neutral toponyms but rather as charged conceptual frameworks through which space is transformed into place and endowed with political, cultural, and historical meaning.³ Because metaphor operates through transference, if not transformation, I examined how artist-organizers and curators mobilized it in the 1990s and 2000s, when institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Japan Foundation sponsored exhibitions and symposia to reify Southeast Asia’s regional integration. Focusing on mainland Southeast Asia, which lacks the linguistic and geographic cohesion often associated with maritime Southeast Asia, or “Nusantara,” I argued that “the Mekong” functioned as more than a cartographic fact. It can be understood instead as a palimpsest of competing historical imaginaries, from colonial fantasy and wartime violence to its 1990s rebranding as the Greater Mekong Subregion. As such, the river functioned less as metonym than as metaphor, registering the traces of cross-border histories through which the region has been materially and imaginatively constituted. 

Therefore, when curators invoked “the Mekong,” they were tapping into this deeply sedimented imagery. Exhibitions like the Mekong platform at the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2009, co-curated by Richard Streitmatter-Tran and Russell Storer, attempted to lend coherence to a selection of artists from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. There, the riverine metaphor functioned conceptually and pragmatically, as a recognizable framework for international audiences, a rationale for artist selection, and a narrative scaffold for regional dialogue, articulated by Streitmatter-Tran as a “mutual Mekong.”⁴ Yet the presentation drew criticism for its exclusion of China, through which more than 40 percent of the river flows, leading one critic to accuse it of producing a simplified, appealing image of Southeast Asia that masked the region’s complex political and resource conflicts.⁵ If this critique exposed the limits of metaphor as curatorial gloss, the 2010 Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail intensified these concerns.“⁶ By overlaying the geohistorical specificity of the Vietnam War’s Ho Chi Minh Trail with the Chinese Red Army’s Long March, the artist-organizers sought to mobilize metaphor as a method for transnational dialogue. However, in tense dialogues that surfaced during the project segment in Phnom Penh, local artists and organizers challenged the project’s extractive nature, its privileged jargon, and its failure to acknowledge the specificities of Cambodian history, ultimately foregrounding the asymmetries of exchange that can underwrite such ostensibly collaborative ventures.⁷

An emphasis on the curatorial can mute the agency of artworks, meriting a shift from the question of exhibition as regional representation to the operations of metaphor as artistic method. Metaphor is always already at the heart of what art does in terms of poetic estrangement and provocation, as Soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky theorized.⁸ This prompts consideration of how contemporary artworks engage the temporal and tacit dimensions of regional imagination, in which metaphor is treated less as geographical anchor and more as material and structural condition. Case studies from the 2023 Thailand Biennale, specifically works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Thailand) and Nguyễn Trinh Thi (b. 1973, Vietnam), demonstrate how landscape, ecology, theater, sound, and automation produce shifting, often indeterminate metaphorical associations that resist narrative legibility (figs. 2, 3). In doing so, these works activate geographical metaphor as a process of defamiliarization and refamiliarization, evoking the Mekong as a multiplicity of lived realities and an unstable metaphor for futurity.

Before turning to the 2023 Thailand Biennale, it is useful to situate perceptions of the Mekong as a catalyst for cultural production. Gridthiya Gaweewong traces the lack of coherence in earlier subregional initiatives to their roots in top-down geopolitical and philanthropic frameworks shaped by Cold War alignments and transnational funding.⁹ Often conceived in metropolitan centers and realized in urban capitals, these projects cast the Mekong less as a lived site than as a symbolic vehicle for “collaboration” in the service of regional development, with local practitioners positioned as ancillary to externally authored narratives. This echoes Patrick Flores’s critique that curatorial regionalism presents a quandary in which regional actors may be reduced to informants rather than interlocutors.¹⁰ In response to limited local initiative and indifference among Thai artists toward neighboring scenes, Gaweewong pursued a more grounded approach inspired by Montien Boonma’s proposal for a community-based “art and life” project, developing the Mekong Lab.¹¹ Though constrained by early 2000s political and economic conditions, she argues such efforts helped shift the Mekong from retrospective metaphor to a site of contemporary artistic production; she notes, however, that as institutional exhibitions featuring the Mekong proliferated, grassroots initiatives declined due to diminishing sources of international funding, underscoring the fragility of regionally embedded practices.¹²

More than a decade later, the 2023 Thailand Biennale, titled The Open World, revisited the Mekong as both river and region (figs. 4, 5). Co-directed by Gridthiya Gaweewong and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and co-curated by Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram, the biennale featured exhibitions and works installed across Chiang Rai province in northernmost Thailand, with sites in the cities of Chiang Rai and Chiang Saen, and along the Mekong in the Golden Triangle (the riverine confluence of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar). Addressing themes of ethnic and artistic diversity, narcopolitics, and transborder mobility, it was distinguished not only by its spatial dispersion but also by the visible investment of local communities, shaping its social infrastructure and prompting its characterization as a biennale “only for the locals.”¹³ Here, the Mekong was not mobilized as curatorial metaphor or developmental trope, but rather encountered as a material site and figure of transborder and subregional historical formation. Curatorial and artistic strategies emphasized shifts in scale from city to province to region, privileging geohistorical genealogies, such as Lanna and the Golden Triangle, over current national frameworks, and inviting a more dispersed, diachronic sense of regionality. Chiang Rai thus served as a generative location through an embedded yet shifting configuration of perspectives, rather than as a centralized historical framework, abstract provocation, or fixed vantage point.¹⁴ 

The 2023 Thailand Biennale thus demonstrates a shift in regional representation that has been gaining currency. While major exhibitions of “Southeast Asian art” have tended to represent the region as a syncretic assemblage of artists from ASEAN addressing national problems¹⁵, over the past two decades, artworks and films have increasingly turned to microhistories and human geography, foregrounding the Mekong’s precarity across environmental, infrastructural, and religious domains. Here, the river emerges as a medium through which different forms of agency are negotiated. In his book Mekong Dreaming (2020), anthropologist Andrew Alan Johnson describes dreaming as an agentic technology mediating human and nonhuman worlds and enabling riverine communities to navigate the disruptions of hydropower and environmental change and the legacies of historical violence, opening vistas onto “new realms of the unknown and unnamed.”¹⁶ For those who live alongside it, the Mekong is thus understood through a confluence of science and lore. At the same time, the river functions as a metaphor for precarious ecology and uncertain temporality—figuring a speculative nonlinear time that plays with ambiguous duration and already mourns possible futures. 

The moving image has most notably been used to represent the Mekong as both physical site and shifting signifier, using the multimodal capacities of the medium to register precarity, unknowability, and temporal flux. Two films commissioned for The Quiet in the Land: Luang Prabang, Laos (2004–8, curated by France Morin), exemplify this approach. In All That’s Solid Melts into Air (Karl Marx) (2006), Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier destabilize visual primacy through an atmospheric interplay of sound, voice, and image, producing what I have described elsewhere as a “horizon of un-knowing” that privileges listening over sight.¹⁷ Similarly, in The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004–7), Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba stages collective, futile gestures along the river to evoke disorientation and temporal slippage, casting the Mekong as a horizon without fixed destination, using presentism and transience as allegories for globalization.¹⁸ This unsettling of expected riverine imagery is echoed by Phan Thảo Nguyễn (b. 1987, Vietnam) in the film Mekong Mechanical (2012), where the pastoral delta is supplanted by industrial repetition and agribusiness, refiguring the river as a site of labor and environmental degradation, and the oneiric factory setting a site where personal and collective pipe dreams collide. Film theorist May Adadol Ingawanij observes how in Phan’s later film Becoming Alluvium (2019), the Mekong is revisited through a humanist, mythologizing framework, its “eco-aesthetics” rendering the Mekong’s cosmological and regenerative force, and interweaving cyclical and linear temporalities to position the river as both maternal and destructive.¹⁹ 

Other recent filmic projects have similarly explored the Mekong’s temporal currents, prompting “Mekong Futurism” as a potential shorthand.²⁰ Even if the naming of another regional futurism risks romanticization, projects like Mekong 2030 (2020), an omnibus of short films produced by the former Luang Prabang Film Festival, demonstrate the productive complexity of such speculative approaches. Bringing together filmmakers from across the region, Mekong 2030 taps into the draw of imagining possible futures.²¹ The resulting films range in tone from the allegorical and didactic to the lyrical and experimental, such as The Unseen River (2020) by Phạm Ngọc Lân (b. 1986, Vietnam), in which the Mekong becomes a metaphor for reversible flows of time, carrying regret, aspiration, and spiritual transformation through both narrative and cinematic form (fig. 6).²²

Phạm’s approach resists the techno-fetishism often associated with futurism, instead foregrounding more subtle constructions of riverine imaginaries. This reverts to the closing note of my earlier essay, which concludes with an alternative model of signification employed by the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture (est. 1998) in Phnom Penh, as discussed by Ashley Thompson.²³ Reflecting on the untranslated Khmer word reyum (“cicada crying/singing”), Thompson describes it as a “present absence,” an inarticulate sonic trace of loss that resists translation.²⁴ In this sense, reyum operates as a culturally specific sonic metaphor. Rather than seeking external legibility, it focuses on local address as an affective and meaningful evocation that may suggest inarticulable loss, but also a regional cadence of cyclical, seasonal time measured by insect song. 

Along these lines, two artworks featured at the 2023 Thailand Biennale—Blue Encore (2023) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Thailand) and Ri s̄eīyng (Sound-Less, 2023) by Nguyễn Trinh Thi (b. 1973, Vietnam)—reveal something similar about the Mekong and metaphor. Focusing on their use of technology and theatricality, I question how one might infer a sense of regional identification from the artists’ visualization and auralization of landscape and ecology. The two artists are renowned as filmmakers, yet while these projects extend their cinematic trajectories, the works contain no filmic components. And in contrast to the works just discussed, the Mekong as region and river is visually elusive but not without some mimetic trace. What is most compelling here is how metaphor operates less as subject matter than as the technological, temporal, and atmospheric structures of the works themselves. 

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s stories are typically set in the northeastern Isan region of Thailand, where animist cosmologies collapse boundaries between human, nonhuman, and spiritual realms. Informed by firsthand encounters with the Mekong’s ecological crises during projects such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), he incorporates these conditions and regional mythologies into works like For Tomorrow For Tonight (2011) and Mekong Hotel (2012).²⁵ A recurring motif is sleep, which functions not only as narrative device but also as a medium of sociopolitical and perceptual transformation, akin to Johnson’s arguments about Mekong dreaming. In these liminal states, characters inhabit nonlinear temporalities marked by memory, rebirth, and the unresolved traces of political violence—what Ingawanij describes as the “stranded temporality” of post–Cold War Thailand.²⁶ For Weerasethakul, this threshold between sleep and waking becomes a generative space: “Dreams are very important to me, because a dream is like a movie, an illusion. It defies time and space. A dream is like another life recurring.”²⁷

Weerasethakul’s Blue series—comprising the 2018 film Blue, the 2022 film and performance collaboration On Blue, and the 2023 installation Blue Encore—suggests a dreamscape constituted by restless slumber. In Blue (2018), a woman lapses between sleep and wakefulness in a nighttime forest setting in which a painted theater backdrop unfurls to alternate between two landscapes: one a sunset on the water and the other a royal palace courtyard. As translucent flames slowly spread from the woman’s torso to engulf her recumbent body, and then her surroundings, the screen continues to spool and unspool, the movement and squeaking sound of the pulley punctuating a relentless rhythm even as the fire spreads to consume the dreamscape (fig. 7). On Blue (2022), created with composer Rafiq Bhatia, reimagines the earlier film and synthesizes it with a live, orchestral performance. As Weerasethakul describes: “On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon’s consistency. It’s predictable yet brings tremendous change.”²⁸ 

 Blue Encore (2023), the third iteration in the series Blue, was presented at the 2023 Thailand Biennale. The installation comprised curtains printed with landscape paintings by Chiang Rai artists and set along the perpendicular walls of a classroom in a former primary school that is now a Buddhist community center. In Blue Encore, Weerasethakul withholds any filmic elements to physically literalize the moving image, creating a stage in which automated curtains expand and contract along walls and windows, the fabric flowing against the ground. The moving panels set organic form against geometry in choreographed animation and in perpetual interaction with the atmospherics of light and dust particles as daylight fluctuates. The movement of curtains traditionally marks spatial and temporal boundaries in theater, creating the illusion of a self-contained world and facilitating unnatural shifts through time and place via the setting of scene. Curtains play a similar role in cinema, opening and closing on the screen to cue the beginning and end of the audience’s release into spectatorship. In Blue Encore, Weerasethakul defamiliarizes the theatrical curtain as it has been naturalized through theater’s hypnotic effects and conflates the scene/screen with the curtain, or the work with its frame. Like the actions of the unspooling theater backdrop in Blue, the automated movements of the curtains are both dramatic and anticlimactic, performing without a narrative logic, their only seeming purpose to reveal the pictures on the painted fabric as they stretch to their full expanse. 

 Two of the panels feature rural landscapes painted by artists from Chiang Rai, a community of artists that Weerasethakul describes as local “impressionists” (fig. 8).²⁹ The third panel appears saturated in vibrant shades of blue, evoking water or some kind of aquatic abstraction, particularly against the green and brown classroom walls. Water and land thus appear to meet, overlap, and retreat from each other in a set sequence of slow and repeated mechanized actions that may test the viewer’s patience. Through the specific choice of landscape painting, they also conjure regional metaphors specific to Chiang Rai and the installation’s setting in Chiang Saen, a town and site of an ancient city located on the west bank of the Mekong River bordering Laos. 

As W. J. T. Mitchell has argued, landscapes have long been instrumentalized for ideological projection, whether as the dreamwork of imperialism or as metaphor for social order.³⁰ There is a dense web of national—and regional—art historical associations signified by the painterly style of these images and the audiences for whom they are intended.³¹ The paintings capture the modern rural idyll, bucolic but not without technological affordance, that is cyclically unveiled and contracted. The painted rural landscape as familiar visual and commercial stock presents itself theatrically and strangely—both as a physical and a symbolic one, and as a literal moving image, on curtains that frame the physical site itself as something to be revealed and looked at in a new way. The defunct primary school turned gathering place for Buddhist learning and social outreach is now activated as a scene and microhistory, as well as a metaphor for community, hope, and slow renewal. The repetition of the curtain’s movements thus engenders a recursive presentation of site within site, landscape within landscape, metaphor within metaphor, image and place as one—familiar and yet unfamiliar to audiences experiencing them as such within Weerasethakul’s installation.

Weerasethakul finds assurance in the measured repetition of programmed movement, replicating the predictable cycle of solar movement that organizes our experience of time regardless of the pace of change that happens around us. But in Vietnamese artist and filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Ri s̄eīyng (a Thai word that translates as “soundless” or “voiceless”), presented at Haw Kham (a wooden structure that once served as a royal residence and is now a museum of Lanna art), she uses instrumental sound to index the opposite: the unpredictable flux of water levels in the Mekong River that are a result of anthropocenic environmental change. In Ri s̄eīyng, deconstructed xylophones (ranat ek) and reed instruments (khaen) play automated musical chords coded to data gathered by water sensors in the Mekong River (fig. 9). Like Nguyễn’s previous work, And they die a natural death (2022), at documenta fifteen, the work has been metaphorized as theater—live, improvisational, musical, atmospheric—coproduced with nonhuman actors via environmental biofeedback mechanisms (fig. 10). While informed by environmental activism around hydropower and river modification, Ri s̄eīyng extends Nguyễn’s artistic praxis from earlier films such as Letters from Panduranga (2015), which uses epistolary narration to question ocularcentrism and recalibrate authorial voice, to films that explore the aural ecologies of highland communities in Vietnam (How to Improve the World, 2021), toward the predominant commitment to sound that has characterized her recent projects.³² Across her works, relationality is increasingly articulated through cut and soundtrack, centering auditory fields over image, and in her recent installations, the listener becomes part of an autonomous system of attunement between objects, space, and sound. 

For Nguyễn, the musical notes in Ri s̄eīyng represent collaboration, based on the ways in which Indigenous musicians compose music. As she describes: “One thing that I have learned from observing Indigenous communities across Vietnam play their instruments—and which have been incorporated in both installations at documenta and the Thailand Biennale—is that each person plays only one note on a single instrument. In contrast to the individualist figure of the Western composer, Indigenous music players cannot create melodies by themselves. This requires them to listen to one another and orchestrate their tunes collectively. I find this a compelling metaphor for community building; only when a balance between manifestations of the ego and collective coordination is reached can music be created.”³³

The installation in Chiang Rai also plays with signifying operations that may seem to contend with one another: index and metaphor. Sound is an index here; it traces and measures the river, translating its biodata into a nonhuman musical field. Metaphor then serves as a tool for the listener to link the sounds with conceptual imagery. The question here is what metaphors are invoked by the index, or the musical chords generated by the percussive and wind instruments. They render a soundscape and a cultural imagination that points back to its regional source—the river. Soundscape is traditionally understood as that which is produced by the atmospherics of a physical place (a form of ethnographic acoustic document) but can also construct the idea of a place and its culture. Ri s̄eīyng invokes aural familiarity through singular instrumental notes instead of recognizable compositional patterns; it does not attempt to reinforce the concept of a unified regional music, rather, it sounds out instruments that are widespread and go by different names throughout the Mekong region, especially in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Even the names of specific instruments in Thai or Lao contain metaphoric dimensions embedded in concepts of music-making that suggest passage between worlds and dream encounters.³⁴ As such, in Ri s̄eīyng these sounds indexically and metaphorically point to the Mekong and its associated imaginations.

In conclusion, the trajectory of metaphor—from a curatorial shorthand for regional cohesion to an artistic method probing the tacit and temporal—signals a shift in imagining mainland Southeast Asia. The artworks of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyễn Trinh Thi do not simply represent the Mekong region but likewise suggest its contemporary associations (such as the nonlinear flow of time, precarity, dreaming) through their very material and temporal constitutions. Blue Encore’s recursive theatricality and Ri s̄eīyng’s indexical soundscape foreground a regionality constituted not through geopolitical definitions but instead through image, sound, environment, and automation. They shift toward abstraction to offer more sensorial, sited, and opaque forms of representing place.

This essay benefited from feedback at MoMA C-MAP Southeast and East Asia, Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies, NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and LASALLE College of the Arts; I am grateful to Carlos Quijon, Jr., Erik Harms, Joan Kee, Francis Maravillas, and Jeffrey Say for enabling those exchanges. I also thank Alexander Cannon for his musicological insights into the Mekong region.

The post Mekong and Metaphor: Contemporary Art and Regionality in Southeast Asia appeared first on post.

To begin with, I want to stay with the title.¹ All of its terms are plural, and this matters. My concerns are not the singular, canonical, capital H History or the capital A, capital H Art History—the forms of knowledge claimed by the state or by national narratives, academic institutions, market logics, or whatever capital is able to extract value from them. Histories, convivialities, art practices: These are multiple, distributed, often contradictory, and they don’t require elaborate justification in the context of what I want to unfold here.

The idea of conviviality that I often return to comes from Paul Gilroy, a theorist of race and racism whose work continues to shape how we understand coexistence in postimperial worlds. Gilroy uses “conviviality” not as a slogan or a more cheerful synonym for multiculturalism, but to describe how people in postimperial cities actually live with difference: the ordinary, improvisational mess of everyday life. People who, despite long histories of race, empire, and inequality, still find ways to eat together, borrow sugar, share the same streets, laugh at the same jokes. He is drawn to those small negotiations—those moments in which what might have divided people (language, skin, faith, memory) ends up coexisting with what they share: a bus ride, a football team, the weather, the city itself.²

When Gilroy’s book first appeared in Britain, it was titled After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?—a diagnosis of a nation unable to let go of its imperial past. But when it crossed the Atlantic to the United States, the title was quietly changed. Columbia University Press published it as Postcolonial Melancholia.³ “Empire” disappeared. “Convivial culture” was deemed too cheerful, too opaque, perhaps too British. Instead, “melancholia”—the mood of something lost but not admitted—fit the American atmosphere of the early 2000s. This was the period after 9/11, when the United States was in the thick of the “War on Terror” and attempting to police the world while insisting it wasn’t an empire. The new title spoke to that anxiety: a grief that follows power but refuses to name itself.⁴

Gilroy was, of course, writing about postimperial Britain, where the residues of empire cling to everyday encounters—in accents, in skin, in smell, in gesture. And yet he observed how, despite all of this, people still manage to live side by side: joking, arguing, sharing food, improvising a common life out of uneven materials. This, for Gilroy, is conviviality. Not harmony, but the practice of staying with differences. And it is this practice—with all its messiness, its harshness, its in-your-face realities, its tragedies and anxieties and dramas, and its inseparability from humor, generosity, kindness, and the continuous effort to make not just a life but a livable environment for oneself and for others—that resonates so deeply with the archipelago now known as the Republic of Indonesia. A place where coexistence has long been ordinary and difficult at once, where differences are not exceptions but conditions of life.⁵

Allow me to briefly outline what I mean by “modern Indonesia.” I do not mean a tidy timeline or a national story one finds in textbooks. I mean something provisional: the ongoing, unfinished effort of learning how to live together across differences—ethnic, linguistic, religious, ecological—and under changing regimes of power and imagination. This definition is not final, and it will never become final. It is subjective and temporal, crafted for the purposes of this moment, and one I would likely contest in another conversation. But it is a starting point—a way to think about how conviviality, histories, and art practices intersect in this archipelago and its many modernities.

Let’s say that the “modern Indonesia” began around 1908, with the Sumpah Pemuda—the Youth Pledge.⁶ The moment when Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) was declared a unifying language across the archipelago that was colonized by the Dutch. It is important to note that even today, Bahasa Indonesia is the first “foreign” language most Indonesians learn in school. More than 700 languages continue to be spoken across the archipelago; for most people, one or two of these remain their mother tongue—some of the languages have their own scripts, their own cosmologies, their own epistemologies of the world.

The decision to adopt Bahasa Indonesia as a unifying language, the way I see it, was an invitation—not a solution or a magic key. It was a proposal for an experiment in speaking and being together across islands, tongues, and lifeworlds. Around this same period, in the arts, painters such as Wakidi (1889–1979), Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941), and Mas Pirngadi (c. 1878–1979) were producing the mooi-indie (beautiful Indies) landscapes—colonial-era images of ordered nature, picturesque tranquility, and the comfort of distance. By the 1940s, other forms began to surface: the untamed figures of Emiria Sunassa (1894–1964)⁷, the expressive sculptures Tridjoto Abdullah (1917–1989)⁸—gestures that argued, questioned, and refused to remain fixed within the available vocabularies. What, then, begins to shift in these works? Is it a matter of representation, or something else—perhaps a reconfiguration of relation, of subjecthood, of how bodies and environments hold one another? I will now introduce you to two of Emiria’s works that I have encountered and (re)staged. Even as they appear here within exhibition space, these figures do not fully settle into the distance of representation. They retain a proximity that resists being reduced to image alone.

A male figure poised in mid-action. His archer’s bow drawn, body leaning back, muscles taut as he prepares to release an arrow. His dark-toned skin is accentuated by ornaments—large earrings, a feathered headdress, and a red sash at his waist. He stands within an environment dominated by the enormous vivid pink and red lotus leaves and blossoms that are blooming around him. The contrast between the earthy tones of the archer’s body enveloped in a dense vegetal field and the saturated hues of the lotus flowers creates a heightened sense of drama.

Emiria often painted figures from across the archipelago—from Balinese and Tidoreans to Dayaks, Bugis, Papuans, Javanese, and Sundanese—but here the figure’s identity is imagined, a creation of the artist’s vision. The surreal scale of the lotus plants transforms the scene into a suspended, almost mystical moment. Painted around 1941–46, during the final years of colonial rule and the dawn of Indonesia’s independence, the work conjures questions of identity, perception, and the Other, framing a human presence within a lush, dreamlike world on the threshold of a history in the making.⁹

A female figure from Sulawesi. But let’s talk a bit about Emiria in around 1910–20. She entered Jakarta’s artistic and political circles in the 1940s and 1950s. Before then, she was remembered otherwise. Oral accounts suggest she was identified not as a princess of Tidore but rather as Emmy Pareira (a Minahasan woman from the Manoppo-Pareira clan), who was raised in Manado and educated in Christian missionary schools. In the mid-1910s, she and one of her sisters were known as musicians—a pianist and singer, respectively—who performed in Dutch society circles in Ternate and, briefly, in Europe (1914–15). There she went by the name “Sunny.” Later, in the 1920s, she described herself as a “girl from the East” who was studying Dalcroze eurhythmics (a musical pedagogy based on body movement) in Brussels and Vienna.¹⁰

In the late 1940s, art schools began to open, bringing Western curricular structures. What is now the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) was established as the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng in 1920 under Dutch colonial administration. After independence, its art-related programs developed within this technical and pedagogical lineage, eventually forming the Faculty of Art and Design in 1984.¹¹ Meanwhile, the Institut Seni Indonesia—Yogyakarta (the first of its kind, now replicated across the archipelago) emerged from a series of institutions founded by nationalist artists—many left-leaning and largely self-taught—including ASRI (Indonesia Academy of Fine Arts, 1950)¹², ASDRAFI (Indonesia Drama and Film Academy), and AMI (Indonesia Music Academy). One might expect that this Yogyakarta group of founders—known for critiquing their predecessors’ idealized depictions of Indonesia in the style of colonial painters—would create a curriculum of their own. Mind you, they did not. The Jogja art school, too, adopted a Western structure and orientation. What is now the Institut Kesenian Jakarta (IKJ), which only formed in the late 1970s, is perhaps the only one that openly stated its grounding in the approaches of Santiniketan.¹³ Yet even there, the national education system surrounding it remained thoroughly Western in design, imagination, and form.

This quick sketch of these schools—their differences, their genealogies—is meant to show that the “modern” in Indonesia was never singular. With their establishment, people’s sense of what counted as “high art” shifted from wayang and temple reliefs toward painting, sculpture, and other forms taught in majority art schools all over the Western world. But the older forms never vanished. As long as they remained functional within their communities, they continued to circulate, inspire, and complicate any neat narrative of artistic progress. In speaking about “modern Indonesia,” I am thinking less in terms of chronology or style and more in terms of conviviality as practice: the everyday negotiation of languages, traditions, faiths, empires, merchants, farmers, rulers, and neighbors. The “modern” was—and remains—about relations: how to live together, how to keep conversations open, how to practice care even when histories, hierarchies, and inequalities persist.

Another example, from a different time, might help to make this more tangible. These are images I often return to—of artworks and people being with them. Not just looking, but talking, pointing, laughing, pausing. There is curiosity there as well as a kind of ease. A willingness to stay with the work, and with one another, without needing to resolve anything too quickly. If we stay a little longer within these situations of looking, certain works begin to hold our attention differently. Not as examples of a period, but as presences that gather and redistribute how people stand, point, speak, and remain.

The first photograph was taken within As if there is no sun, an exhibition that was part of the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet? in Pittsburgh (2022).¹⁴ The other is from a more recent exhibition at Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta titled Kebebasan Manusia Perasa (Freedom of the Sentient Beings, 2025).¹⁵ Research-wise, the latter extends the former, continuing Hyphen—’s inquiry into the practices, rhythms, and daily worlds of mid-twentieth-century painters often left out of national and mainstream narratives. Both titles are not newly coined.¹⁶ They arrive from writings produced alongside the works themselves—from observers of their own time. In this sense, the exhibitions do not simply look back. They carry forward ways of sensing that were already in circulation, allowing them to meet the present again.

In the photograph from the Carnegie, one such work draws a more focused kind of engagement: Two viewers stand close to it; one points toward the lower part of the canvas, the other follows. The gesture is small, but it reorganizes the encounter. Attention narrows, slows, becomes directed. The painting is not simply seen; it is entered into through another’s indication. In her painting Aku Hamil (I’m Pregnant, 1962), Kartika (born 1934) presents her own body turning slightly away, even as her gaze meets ours. The interior around her—chairs, a hanging lamp, a smaller portrait—recedes unevenly, as if space itself is unsettled. Objects gather in her hand and scatter at her feet. The palette presses rather than opens: yellows, greens, ochers that feel closer to density than light. What is held here is not immediately shareable. The painting does not clarify itself; it withholds, or perhaps more precisely, it concentrates.

And yet, in the photograph, this interiority does not remain closed. It is approached collectively—through pointing, through conversation, through the act of showing something to another. What might otherwise remain singular becomes partially held in common. Not fully understood, not resolved, but shared enough to sustain an encounter. If conviviality names the practice of living with difference, then this moment suggests that such practice does not depend on transparency. It can also be built around what resists easy articulation—around forms of sensing that are unevenly distributed, guided, negotiated. One points, another follows. Attention is shared, but not equally. The work participates in this asymmetry, shaping how relation unfolds.

A different rhythm appears in the second image, where Title not yet known (2005) by Siti Roelijati (1930–2023), Bakau-bakau (Mangrove, 1973) by Sriyani (1930–2006), and Gerobag (Cart, 1969) by Kustiyah (1935–2012)—are gathered along the wall. Here, attention does not settle as tightly. It moves—across surfaces, between figures, from one painting to another, and back again. Viewers do not fix themselves in front of a single work; they circulate, pause, resume. The encounter becomes less about entering one interior and more about navigating a field. In Roelijati’s compositions, lines rarely rest. Figures, animals, and objects seem to emerge through movement rather than outline. The eye follows but never quite arrives. Looking becomes a matter of attunement—of staying with rhythms that do not resolve into a single focal point. Sriyani’s works, by contrast, often hold a quieter density. Forms gather slowly; darkness is not absence but a kind of presence that reveals itself over time. One does not grasp the image at once. It requires returning, adjusting, allowing the work to unfold at its own pace. Kustiyah’s paintings move still differently. Her brush seems to glide, carrying a lightness that does not negate depth but instead approaches it without weight. Flowers, objects, self-portraits—these do not insist on symbolic reading. They offer themselves as things to be lived with, to be encountered in their immediacy.

Taken together, these works do not present a unified style or direction. What they share is less formal than relational: a way of holding the world that allows proximity without collapse, distance without detachment. They invite forms of looking that are sustained, negotiated, and often shared. It is perhaps here that the words of Oei Sian Yok return, not as a statement to be confirmed, but as something that begins to resonate differently: “The birth of nationalist awareness at the beginning of this century also awakened Indonesia’s humanist consciousness. This, then, became their right to freedom as sentient beings.”¹⁷

Read from within these situations—of looking, of pointing, of staying with works and with one another—this “right” does not appear as a declaration secured once and for all. It emerges, rather, in the act itself: in the ability to attend, to respond, to remain with what is not immediately resolved. Freedom, here, is not located outside the encounter but practiced within it. In one instance, it takes the form of a concentrated interiority—a figure who holds something not fully shareable, yet not entirely closed. In another, it disperses across a field of works, where attention moves between images and bodies, never settling for long. In both, what is at stake is not only what is seen, but also how seeing becomes possible, and with whom.

Marianne Katoppo’s writing offers another way to approach this. For Katoppo, freedom is rooted in compassion—not as sentiment, but as a capacity: the ability to be touched and to touch in return. Such a capacity does not eliminate distance; it works through it.¹⁸ It allows proximity without possession, relation without the need to resolve differences. Perhaps this is what these works—and the situations that gather around them—make available. Not a unified account of modernity, nor a stable image of the human, but a set of practices: of sensing, of attending, of being with others, human and otherwise, in ways that remain open, partial, and ongoing.

If histories are multiple, and convivialities are lived rather than declared, then art practices might be understood less as objects to be interpreted than as conditions for such encounters to take place. Not answers, but occasions. Not resolutions, but ways of staying.

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Ananya Sikand: Today we’re joined by Rajyashri Goody, who will present her artistic practice and long-term research on the interweaving of Dalit food culture and Dalit literature adapting recipes from autobiographies. These recipes serve as the backbone of her work across ceramics, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance.

Food is an important site of memory, resistance, resilience as well as a form of embodied politics, because among the many reasons that the Hindu caste system has such deep roots is that rules related to adhering to caste have been applied to basic activities necessary for survival such as eating and drinking, which are bound up in casteist notions of purity and pollution. Dalit people have been treated as untouchable and impure for thousands of years, and many are still denied basic rights to food, water, land, and literacy. Rajyashri’s work highlights how Dalit identity is being reclaimed and reinvented through acts of everyday resistance, especially relevant in the present moment given the rise of Hindu nationalism, which promotes the upholding of casteist values, vigilantism, and violence against minority communities in the name of religion.

Rajyashri’s work is presently part of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, a program developed by the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale.

Rajyashri Goody: I want to begin with the recipes (fig. 1) that I work on, an ongoing practice since 2017. I started my research in 2016, when many parts of India were seeing a lot of lynchings based on the suspicion of eating or transporting beef. At the time, Muslim and Dalit people were targeted, accused of eating beef, and then publicly attacked. Simultaneously, there were many protests. One, in particular, led by lower-caste people in a village called Una in Gujarat centered on their refusal to pick up dead animals, a job forced on this community because of their lower-caste and “untouchable” status. Across India, Dalit people are forced to take on the role of sanitation workers, which includes disposing of carcasses of dead animals. Dead cows have been a major source of food for the community because, historically, Dalit people haven’t been allowed to own land, much less grow their own crops, etc. Today, many Dalit people are resisting these jobs, but it’s very difficult because no other caste wants to undertake them. Dalit people, even if they’re going to school, etc., are forced by the system to take on such labor. I read, about 10 years ago, that all the sanitation workers in India are Dalit and that no other communities are involved in this work. As all of this was happening in 2016, I started thinking about my own food practices—given my mother belongs to this community—and asked myself: What do we eat as Dalit people?

My family doesn’t eat beef because we became Buddhist in the 1950s, like a lot of Dalit people. In embracing Buddhism, we gave up eating meat in general—and especially beef because of its connection with sanitation work. But I asked myself, What if I’m eating vegetarian food? Does that then become Dalit? What about if I share food with an upper-caste person? What about the food makes it upper-caste or makes it polluted—as is thought to happen if a Dalit person shares food with an upper-caste person. 

I’ll read a recipe from my writing called “Well Water”

Although the well
belongs to the Patils,
the spades and the shovels, 
the sweat,
the explosives 
of the Mahars 
were used to dig and build it.
You are the reason 
for water in the well.

But now you are not allowed 
to draw water from it.
If you are walking by
feeling tired and thirsty
go down the well 
to drink water
while your friends keep watch.
Make sure no one sees you.
Otherwise you might be badly beaten.

Quench your thirst 
furtively.

Touch the water.
Gather it in your cupped palms.
Ripples might form on the surface.
The water inside the earth might shake.

This writing is adapted from Dalit literature—“Well Water” from Sharankumar Limbale’s writing and “Chaanya” (fig. 2) from Daya Pawar’s. Whenever I read a Dalit autobiography, I mark where the writer mentions food or water. Then I switch it from the first person to the second to make it read like a recipe—but often one that’s impossible to actually follow. I started this exercise for a number of reasons, including the fact that I couldn’t find any Dalit cookbooks—other than Shahu Patole’s Anna He Apoorna Brahme, which had just come out in Marathi.¹ And there haven’t been any other Dalit cookbooks since people from the community haven’t been allowed to read and write. So how does one write a cookbook in the first place? A cookbook assumes many things, including access to a functioning kitchen, utensils, and ingredients, all of which is related to socioeconomic status. But there’s also an assumption of pride in one’s food, which with Dalit people is difficult because many of our food practices stem from being forced to eat leftovers, to beg, to make do with nothing—but not as a form of resistance. It’s not something that parents want to pass on to their kids. So how does one remember and gather these recipes, and should one even bother? That’s when I realized that it’s not necessary to have a Dalit cookbook in a conventional sense. But Dalit literature, a massive genre given it’s only 50–60 years old, is filled with writing about food and water. Dalit oppression is deeply connected to the stomach, so this exercise has allowed me to understand the similarities in Dalit food across India, but also the differences—and how time works in strange ways. For example, I’d be reading something written 40 years ago and something else written five years ago, and it could be the exact same story. This continues, and I’ve made 23 cookbooks so far. 

These recipes allowed me to build on other works, such as those shown in the exhibition Eat with Great Delight (2018) at the Clark House Initiative (fig. 3).² This series came from my family photos, specifically from examining them as records of where traces of food existed. My family has had access to a camera since the late 1980s, when my mother married my father, a white man who came to India to do social work, and he had a camera. Not only did he take photographs, but also other family members began to use the camera. It was interesting to see the differences between the photos that he took for work and our own family photographs of celebrations. I showed 18 family photos as they were, alongside eight recipe books. Photography, just like writing, is a tool for access. What do you do with a camera? What do you photograph? What do you do with a pen? What do you write about?

I also started working with ceramics in 2017, which came about because I didn’t want to actually cook the food—because it’s not about that. I’m not interested in making a Dalit dish, and people were approaching me and saying, “Can you cook something?” They didn’t get it. But I did want to make something with my hands. Because the reading and writing were getting to be too much, I felt like I needed to process it in a different medium. I started with bhakris (fig. 4a), rotis made out of millet, because some Dalit writers write beautifully about it, comparing it to the sun and moon, to the mother and father, to heaven and hell. I wanted to create the bhakri in a material that would last. Then I went on to make larger installations that reimagine many of the recipes (fig. 4b)—especially if they center foraging or hunting or stealing food—and processed these stories while making the ceramics. Some pieces look like food items, but there are many that don’t. Some look rotten; some look like fungus. Unlike food, or perhaps like Dalit food, they are inedible. 

Then I made Is the water chavdar? between 2020 and 2022. It’s an installation of 10,000 stupas, which look like inverted bowls, about the Chavdar water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra. In 1927, our leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar walked to this tank with 10,000 people to drink water from it. They were in Mahad for a conference on Dalit rights, and even though the government had made it legal for Dalit people to access public water bodies, they were still carrying their own water. So they drank from this tank to make a point. It’s one of the most important Dalit events in history, and yet, it’s forgotten by mainstream upper-caste India. It’s not really mentioned in history textbooks, but Dalit people grow up learning about it and going to Mahad. I wanted to make a memorial or homage to the people who went there. Also, this event was not photographed. Even though cameras were accessible in 1927, it was not considered important enough to record.

I made 10,000 stupas and arranged them to look like a square water tank (fig. 5). I surrounded them with prints of images I sourced from Google Maps. Even though images of the 1927 event don’t exist in any formal archives, Google Maps has thousands of images of Dalit people visiting the location since then. I chose 27 and printed them on transparent sheets and then pressed them into printmaking paper, which gives them a wet-looking quality (figs. 6a–c). This process allowed me to protect the identity of the people in the pictures, but at the same time, they stand in for people from the past or the future. I wanted their faces in the prints because I think people taking photographs of themselves at the water tank is special. It also allowed me to speak about the water without displaying any actual water. These images surround the installation, and then in the middle of it, a beam in the center of the space is covered with paper pulp I made from the Manusmriti, which Ambedkar burned in Mahad about six months after the original event. He burned the book, saying that it must be destroyed, but at the same time, he knew that it was more important for the ghost of Manu, which still lives on in people’s minds, to be burned and defeated.³

In Deeksha (figs. 7a–b), I printed photographs that I had taken of my family celebrating the anniversary of our conversion to Buddhism. In 1956, about six months before Ambedkar died, he converted to Buddhism. He said, “I may have been born a Hindu, but I won’t die one,” and along with him, many Dalit people converted. Our form of Buddhism is quite different as there’s no god, no worshipping of any Hindu deities, no superstition. Gods have controlled Dalit people for thousands of years. It is said that you’re born in this community because you were bad in your past life, so there’s no mobility outside of it unless your god decides differently. With Buddhism, you’re taught to learn to build dignity from within yourself. Now there’s a big resurgence of Buddhism, but if I tell people I’m Buddhist, they’ll know I’m Dalit. I don’t know how much of a difference it makes to others, but at least for us, for our own dignity, it does matter.

For Did you open the door, or did you find it open for you? (2023), I built a stupa with paper pulp from newsprint (figs. 8a–b). Ambedkar started many newspapers in his lifetime, so I was thinking about literacy, access to it, and the possibilities of it. The stupa has become quite an important architectural form. Whereas within Hinduism, we wouldn’t be allowed inside a temple, this conversion has allowed us to access and embrace ancient Buddhist sites that have been in the vicinity for thousands of years as a way of reconnecting—or connecting in the first place—with our new religion. We’re also building new stupas that are hollow inside to serve as meeting places. In Bombay and Pune, you often see white domed structures that are Dalit Buddhists spaces, and they’re occupying more and more parts of India. I built this stupa thinking about the past and the future. 

I started Give up your old habits in 2023 based on the image of Ambedkar (figs. 9a–b), and now I’m building a larger body of work around it. Ambedkar’s image is everywhere, across India—a man in a suit, tie, and glasses, often holding a book—and it’s an interesting relationship that we’ve built with it, because it’s one of pride. Yet it’s also a marker of where Dalit people live, which allows others to make judgments and assessments. In this body of work, I’m printing the same image of Ambedkar on porcelain, but as a silkscreen print, so when it’s on the wet clay, it becomes something else. Each one looks quite different but they all have hints of Ambedkar in them. I’m repeating them in the hundreds and thousands, so let’s see what happens with that.

I’ve also been doing quite a few performances over the past years. Turn Your Bowl into a Stupa (figs. 10a–d) was in Bukhara. Essentially, it was 1,000 bowls that we turned upside down. I feel like this is a strong metaphor for Dalit Buddhism. There is a Tibetan story about when the Buddha was dying . . . His disciples asked him, “What do we do with your body when you die?” And he took his begging bowl and turned it upside down. Though nobody knows if it’s historically true and given Dalit people’s association with begging, with this embrace of a new religion—we’ve also taken the begging bowl and turned it upside down and said no to the past and rejected many things. The performance began with me reading out the recipes followed by turning the bowls upside down with three collaborators. I was very excited to perform this work in Bukhara because the name “Bukhara” stems from the word vihara, which means “Buddhist monastery” or “temple.”

Everything is quiet now was a small performance that I did in Canada (fig. 11). It included four people and four bowls, which we slowly turned upside down. It started with a poem I had written about the Khairlanji massacre, a caste-based atrocity that took place 19 years ago, in which a whole family was brutally killed—and they still haven’t gotten justice. I was using the turning of the bowl as a way to slow down time and to think about this family. I’ve also been working with press photographs that were taken at the sites of this atrocity—at the hut that the Bhotmange family lived in, at the canal where their bodies were dumped. As horrible as it sounds, these photographs and even more violent ones have played a huge role in rallying the Dalit community to push for justice. It was also—as a 16-year-old—my first real encounter with what a Dalit atrocity looks like and with seeing the whole community come together in response to these photos. Though this is a strange way of spending time with them—they’re ink-jet prints, so I use a paintbrush and water to erase them, but they’re still there though certain bits are washed out. 

AS: As a way of beginning our conversation within the context of this group, which is focused on the city and the theme of infrastructures, I was thinking about Pune and Maharashtra as larger infrastructures in your practice—from the neighborhoods where you’ve fabricated different elements of your practice to your involvement with the secular art movement started by Prabhakar Kamble, Clark House, histories of Dalit activism in the region, etc. Could you speak about this? 

RG: It’s all connected. Because my parents are involved in social work, it’s not really been a choice to involve myself in these things. I think even if I wasn’t making art, they would still be an important part of my life. It has been quite special to be involved with the secular art movement, which is the art wing of a political movement in Maharashtra. And it was in spaces like Clark House, the Ajanta caves, and The Middle Way Retreat Centre in Kondanpur where these conversations were had and still continue. The last time we did a secular art movement workshop, we just wanted to get together and see each other’s practices—because we don’t often have opportunities or time or spaces for that—and to look at each other’s work, to listen to each other. Though there’s room for so much more. For example, it’s still very difficult to critique each other because if we’re seen critiquing each other even slightly publicly, then upper-caste artists or people in the art world will use that against us. They try to involve themselves in it and pit us one against the other. It’s quite exhausting. Unfortunately, we’re still seen as just Dalit artists by savarna people. I don’t think I’ll ever make work that’s not about caste, but there has to be space beyond that category. Also, if somebody doesn’t want to recognize the persistence of caste, they simply won’t. Labeling us this way makes it convenient for them to stereotype our practices, tick a box, and look away as fast as possible. 

Lucy Gallun: Thinking about this idea of space-making and how it has come through in your practice across different approaches, media, techniques, etc. . . . You talked about writing being a place, and of literacy and disseminating writing being a history that you’re taking up in your work, but also, about the building of a stupa—of creating something that’s visible in communities—especially in Maharashtra. Could you speak about this idea of a practice of space-making and what it means to you?

RG: Many upper-caste dialogues center on the fact that there’s not enough information, or that people don’t see caste, or that they didn’t grow up practicing caste, etc. Even when I was looking for Dalit cookbooks, I couldn’t find them. But then I realized that it’s just a matter of shifting my perspective; perhaps they don’t exist in a conventional form, but they do exist nonetheless, and then I discovered there’s so much in Dalit literature. I think this is the case with space-making as well, and that my large-scale installations are a way for me to spend time in the spaces themselves, but also, to really think about the significance of these spaces. Whether it’s an ancient site or the Chavdar water tank, which in photographs looks like any other water tank, is important to me. They are both big and small omnipresent sites, and Dalit people recognize and remember them. Even though the white stupas are everywhere, it’s easy for upper-caste people not to pay attention to them in their day-to-day landscapes. For instance, I’m in Goa now, and while Goa is the neighboring state to Maharashtra, and Maharashtra has always had a visible Dalit presence—there are blue Buddhist flags and white stupas everywhere—Goa has considerably less of one. But I tell myself that I have to find out what and how this looks in Goa. I’m trying to train myself to look differently. 

Ksenia Nouril: I’m struck by the materiality of your work—the breaking down, disintegrating, and bringing back together of paper pulp, your painting of photographs to dissolve them, etc. Could you talk about materiality in your practice?

RG: The materiality of my work is very important, if not the most important. Materiality, such as the texture of the paper, for example, allows me to move away from words, from writing, from that sort of language, and allows for a certain kind of infrastructure of invisible presence. The paper disintegrates, and while you can no longer read what is on it, it’s still there. I’m trying to figure out what that means and what to do with it. There’s a lot of hope with Dalit narratives, but there’s also one step forward, three steps back. A lot of the work that people are doing gets invisibilized. With materiality, it allows for that hesitation. While I can be more hopeful when I’m speaking, the materiality of the work allows for a sadness, a haziness, a blankness that paper or ceramic or the blurred photograph can communicate to the viewer better than I can.

Lanka Tattersall: Since Ananya mentioned you’re exhibiting in Venice, could you speak about what you’ll be up to there?

RG: Essentially, it was a grant to produce work that could be shared digitally and that would involve what my community means to me. There’s a Dalit girls’ hostel in Pune—close to where I live—and my parents have been involved with it for decades. I’ve also been visiting it since I was little. Most of the girls there come from villages around Maharashtra, and they’re there because their schools are extremely far from their homes—sometimes 20 kilometers away. Having to walk these distances to get to school would be incredibly difficult. I held workshops—on writing about food, about school, and on drawing their journeys to school, drawing what their schools looks like—and produced a booklet of 15 recipes and stories about finding food, stealing food, etc. The girls who participated were 13–14-year-olds, so their stories are more joyful than the ones I typically read, and I merged them with recipes that I created from female Dalit Maharashtrian writing—so they read as narratives from young girls, and time is again warped. Alongside it, the stories are also presented on video, where the girls read them out in Marathi and English.

LG: I was thinking about how you read us some of your recipes in English, and about the girls reading in Marathi and English, and to a previous session on the little magazine movement in Maharashtra that thought through the different ways that information is shared and what communities share through language, and I’m curious about how that has come up in your practice. 

RG: Until last year I was quite adamant that everything I write had to be in English, even though I can read Marathi and Hindi and I’ve accessed many autobiographies via English translations from Tamil and Telugu. I don’t see English as a non-Indian language, and historically, we weren’t allowed to study pure Marathi or Sanskrit, so an English-language education was the way out and necessary for upward social mobility. English has been an important language of access. There’s no real nostalgia for Marathi, but at the same time, there is something to be said about things that are untranslatable. When I’m reading a Dalit autobiography in Marathi, it’s different from what it is in English. I don’t want to romanticize it, so I keep it in English, because if my audience can read English, then I don’t want to create a barrier to the work. But what I realized from the girls reading in Marathi and English is that even if the audience can’t understand Marathi, there is a generative pause in listening to another language. Again, the girls are studying English; they’re not fluent, but they wanted to read in English as much as they wanted to read in Marathi. If I had robbed them of reading in English, I would have made them feel like they weren’t good enough or that they shouldn’t have been studying English in the first place, so to have their voices in both languages was important.

AS: I have a question about reading as a practice in your looking at memoirs, autobiographies, and memory texts. These writers would have been among the first generation in their families to be educated. Could you speak about these primary sources and about the format of the recipe—what drew you to it, how you adapted some of the larger concerns of the texts into recipes, etc. 

RG: I started with Maharashtrian Dalit writers because they were in my house. The Maharashtrian Dalit community also has an advantage, because Ambedkar was from this community, and it has been the force of his direct influence that has and continues to encourage the community to leave behind caste-based manual work, move to cities, and send their kids to school. A lot of the writers in this genre are male—though there are many female writers as well. But, if one was going to send their children to school for the very first time, it was often the sons who were sent. The realization that one could also send their daughters came later. 

But with the recipes . . . they’re a ploy to get the audience to read the original book. I keep things simple and, in each booklet, I’ll only include six recipes—some short, some slightly longer—and then at the back of the booklet, it says that this has been adapted from “x” autobiography to invite the audience to read this literature. I wish it was not about that, but coming from this space of people not knowing where to start, I provide them with options. Also, as much as my family is involved in this work, it’s still difficult to have one-on-one conversations because there is a lot of shame involved. There are things that people just don’t want to talk about, and I respect that. Dalit writers have written down everything that they needed to, so I decided to see what they’ve written about and to bring it out in whatever way I can. It’s almost like preliminary research for having actual conversations with my own family and others in the future.

AS: It’s also a ploy for people who claim caste doesn’t exist . . .

RG: Yes. The act of opening a book and reading for oneself has allowed me to have more interesting conversations around caste, especially compared to my earlier works which were a little more on the nose, and elicited anger and questions such as why I’m showing work on caste if caste doesn’t exist. So sometimes opening a book, reading it, and trying to figure it out for oneself allows the audience to take it in differently.

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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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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Ananya Sikand: Vrishchik, which means “scorpion,” was a little magazine that you founded and edited with Bhupen Khakhar in Baroda. Published monthly or bimonthly from 1969 to 1973, it featured an array of content including poems, stories, critical essays, and folios of printed artworks.

In her 2001 article “Signatures of Dissent,” Geeta Kapur notes that Vrishchik “spoke in the many voices of those artists, critics, [and] poets” that it spotlighted, serving as an active forum for contemporary artistic and literary expressions as well as a catalyst for artists’ views on their field, on art institutions, and on social concerns.¹ Sheikh Sir, as you’ve noted in the past, Vrishchik was the need of the day, as there were hardly any communication channels through which artists could speak and raise issues at the time. To get started, could you speak about the story behind the name of the publication and about its form and materiality.

Gulammohammed Sheikh: You have rightly noted that there was a dire need for a communication channel among the artists of India, since there was only one journal—Lalit Kala Contemporary—which was very irregular. There was no other channel through which we could communicate with one another. This was an issue that bothered many of us.

I was with friends at our home in the Residency Bungalow in Baroda. About six or seven people had come for a party, and we were discussing this, and we all agreed we should do something about it. One thought was to bring out a journal, and everybody agreed wholeheartedly—but then asked, “How do we do it?”

Let me give you some background. When I was in England, I had become aware of small magazines published across the world. I used to go to bookshops and find publications by small presses, including collections of poems—such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. These were not well-known publishers; sometimes they were just individuals publishing their own work.

In India, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who lived in Bombay in those days, had started a small journal called Damn You—a radical literary journal with a critical take on what was going on. Then J. Swaminathan, another artist and friend, brought out a journal called Contra from Delhi. He raised a number of concerns in Contra—mainly about the National Art Academy, the Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA), and its functioning. The LKA was a government-sponsored organization whose members were nominated by the government, and we all felt there was insufficient representation of artists from across India. Vrishchik took up this subject at a later stage.

But let me start with how we began. The first issue was printed at a press in Baroda called Miraj Printery, where I once had a catalogue printed. We asked them if they could print directly from a linoleum block, which they were unfamiliar with but agreed to do. In those days, printing blocks were made of zinc, fixed on a wooden block, and then printed on a letterpress with movable type. Each letter of every word had to be set by hand before the page could be run through the press with a roller. 

We chose brown packing paper because it was cheap and because we loved the color. Printing on tinted paper was far more interesting than printing on white. I had previous experience using lino blocks while working on a Gujarati literary journal called Kshitij (1959–67), which was edited by my literary mentor Suresh Joshi. For a journal of limited resources, I devised a method of producing original prints by taking linoleum to Baroda-based artists—K. G. Subramanyan, my teacher, and Jyoti Bhatt, my senior—and having them hand-cut the block. I would then mount it on a wooden block of the same gauge as a letterpress block so that the hand-cut lino could be printed on the letterpress. This meant that 500 copies could be printed at once, and the lino block remained undamaged. The advantage was that it was an original linocut print that could be made available to 500 people simultaneously. I used to go to the press and sit there while each issue was being printed, checking every copy to see whether the print came out well, whether the ink showed through on the back of the page—which sometimes happened with poor printing in those days. You had to learn to work with the printers to bring out the best result. This is the approach we brought to Vrishchik. 

As we were discussing possible names for the journal, somebody asked, “What is your rashi—your zodiac sign?” It turned out that four people in our larger group were Scorpios, including my wife, Nilima. We thought it was a good idea to call it “Scorpion” because it could have its own life—and a little sting. So Vrishchik emerged, and we put a linocut of a scorpion designed by my friend Vinod Ray Patel on the cover (fig. 1).

The purpose of Vrishchik was to reach out not only to visual artists but also to artists of all denominations. We made a list of filmmakers, writers, painters, etc., of about 250 people, and thought we’d just send it out.

The first issue had six pages. Bhupen [Khakhar], my coeditor, produced a little gem of notes on the visual scene, mocking and relishing popular taste—he called them “visual notes.” Geeta Kapur contributed a poem. Would you believe it? Arvind [Krishna Mehrotra] shared a poem from a series about his wife called “Bacchi Chakra.” After that, poems appeared in several issues. On the last page, I wrote a short editorial about current events. As you know, 1969 was a period of great upheaval because of the communal riots that were raging in Ahmedabad and Baroda and causing great turbulence across Gujarat. I began my first write-up by reflecting on the situation that prevailed at that time—a rumination called “Afternoon.”

Suresh Joshi had written [an essay] on the poet Rajvi Patel—one of the finest Gujarati poets of my generation—which had originally been commissioned by the journal Books Abroad. We reprinted it in the second issue. For the third issue, Vinod Ray designed another cover—this one featuring a hippie-like man and woman with their hair down; both had bodies of scorpions (fig. 2). That issue included writings on cinema, including a delightful riposte by Bhupen in Gujarati on Bollywood films (this was the only non-English write-up in Vrishchik) as well as drawings by an artist friend of my generation, Nagji Patel.

Lucy Gallun: Could you point out some of the contributors to the early issues of the magazine—the types of things they were wanting to circulate among the community and what you chose to include, as you have already started to do. 

GMS: I ran a little office from my home, writing letters to poet friends, writer friends, painter friends, telling them about Vrishchik. Those who received my letters became interested in contributing. Initially, only artists and writers based in Baroda contributed. But later on, I met, for example, a visiting Greek writer who had written about the coup in Athens. I asked to read her piece and found it worthy of publication. She agreed but wanted her identity concealed and chose the pseudonym Erato—the piece was called “A Greek Story.” Vinod Ray made an illustration to accompany it.

Then Bhupen and I were up to some mischief. We decided to buy a popular landscape poster—the kind sold on footpaths—roughly double the size of Vrishchik. We bought 200 or 300 copies and, on the blank reverse side, concocted a dialogue between an artist and an art critic. We came down rather heavily on absurd stories circulating among artists about their role and that of art critics and criticism. It was part gossip, part serious critique, and as expected, it angered many people. We thought it was a way of communicating with our community with no holds barred. We received a number of letters in response; some enjoyed the tongue in cheek humor, but others found it hard to stomach.

The subsequent issue reproduced letters from GIs in Vietnam. It was followed by an issue featuring a dialogue on the state of contemporary printmaking between Jagmohan Chopra, who started Group 8 in Delhi, Bishamber Khanna, Zarina, Jyoti Bhatt, and me. This issue carried ten prints by the aforementioned artists and by K. G. Subramanyan, Jeram Patel, Bhupen, and Anupam Sud—all well-known artists of the day. 

After that, Arvind sent a long poem “Song of the Rolling Earth,” which we published. Adil Jussawalla, another well-known poet, submitted a poem called “Dog.” I wrote “Miniature Purana”—a critical view of how art history in India was being written at the time. 

In issues that followed, we focused on saint poetry. I came across translations by Arun Kolatkar—a bilingual poet who translated Muktabai, Janabai, and Namdev—and was deeply moved by them. My favorite poem, by Janabai, goes:

I eat God 
I drink God 
I sleep on God 
I buy God 
I count God 
I deal with God 
God is here
God is there
Void is not devoid of God 
God is within
God is without
And moreover, there is God to spare.

Arvind had also begun translating the great 15th- and 16th-century poet Kabir. One of his best poems, in Arvind’s translation, reads:

The kings shall go, so will their pretty queens
Courtiers and all proud ones shall go
Pandits chanting the Vedas shall go and go with those who listen to them
Masochist yogis and bright intellectuals shall go
Go the moon and the sun and the water and wind
Thus, only those can remain whose minds are tied to the rocks.

My friend Gieve Patel—the painter, poet, and playwright—had visited Baroda in the early 1960s and met Suresh Joshi, who had written on the Gujarati medieval poet called Vasto. Gieve sat with Joshi, took extensive notes about translating Vasto, and from these notes, produced three poems, which we also published.

The next issues raised the question of the impending Triennale—the international exhibition planned by the LKA (fig. 3). Many issues were devoted to artists’ letters questioning the relevance of the Triennale. Artists from all over the country wrote in with their views on the impending event—K. G. Subramanyan from Baroda; Pranab Ranjan Ray from Calcutta; Krishen Khanna, Swaminathan, and Roshan Alkazi from Delhi; K. K. Hebbar from Karnataka; and Akbar Padamsee from Bombay. Eventually the Triennale did take place—along with protests and controversy. Vrishchik became a forum for protests against the LKA and its reform. Most of us boycotted the Triennale and the LKA, and so the government was obliged to appoint a commission of inquiry headed by Justice Khosla. After traveling around the country to consult artists, [Khosla’s] suggestion was that the LKA implement a process by which artists themselves elect representatives to serve on its general council.

These issues also raised other questions—such as the implications of internationalism. Geeta wrote on this subject, and Vivan Sundaram, her partner at a later stage, wrote a rejoinder. We published both. So, these conversations on the Triennale and on what kind of internationalism India should have eventually led to the reformation of the LKA.

Our main interest was to arouse awareness of issues within the artist community. We were dealing with multiple generations of artists who were active in those days—K. K. Hebbar and Krishen Khanna belonged to the first generation, Swaminathan and I to the next, and then there were younger artists. The basic purpose of Vrishchik was to create that kind of awareness across generations. 

Lanka Tattersall: Could you tell us a little more about the state of printmaking in Baroda, which you mentioned was the focus of one of the issues?

GMS: In Baroda, printmaking was an important part of the syllabus right from the beginning—from the 1950s onward. Students of painting took printmaking as a subsidiary subject. I learned printmaking in the graphic arts department of the Faculty [of Fine Arts]. The Smithsonian Institution hosted a printmaking workshop in Delhi in 1970, inviting 100 artists from across India and providing facilities to work on the best papers and zinc plates. Over a month, we learned etching and aquatint under Paul Lingren. On returning to Baroda, I bought an etching press, set it up in my home, and worked on a series. Jyoti Bhatt took to printmaking intensively, and it eventually turned out to be his principal métier. Others who took to printmaking and produced exceptional works were Laxma Goud, Devraj Dakoji, D. L. N. Reddy, and Purushottam and Rini Dhumal—all of whom worked at the Faculty under the guidance of N. B. Joglekar, who headed the graphic arts department.

AS: As additional context, each handcrafted issue of Vrishchik was supplemented by a free original artwork—modest in scale—whether a linocut, woodcut, or lithograph. Sheikh Sir, could you speak further on the artworks that accompanied each issue?

GMS: I had seen four issues of Contra that printed artworks using machine-made blocks. This made me think that Vrishchik could introduce linocuts, woodcuts, and other printmaking mediums. So, while we printed an artwork on the cover, we also included a loose copy of it inside Vrishchik—so that those who wanted could mount and preserve it or put it on display.

As for how Vrishchik was produced: as I said earlier, I was running a little office from my own home, writing letters, keeping correspondence in big files, and sometimes getting my students to help. We had 500 copies per issue, and 250 to 300 had to be sent out, which meant writing addresses, stuffing printed copies in envelopes, and posting them all—which was conducted entirely from the Residency Bungalow. I enjoyed it. I asked Bhupen to handle the accounts, which he did—he was a chartered accountant.

The press we used from the third issue onward, 3-A Associates, was run by N. B. Joglekar and he was amenable to any kind of experiment we wanted to try. First, we gave him linocuts to print. Then I said, “Mr. Joglekar, you also have an offset press.” Offset is like lithography but on a plate—you draw directly on the plate. So, Bhupen and I and others made drawings right there, which were then transferred and printed. Bhupen made a drawing of a tailor, among others (fig. 4).

LG: You’ve discussed your office at the bungalow, working with Bhupen Khakhar, the head of the graphics department, who served as printer, and your students helping with the mailing. Could you say more about the setting at MSU Baroda—and at the same time, your relationship to other artists in other cities, particularly Bombay, given our group has been discussing the art scene there at length?

GMS: As you know, the artist community in India is like an extended family—we all knew each other. I used to travel to Bombay, meet friends there, see their exhibitions, and the same applied to Delhi. I had also been to Santiniketan, to Calcutta, and to several other places. I had personal friendships with many artists, so I asked them for contributions for Vrishchik, and they offered willingly.

LG: Was there something specific about Baroda that enabled this kind of journal to happen in a particular way?

GMS: Baroda was very special among art schools in India at that time. It was one of the most liberal institutions, which allowed all kinds of activities, and we had students from all walks of life and sections of society.

The pioneers of the Faculty had Gandhian ideals—of building something they could handle without hankering after what was beyond their means. The institution was built on basics: painting, which needed a good studio; sculpture, which needed casting facilities; printmaking, which needed an etching press, a litho press etc.; and art history, [which was] taught to every student regardless of department. The Story of Art—a history of world art—which I taught for almost eighteen years was key to every student’s education. I had very young and bright students; they included Vivan, who came from the elite Doon School, while others came from small towns and tribal hinterlands. I taught the Story of Art in English for degree students and in Hindi for diploma students. At some stage, students who knew I was Gujarati asked why I didn’t teach it in Gujarati, so then I taught three classes on the same subject. In the first, Vivan would bring up Jackson Pollock; in the second, students only knew what was happening in their part of India; and in the third, some had not even heard of the Mona Lisa. That was the big challenge—how to teach all of them. It opened my eyes to the diversity of the world of artists coming to the Faculty.

But I will also go back to my background. I grew up in a small town called Surendranagar in Gujarat, where I started writing poetry, drawing, and painting. In those days it was customary for good schools to have a hand-painted, handwritten annual journal. One of my teachers—a poet who led me to write in Gujarati—decided to make such a journal to be placed in the public library every week. He decided that we would produce it together. We went to the Khadi Bhandar—khadi is the hand-spun cloth associated with Gandhi—which produced a very rough handmade paper that I enjoyed working on. Today, all artists love such papers because they are resilient and receptive to paint. On them, I would paint the cover, draw the titles of articles, and illustrate a picture story for children, while my teacher wrote short stories, a thought of the day, and poems. This ran for a year when I was about fifteen. I still have some copies—I showed them recently in an exhibition of my printmaking.

Jay Levenson: You mentioned Vrishchik was addressed primarily to artists. Were there also collectors who were involved?

GMS: No. Our list included visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers—about 200 people, many of whom we knew personally. I think there were hardly any collectors in those days. Those who may have collected works by [M. F.] Husain or Krishen Khanna were not accessible to us.

In those days, if we wanted to exhibit, we did it ourselves. No gallery would pick up our work. We took our paintings to Bombay or Delhi, mounted the exhibition ourselves, printed our own catalogues, and tried to sell the work by sitting in the gallery. I remember my first exhibition in Bombay: I had learned from my seniors that canvases had to be rolled up, so all our canvases were rolled. We took our stretchers, bound everything up, and booked a first-class train for the occasion. In Bombay, we couldn’t afford taxis, so we used horse carriages to transport everything to Jehangir Art Gallery, a public gallery that only opened around 11 o’clock. We’d arrive at six in the morning, wait for hours, then unpack our things, put the frames back on the canvases, and mount the show. A carpenter helped, if we could afford one; otherwise we did it ourselves.

As for collectors, I remember that Air India was a major buyer in those days. There was a gentleman called Jal Cowasji who made the rounds of galleries—and everybody would trail him, because he was the main person acquiring work for the airline. By 1969, the situation had improved with a few more galleries, but private galleries were still very few.

Rattanamol Singh Johal: Could you reflect on the relationship between Vrishchik during that very productive period from 1969 to 1973 and your painting practice at the same time. Reading the editorial from the first issue— “Afternoon”—I was struck by how much it resonates with paintings like Returning Home After Long Absence (1969–73; fig. 5) and Speechless City (1975; fig. 6). Could you speak to the threads that connect your poetry, your narrative writing, and your painting?

GMS: All of it—my writing on communalism, on silence, on isolation; my painting; my publishing of Vrishchik—were connected. 

When I returned from England in 1966, I took a long, nearly three-month journey, traveling by road from London to Bombay via Europe—buses, trains, walking, everything. That journey allowed me to discover India, and I began to look at everything with fresh eyes. I remember being on a bus near Jhansi, watching the landscape change as the bus moved so fast that distant trees appeared to rush toward me and mountains shrank. Experiences like this were accumulating. It was also when I felt I should write my memoir. I was on a train heading home to Surendranagar, and on whatever scraps of paper I had, I started scribbling notes on returning home. That memoir in Gujarati is now published, and hopefully an English edition will appear soon.

At the same time, I began the painting Returning Home After Long Absence. My memoir and my painting went hand in hand, opening pages of each other. In the painting, I brought in my mother, images of the town I grew up in, an Islamic backdrop with an image of the Prophet, a big wall—I wrote an entire chapter in my memoir on a wall—and trees, particularly the peepal tree, the Ficus religiosa, which was a beautiful tree that I could see from my window at the Faculty. All these things combined during those years.

By 1973, I was painting both from within myself and from what I saw around me—I painted two works called Man I and Man II (figs. 7, 8). Man I is a metaphorical work in which a man is seated, with his head on his lap. In Man II, a man holds another man [who is tied up] as an object of public display. That was when my eyes opened to the politics of India—which eventually led to Speechless City, painted while the Emergency was in effect. The roots of many paintings that came later were sown during that same period, while I was also publishing Vrishchik and writing poetry. 

AS: I’d like to close by asking about your commitment to multilingualism across your writing, poetry, teaching and publishing practices. 

GMS: I do not really know how to explain it—all three languages come to me naturally. I knew Gujarati because it is my mother tongue, and so if I want to write poetry or creative prose, like my memoir, I choose Gujarati. I learned Hindi on my own—and everyone in India knows some Hindi because of Hindi cinema. And English, I learned in school and college.

Vrishchik was, in part, a kind of lesson for me: It allowed me to polish my English. I did not know English very well at the start, but those four years helped me learn it properly. I was communicating with a large number of people, writing and receiving letters, editing contributions, proofreading—and when Adil or Gieve wrote in perfect English, I had to ensure that every word was printed exactly as they had written it.

All of this was part of my life, [as was] living within a family with my children and Nilima. I cannot really describe myself. I can only say that all of this is part of me—not something I took on as a challenge or as a duty, but something that came naturally. It was all part of my makeup.

Every Indian speaks two or three languages: the local language, Hindi, English or another language. We are plural by nature, multilingual. We think in multiple languages simultaneously. That is the makeup of the average mind, and thus, I am not so different. By writing in multiple languages, I have learned that I have to find myself in each of them.

The C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Group would like to express its sincere thanks to Gulammohammed Sheikh and to the team at the Asia Art Archive in India for making Vrishchik available to us. The magazine’s various issues can be accessed via the following link.

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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A Diasporic Mythology (2021) by Bagus Pandega (Indonesian, b. 1985) is a kinetic and sound installation organized in concentric rings (fig. 1). In the outer ring, several stringed instruments are similar in shape but culturally distinct: a taishōgoto from Japan and a sijobang harp, Balinese penting, Lombok penting, and mandaliong, all native to Indonesia. At the center of this arrangement are live tea plants equipped with MIDI Sprout sensors that capture bio-information from plants, which is translated to signals that activate the instruments. The MIDI sensors are also connected to a mechanical system that reads musical scores printed on a sheet of vinyl paper. The scores are informed by interviews Pandega conducted with local musicians who played the instruments included in the work. From these conversations, Pandega wrote scores that the sensors read as digital annotations, triggering a network of solenoid drivers and rotating motors to strike strings or press keys, creating an automated, live performance. This automation is bound by an invisible thread of historical and cultural translation. While the instruments explore how the same acoustic apparatus (the string instrument) circulates and adapts across different regions and cultures, the tea plants speak of the colonial history of the Dutch bringing tea from Japan to Indonesia.¹ Without oversimplifying the work through a mere, brief description, this is the intricacy of Pandega’s aesthetic.

Pandega assembles various electronic components, musical instruments, found objects, and 3-D-printed custom parts and software into artworks that combine and generate kinetic, acoustic, and light elements in a modular way: Each of the constituent components can be replaced, modified, or exchanged to form another iteration. Despite the technical marvel of his installations, Pandega’s approach to artistic practice remains fundamentally DIY—an artistic ethos that intentionally bypasses industrial standards. Pandega has adopted this “maker” mentality—rooted in Indonesia’s 1990s media landscape—to reexamine the collision between society and nature, as seen in The Diasporic Mythology.

DIY culture in Indonesia as it relates to art is primarily associated with self-organizing. It acts as a response to the lack of art infrastructure or institutions, and takes form in collective or community-based practices. However, DIY can also be seen in the process of creating artwork through a culture of customization and the use of “low technology” in media and new media art, that was introduced to Indonesia in the 1990s, along with the growing consumption of media and information technology, such as computers and the internet, in Indonesia and Southeast Asia in general. 

Pioneering multimedia artist Krisna Murti (1957–2023) utilized video installations to critique the friction between Indonesian tradition and technological consumerism. Canonical works such as 12 Hours in the Life of Agung Rai, the Dancer (1993)² and Learning to Queue Up to the Ants (1996)³ highlighted a clash of modernities in which the digital medium was used to examine tradition rather than replace it. While Murti’s installations were not modular and, furthermore, were typically fixed in their configuration, his interdisciplinary approach laid the groundwork for the more fluid systems developed by the next generation. 

In contrast, Heri Dono (b. 1960) created low-tech kinetic installations that critique Indonesia’s position as a consumer of technology. Observing that defective electronics were more often discarded than repaired, he incorporated used motors and coils into his work. Dono looked upon this process of “reviving” obsolete objects as a form of mechanical animism.⁴ His practice was further informed by the concept of dua seni rupa (two arts) first explored by Sanento Yuliman in 1984, which encourages a dialogue between “high” and “low” sociocultural phenomena.⁵ Dono’s works, for example Gamelan of Nommunication (1997), use mechanical devices and samples to automate traditional instruments, prefiguring the automated ensembles later made by Pandega (fig. 2). 

In their work in the 1990s, Murti and Dono examined encounters between technology and tradition as well as the binary tensions arising from symbolic and performative gestures addressing them. Sometimes, they distanced themselves from the concept of high technology. At other times, they were satirical or parodic in their approaches to it. Their video works are parts of fixed installations that would always be arranged in the same way—as opposed to being modular and reconfigured depending upon the context. Yet, their works are also interdisciplinary in nature, a characteristic that foreshadows the new media works of a later generation of artists.⁶ As Indonesian curator Agung Hujatnika has observed, the early Indonesian media artists who merged art and technology were not driven by a spirit of “scientific discovery” but rather by their interest in the impact of technological culture on and in the everyday lives of Indonesians.⁷ 

Ade Darmawan (b. 1974) and other artists working at the dawn of the 2000s—in post-Reformasi Indonesia—expanded new media art in terms of both artistic expression and infrastructure.⁸ Though the cultural mood of this period was in many ways euphoric, including for artists and musicians, the capitalist television and music industries, which favored more popular media, remained a hegemonic and out-of-reach ecosystem. As a reaction to this, machine customization culture, closely linked to experimental sound and music performance, flourished. For example, the early sound installation performances of the short-lived Yogyakarta-based artist duo Garden of the Blind—Jompet Kuswidananto (b. 1976) and Venzha Christ (b. 1975)—were primarily constructed from tinkered technology. Kuswidananto described their practice as “electrocraft,” a term he coined for a method of working that falls somewhere between the realms of analog and digital.⁹ This kind of low-tech assembly is apparent in the duo’s performance Kingdom of Broken Heart (2001), which features a cyborg-like performer equipped with a sensor-based right-hand glove and a spine that emits beeps when it moves (fig. 3). Seated in a chair on a postapocalyptic stage, beneath rotating televisions suspended from the ceiling, the performer remains central to the installation. 

Pandega’s practice emerged from a more established landscape of artist-led infrastructure, including collectives like ruangrupa (est. 2000, Jakarta), which staged the first OK. Video—Jakarta International Video Festival in 2003, and Bandung Center for New Media Arts, which institutionalized DIY and DIWO (do-it-with-others) mentalities. As part of the generation that emerged after the new media artists born in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Pandega had earlier and more significant exposure to technology and relatively established infrastructure and reception. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in sculpture in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2015 from the Faculty of Art and Design at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). Pandega’s artistic development coincided with the emergence in 2007 of “intermedia” within the practical and pedagogical trajectory of ITB, which developed the category as a new and separate discipline within its fine arts department as a means of integrating art within media and information technology. Though Pandega himself remained an autodidact, this institutional shift in focus made new media art a budding practice within the formal infrastructure of ITB, which traditionally, had been more artist-initiated and grassroots-oriented.

In 2007, Pandega also encountered the work of Japanese artist Muneteru Ujino (b. 1964) at KITA!! Japanese Artists Meet Indonesia, where Ujino exhibited The Rotators (2007) (fig. 4).¹⁰ Ujino is known for sound installations that combine 20th-century industrial products, such as household appliances, electric guitars, cars, and building materials, with DIY technology. Pandega took inspiration from his practice and started exploring the tension between the functional history of an object and its potential to generate sound.

By 2015, Pandega was fully integrating modularity, treating installation components as individual, wall-bound units of vinyl and light—a pivotal shift evident in his Clandestine Transgression series (fig. 5). In subsequent works, like Polka (2016) and A Tea Poi on Moo (2016), he further distilled the complex setups into self-contained modules. This new approach allowed him to extract and recontextualize various components across exhibitions, to look upon them as technical and conceptual nomads rather than fixed parts of a single unit. While Murti and Dono utilized traditional musical instruments to symbolically illustrate a cultural clash with modernization, Pandega favored a different friction: stripping the instruments of their melodic expectations and treating them as raw sound generators. 

Referring to his practice as “social-based DIY,” Pandega visits local smiths and technicians—such as lathe operators—to commission components and machine parts for his installations as well as to establish long-term relationships with the people integral to his artistic practice.¹¹ His works are hands-on, and his deep, consistent engagement with objects and the smiths who make them is testament to the dialogic and often communal nature of new media arts in Indonesia. Pandega’s work transforms and deconstructs the functionality and nature of everyday objects, some of which he has acquired secondhand. His use of modern musical instruments, whether they are intact or physically deconstructed, echoes the interdisciplinary ethos of earlier artists. Whether using vinyl LPs, lamps, or custom instruments, Pandega treats every variable as a technical and conceptual nomad that can be continually repurposed through new prompts and iterations across different modular systems.

A Diasporic Mythology explores the diaspora of culture and objects through trade and musical influence. This kinetic and sound installation establishes relationships between Indonesia and Japan by bringing together seemingly unrelated items from across borders into a diasporic ensemble. The taishōgoto, a 1912 Japanese invention, hybridizes a typewriter mechanism and stringed instrument. In joining it with Indonesian instruments—a mandaliong (Lombok), penting (Bali and Lombok), and kecapi sijobang (West Sumatra)—Pandega creates a cross-cultural dialogue. 

This ensemble is connected to the live Camellia sinensis, a tea plant with deep roots in colonial trade between Asia and Europe. MIDI Sprout sensors detect the plants’ electrical conductivity as biodata, triggering solenoids and motors to pluck the strings. The resulting sound is a musical and historical cacophony that highlights three of Pandega’s core interests: 1) an assembly of instruments from different cultures; 2) the use of nonhuman agency (nature) to “control” technology; and 3) the contrast between traditional, native instruments and modern, technological devices and softwares. The contrasts explored here by Pandega mirror the cultural tensions explored by Murti and Dono in the 1990s. 

In the context of A Diasporic Mythology, modularity operates on two levels: technically, in merging electronic components and living organisms into reconfigurable systems, and conceptually, in recasting cultural objects and their inherent histories as interrelated fragments brought together to reconstruct an ensemble or an ecology. The modular logic allows each work to perform as a fluid mechanism capable of being dismantled and recalibrated to inhabit new geographical and curatorial environments without losing its integrity. Since its inception, A Diasporic Mythology has experienced a dispersion from its original articulation. The work debuted in 2021 as a commissioned piece in the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. It was then featured in 2022 in Pandega’s solo exhibition O (pronounced “circle”), the focus of which was ecological extraction and circular economies. On both occasions, the arrangement of individual modules, each enabled by its own inherent technical and architectural capability, echoes the diaspora it aims to address. 

The modular nature of A Diasporic Mythology is also due to the functional independence of its components. As previously mentioned, Pandega treats acoustic, light, and kinetic as individual elements that can be brought together to form a more expansive body of work, that is, a richer ecology. This work is composed of several self-contained modules that can operate independently or on a smaller scale. Indeed, some of them have been used in entirely different artworks. For example, the taishōgoto is also part of Pandega’s Remaining Ending (2020). In this earlier piece, an orchid is clipped to the MIDI Sprout so that its conductivity can be read by the device to play the taishōgoto. In front of the musical instrument, Pandega placed three books on Pendidikan Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa (Education on the History of the National Struggle), a subject in the curriculum of the Indonesian New Order.¹² Different from A Diasporic Mythology, the taishōgoto in Remaining Ending conceptually represents the history of education in Indonesia, which was influenced by Japanese colonialism, and links it to the education system and controlled narratives of the New Order era. 

In A Diasporic Mythology, this same instrument conceptually represents a different colonial historical network, a shift that is further complicated by a series of similar stringed instruments with nonetheless different cultural associations. This example shows how the very same module might conceptually transform when it is recontextualized, or placed within a different and more entangled installation.¹³ This particular mechanism also echoes the diaspora in that modules formerly concentrated in one environment have scattered from their homeland to inhabit new, more culturally intricate environments.

A Diasporic Mythology does not hide its modularity (fig. 6). Indeed, its constituent parts are literally laid bare—with nothing shrouding them. Viewers can simultaneously observe the exposed circuitry, structure, and tangled wires up to the electric power socket into which they are plugged. On full display, the modules making up A Diasporic Mythology are thereby rendered visibly equal—even though the tea plant and musical instruments serve as the main discursive points, and despite the fact that the rotating LED screen is at the center and top of the concentric installation. Pandega’s objective as a new media artist is to invite viewers to pay attention to his work’s complexity. A Diasporic Mythology coaxes them to trace how the tea and taishōgoto, for example, are connected not only through the MIDI Sprout, but also through the cultural diaspora. The repetition of certain objects across Pandega’s works demonstrates a configurability that reveals both diasporic and prototypic dimensions.¹⁴ By considering the same mechanism in the context of different arrangements, we can see how it might serve as a prototype, or preliminary mechanism, for future rearrangements—wherein new elements are added and old ones subtracted or repurposed to serve a new ecology of relations. Ultimately, any one module might be rescaled and/or rearranged, evolving alongside the specific ecology of a particular exhibition.

To define the trait of a module and modularity in Pandega’s practice, we might look at how the artist combines physical hardware and historical objects. In Pandega’s practice, which evolved from studying fine art sculpture to applying his “social-based DIY” method, a module is not merely a building block of an installation; it is a self-contained conceptual block capable of inhabiting different contexts. Each module represents a combination of technical and conceptual components. Each possesses the functional capacity to operate as a single mechanism, as exemplified by Remaining Ending, or as part of a larger, webbing ecosystem, such as A Diasporic Mythology. Each constituent possesses a distinct history or association, be it with colonial trade or musical migration, that persists regardless of its physical and historical displacements. Hence, modularity is the aesthetic that allows the inherent cultural or historical quality of an object to be as reconfigurable as its hardware.

As seen in A Diasporic Mythology, modularity is also defined by the exposed relations within the installation. By baring its circuitry, the work weaves technical mechanisms into visible figures of speech. This unshrouded modularity invites the audience to trace the relationships between the modules—not just their physical presence. Modularity mirrors the diasporic framework: It embodies the historical dispersion of the objects it utilizes by migrating across geographical and curatorial ecologies.

Pandega’s modularity clearly addresses more than technological or scientific discovery. It also calls attention to artistic derivations resulting from the discrete material and conceptual properties of each module. It demands an understanding of a complex material ecology: What did the module look like previously? How does it function in the present work? What possible mechanisms might it operate in the future? Within this circuitry, historical moments serve as “invisible” modules, the connective tissue that complicates Pandega’s installations and enhances what might otherwise be a purely kinetic endeavor. By treating every component as a module, Pandega moves beyond the binary tensions of the 1990s media art into a space of fluid, intermedial conversation. Through this intricate assembly, Pandega ensures that the complexity of his modularity lies not just in its technical spectacle, but also in its ability to fundamentally question our own relationship with technology, its politics, its ecology, and its history.

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In this essay, I approach the intimate configurations captured in Finger Ornament as a site of artistic expression that reworks local ornamental production, dissolving categories of high and amateur, domestic and public, visual and haptic. In so doing, I highlight that the artwork accentuates the conceptual potential of its primary reference: the ornament of textile associated with the pre-Soviet culture of Kazakh nomads. In order to align with the artistic intention to foreground regional creative forms, my essay proposes a speculative turn: adopting a relational reading and an intertextual analysis between the artwork Finger Ornament and traditional textile ornamentation. Through an intertextual reading of Blinova’s work and traditional ornamentation, I trace and disentangle how Finger Ornament recontextualizes textile art.

Kazakh ornament is a nonfigurative aesthetic sign associated with carpets and textiles produced domestically by women in nomadic society. Kazakhs lived as pastoral nomads from the 17th century until the early 20th, when Stalinist modernization policies forcefully sedentarized nomadic polities in the Soviet Union. The atemporal dialogic proximity of Finger Ornament and the semantic figure of traditional ornament serve as precursors to the postindependence cultural shift toward regional creative practices and their media, while operating across divides of fine and folk art, of high and low, of visual and haptic modes of perception. Relational reading enables us to shed light on conceptual characteristics of pre-Soviet textile art, previously obscured by its epistemic and institutional positioning as craft and folk art. 

Haptic Ornament 

Finger Ornament is one of the few surviving works from the partly lost and, by nature, fragile and ephemeral, body of work by Blinova. Formally trained as an architect at the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute, Blinova had worked at the architectural bureau in Almaty. Together with her husband, Rustam Khalfin, she organized apartment exhibitions and gathered together a small community of like-minded artists. In the mid-1980s, the couple abandoned formal positions as architects to commit themselves to their artistic practice. Unlike her life partner, a prominent figure in the Central Asian contemporary art scene, Blinova left behind a modest artistic heritage: scattered pencil and watercolor drawings, a book, “A Poem about a Learned Cat” (1994), several wooden sculptures, photo-documentation of her plastic jewelry, and Finger Ornament. The latter is a series of ten black-and-white photographs of figures and signs composed by the artist using her own fingers and palms. By turning, twisting, opening, and closing her hands, Blinova made new spatial forms, which she had photographed, and then she assembled the pictures into a two-row grid, creating an ornamental structure. This corporeal and intimate reenactment of visual patterns invokes a haptic aesthetics—a visual register where the boundaries between sight and touch collapse into a single mode of perception.

Blinova was interested in what she called “elementary sculpture,” or the basic form that exists before the hand touches a material.¹ In the early 1990s, she was experimenting with plastic jewelry, crafting sculptural and wearable objects for possible sale. She undertook this domestic, kitchen-based production of small jewelry pieces to help sustain herself and her husband during the economic upheavals and social uncertainty of the early 1990s. Figures of Finger Ornament sprang from the artist’s tactile practice of molding soft plastic and her exploration of the notion of basic form. Blinova stripped away the material and instead modeled her sculptures from her own hands. The artist’s friend, the architect Larissa Andreeva, photographed them at Blinova and Khalfin’s flat. The artwork is composed of a series of fragile and transient sculptural forms, each of which embodies the dissolution of the previous sign. By flattening spatial objects into an ornamental pattern, Blinova sensed and exposed the haptic aesthetics coded in traditional carpets and their ornamental vernacular. Haptic reenactment of the ornamental grid shifts the focus away from the prolonged vision-centered discourses that have constricted textile practices to minor and applied arts. 

The ornament is intrinsic to textile objects such as carpets, tapestries, and garments, which constituted the core of the material culture of nomads in pre-Soviet Central Asia. In nomadic culture, creative practices were deeply enmeshed into the process of living—as opposed to separated into the distinct and detached realm of autonomous art. In the 1930s, along with the forced sedentarization, Soviet modernization policies introduced and institutionalized the pictorial tradition of oil painting. Simultaneously, a wide range of local creative practices was academically narrated and institutionally contextualized as folk and applied art. After the demise of the Soviet Union, while both cultural practitioners and institutions turned to the reassessment and reimagination of regional cultural heritage, its forms, and media, the previous analytical tradition continued to maintain the split between art and craft. Decorativeness served as the main signifier for practices that involved ornamentation, confining them to the category of craft. It should be noted that the notorious notion of the “decorative” was one of the organizing principles in the prolonged hierarchy of art and craft not only in the former Soviet bloc, but also more widely in Euro-American scholarship and art criticism. Juxtaposed with modernist pictorial and conceptual innovativeness, the decorative served as a rhetorical device to distinguish between high art and minor arts, which were often associated with gendered and racialized practices in postwar North America.² In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, one of the first academic books focused on the exploration of Kazakh ornament urged artists, artisans, and scholars to overcome the indulgent standpoint and to extricate ornamental practices from the limiting notion of the decorative.³ Drawing on Vladimir Propp’s structural analysis of Russian folk tales and Soviet Kazakhstani archaeologist Alan Medoyev’s formal analysis of petroglyphs and cave paintings, Karlygash Ibrayeva suggests approaching folk ornamental production as a system that models and is directly related to the surrounding environment.⁴ The architect Almas Ordabayev, who contributed to the volume and provided graphic materials and photographs, was a professor in the department of architecture at the Polytechnic Institute when Blinova and Khalfin were students there and later became friends with Blinova. Indeed, she was familiar with Ordabayev’s studies of ornamentation in architectural monuments in Mangyshlak, a region in southwestern Kazakhstan.

Finger Ornament was first exhibited in 1995 at the Parade of Galleries, an event that marked the emergence of private galleries on the post-socialist institutional landscape. The Parade of Galleries, also titled Independent Galleries of the City, hosted by the Abylkhan Kasteev State Museum, was in itself a novel platform that celebrated the spirit of the transition period in society, its aspiration to expanded civic freedom and to opening up new market relations. More than simply introducing market mechanisms, The Parade functioned as a diverse semi-institutional space for artistic and cultural producers’ experiments across dozens of private galleries. The event showcased an array of artistic practices that sought to move beyond the stylistic traditions of official art and its Soviet legacy. The emergent aesthetics of transition manifested in experimental and expanded media and material choices, as well as in time-based and performative practices. Blinova’s delicate Finger Ornament both anticipated and participated in the strong trend of exploration and reimagining of regionally situated cultural and creative practices and forms by official and nonofficial artists and art institutions. The ornament has become a recurrent visual trope in artistic production, design, and architecture, solidifying its status as a vernacular expression. What distinguishes Finger Ornament is its non-mimetic yet haptic reenactment of traditional ornamentation, which both elucidates and recalibrates its conceptual code as well as alludes to its codependency on the wider cultural and environmental webs of relations.

Haptic aesthetics, a recently emerging academic field, examines the implications of touch, tactility, and sensorial interactions across disciplines, from art history to anthropology. Film scholar Laura Marks theorizes haptic images as ones that, by reducing the distance between the viewer and the image, generate embodied response, evoking memories of physical sensations and drawing attention to texture and proximity rather than distant contemplation.⁵ Haptic registers in Finger Ornament sense the co-constitutive interaction between vision and tactility, foundational in the process of producing textile ornamental objects and in their perception. It is difficult to say whether Blinova was familiar with traditional methods of carpet-making, which involve stages of felting the wool by hand and subsequently rolling a pattern of colored wool into the base of semifinished felt (fig. 2). However, Blinova experienced tactile operations of kneading and molding plastic and the work of one’s body in making a visual form. 

If we adopt an intertextual reading of the traditional ornament through the haptic registers of the artwork, we are able to highlight its structural affinities. In traditional carpets, patterns trace corporeal movement and the sense of touch: The wool is transformed into felt through the physical pressure and movements of the entire body. The photographs in Finger Ornament do not mimetically reproduce the visual referent; instead, they capture the dynamic process of creating a new sign through lived, bodily gesture. The artwork alludes to the ornament’s non-referential and nonmaterial characteristics. Shifting emphasis from the visual to the tactile, the indexicality of Finger Ornament reveals what is not visible in traditional ornamental production—such as the corporeal performativity of its making. In pastoral nomadic culture, felting and carpet-making included individual but more often collective women’s creative labor. It played a vital role in the transference of knowledge and familial stories along maternal lines. Nurbolat Masanov (1954–2006), a scholar of nomadism, argues that pastoral nomadism, its economic organization around cattle breeding, and its material culture were determined by the geo-ecological and climate systems in the arid territory of Kazakhstan.⁶ The textile object stands within the intricate web of codependent relations between the ecosystem, social and economic organization, and women’s sensibilities and creative practices. Finger Ornament restages the ornament as a coded system rather than as merely a decorative sign. The artwork’s performativity emphasizes the flow of creative energy and ideas that guided domestic ornamental production. 

According to the recollections of friends and artists from the Almaty art scene, Blinova was a modest person and a rather unknown artist. Almas Ordabayev has stressed that though she was very gifted and could research themes in linguistics, history of art, and culture, she did not want to limit herself to either the restraints of official institutions or the framework of particular media.⁷ He added that Blinova had preferred the intellectual intensity of coining and thinking through ideas and the creative interplay to finalized and polished art objects (fig.3). Various memoirs recurrently describe Blinova as the one who quotidianly lived within the flow of unbounded imagination.⁸ After leaving her job at an architectural bureau, she participated in several exhibitions. The period of the early 1990s was marked by a loose institutional infrastructure and a lack of support for independent and experimental practices. In 1995, the artist presented her “A Poem about a Learned Cat” at the Kokserek gallery in Almaty, mounting lines of its verses along the walls at a very low height from the floor—that is, at a cat’s-eye level. The playfulness of her practice was accompanied by the conceptual exploration of tactility, spatiality, and bare form. The nascent art market, probably, contributed to her ephemeral creative labor. Although few of Blinova’s works have survived, her artistic presence endures in oral histories, artistic projects, and publications by a circle of friends, artists, and peer members of the Almaty underground art scene in the late 1980s and 1990s.⁹ These guardians of memory portrayed her as an artist whose life was guided by the power of imagination and whose legacy shimmers and resonates in the work of others, most notably that of her husband. 

The dialogic interplay between Finger Ornament and traditional ornament explores how the haptic is entangled with the social and relational in everyday, uncommodified female creative practices. The artistic fate of Blinova gestures toward the larger question of the art-historiographical positionality of numerous women whose creative labor formed the core of the material culture of nomads. The process of mark-making in ornamentation is intuitive, gestural, and even chance-driven. The performativity of Finger Ornament echoes the process and passion-driven nature of ornamentation and its deep immersion in the flow of crafting a new form. Thus, Finger Ornament presses into the continuity of local creative traditions while expanding their medium and conceptual code. In postindependence Kazakhstan, where artists sought to reimagine cultural forms rooted in the region, Finger Ornament is a delicate exploration of haptic knowledge and practices guided by a love of crafting and making. If the dialogic reading of the traditional ornament and the artwork of Blinova should arrive at a concise conclusion, it is the one that charts mutually formative connections between the high and the vernacular, between pattern and thought. 

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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.

The post Tricky Terms, Coming Together: Arianna Mercado, David Morris, and Wing Chan and Carlos Quijon, Jr. in Conversation appeared first on post.

Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: I think we need to think a little more carefully about what we call “our inheritance.” What you think is yours may not actually be yours in the way you imagine. I am not saying you do not have a right to access it, but you have to think about how and why and where you are using it. The culture I want to be part of, the culture I want to help create, is shaped by artists from oppressed castes, from Adivasi and Indigenous lineages.¹ But being an artist from an oppressed caste in South Asia is not new. These are communities that have produced culture and developed visual traditions for centuries. Traditionally, we were the artists. We were the ones creating looms and weaves and pottery.

What the Western world now calls “craft” and what it sometimes demeans as “craft”—all of it was developed by those who belonged to oppressed castes, not by those from oppressor castes. So when I see people casually referencing certain patterns or weaves—as if it is simply, “I’m South Asian, I’m Indian, this exists in my work”—that is not how that works. That is not how those loom and weaving codes came to be. Those codes were developed in very specific political, social, and historical contexts.

So we have to think about what that canon really is. And we have to think about it very intentionally. I am not the first person saying this. Many artists, like me, talk about how the entire cultural, political, and visual culture of South Asia comes from communities that belong to oppressed castes. Yet in the larger art world, South Asian art is often represented only by those from oppressor castes. And that is deeply warped. It smells a bit of appropriation to be honest.

MV: This way of very intentionally thinking about inheritance has shaped how you work with material history, especially your Dalit Panthers Archive. You’ve often described yourself as an “accidental archivist.” Can you explain what the Dalit Panthers Archive is and what it meant to take on that work? 

SNS: The Dalit Panthers Archive grew out of very practical circumstances. A few friends and I were researching a documentary on the Dalit Panthers, and we kept running into the same problem: There simply wasn’t enough accessible material.² There were very few photographs, very little visual documentation, and that made it difficult to work on the project as nonfiction. As we continued researching, we realized that much of the Panthers’ history was being held privately. People had posters, pamphlets, and publications in their homes, but they were often in very fragile condition. We began scanning and recording these materials initially as part of the research process, but it quickly became clear that this work needed to be done more deliberately.

One thing that’s important to understand about the Dalit Panthers is that they were not visual artists or performers. They were writers and poets deeply involved in radical literary movements in Maharashtra at the time. The movement existed largely through poetry, writing, and publication. So we focused very specifically on that print culture: manifestos (fig. 1), book covers, little magazine publications, and writing by or featuring Panther poets and writers.³

After that, I spent months editing hundreds of images one by one, cleaning them up, and assembling them into readable PDFs. But almost all of this material was in Marathi, and I was extremely dissatisfied with displaying or circulating it without translation—especially outside of Maharashtra. When people can’t read the text, engagement stops. It becomes a visual reference rather than an encounter with the writing itself or the image and text in tandem.

That’s when translation became central to the archive. I applied for funding through the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation so that the work could be translated, edited, and interpreted. Because this writing is rooted in a very specific time and place, translation required more than just linguistic accuracy. It meant understanding slang, cultural references, and historical context that doesn’t immediately carry across generations. In that sense, translation became part of the archival labor itself.

MV: As you were working through this material, was there a particular publication or person that you found yourself returning to?

SNS: Through this process, I ended up getting extremely close to Raja Dhale’s work.⁴ Not in the sense of speaking to him, unfortunately, because he passed away around the same time I was working on the translations. We had spoken earlier, during the documentary interviews, but not during the translation phase of the research—as I really wish we had.

Because once I started reading everything he had written—slowly, carefully—I understood him very differently. What became clear to me was how urgent his relationship to language was. He was thinking constantly about how we speak, how we write, how we publish, because he was deeply concerned with being misunderstood. He wanted language to be sharp, so that what was being said could not be easily distorted. I relate to that very strongly.

One publication that stayed with me was Chakravarty, a literary daily he published for fourteen days straight (fig. 2). That in itself is kind of insane! It was not about current affairs; it was only literature, only radical writing. And he did everything himself. What struck me about the text was that it was not dry or heavy. It was funny. It had a real sense of humor. There were fake obituaries, satire, moments of play. That combination of rigor and humor felt very important.

Working with Chakravarty also raised questions for me about form. I spoke to one of the artists whose work appeared in the publication, and he told me that the images often had nothing to do with the text. Dhale would simply say he liked the work and include it. The image did not illustrate the writing, and that separation was interesting to me. The publication itself became the work. And spending time with that material made me think much more seriously about skill, rigor, and intention in political practice. It challenged the idea that it is enough to just have something to say. The Panthers, and Dhale especially, were extremely precise about how they said it.

MV: What I find especially compelling in your work is how you move between very specific materials, like Dhale’s Chakravarty, and much wider cultural inheritances in India. How do you understand the Panthers’ place within older lineages, particularly Buddhist histories in Maharashtra?

SNS: When I think about my own lineages, the Panthers are a very direct influence, but they are only one part of a much larger anti-caste movement. And that movement comes from Buddhist cultures as well. Growing up in Bombay, a huge part of my childhood was having access to the Kanheri Caves (fig. 4). My mother used to take us every year during the monsoon. We would trek up and spend time in these over-2,000-year-old caves with extraordinary carvings and sculptures. These were not just monuments, but also Buddhist learning centers, places where people lived, studied, and created. Being in those spaces makes you think about what Mumbai once was—green, swampy islands where philosophers, artists, and writers lived. That is a very real cultural lineage for me.

At the same time, you become very aware of how quickly these histories get absorbed into Brahminical narratives. These sites are constantly being reinterpreted as something else, often as places where the Pandavas rested, when they were clearly Buddhist spaces of learning.⁵

More recently, I was at the Elephanta Caves, and I was struck by how aggressively Buddhist history is being suppressed.⁶ The site has a layered history, but what is happening now is not about complexity. On the plaques, they avoid even using the word Buddhist. Things are described as stylistically Buddhist, not as what they actually are. There is a very clear erasure of Buddhist and Jain traditions happening. Parts of the caves that are visibly Buddhist are left to crumble and remain closed, while other narratives are foregrounded. 

MV: What does witnessing that erasure demand of you as an artist working with history?

SNS: I think about this a lot in relation to my position as an “accidental archivist.” I am not a historian or an archaeologist, but rather an artist working with history, I know that symbols matter. It becomes important to use them deliberately and clearly. This is not only about Buddhism as a religion of liberation for my community. It is also about recognizing traditions in South Asia that existed in opposition to Vedic culture. For me, engaging these older inheritances is part of the same work as engaging the Panthers. It is about insisting on histories that are foundational but repeatedly pushed aside.

MV: When you work within these older inheritances and the Panthers’ print culture, you are encountering symbols that already carry enormous political weight. I’m thinking of the panther in particular, a symbol shaped by a long history of Black civil rights struggles in the United States. How does this image surface in your work?

Being a Panther was something that people took on very passionately and very immediately. We adopted it because the panther is such a powerful-looking animal. It’s strong; it’s striking. Even now, I have a panther tattoo. That image resonated very deeply with people. I think it also stood in opposition to other symbols at the time, like the Shiv Sena tiger.⁷

I was thinking through this symbol while working on an illustration based on the 2022 film Jhund (fig. 5).⁸ I represented one of the characters with a whole world operating around her, and from those details you can tell so much about her life. At the same time, she’s still the focus: She carries a sense of ambition and aspiration, and she’s also holding something of the “learned culture” that comes from expressing yourself through fashion or hair. We never see her like this in the film, but this is the version of her that has existed in my mind.

She is wearing a leopard print in the illustration, which is very intentional. It could easily look like a Western fashion reference, but for me it comes from somewhere very local. It’s inspired by Namdeo Dhasal, a leader and poet in the Dalit Panthers. He was known for his flamboyance, for wearing wild, printed kurtas. I’m not saying the girl is a “panther” or that the Panthers are the main point of the image. It’s more that their presence exists as a backdrop that she can stand confidently against. So even when a pattern or an emblem looks global, the reference is very local, very specific. It’s Dhasal. It’s the Panthers. And this is true across my portraits right now.

In one of my portraits in [the series] Educate, for example, I made a self-portrait about my early education at home (fig. 6). In almost every childhood photo of me, there’s a book—or I’m scribbling on the wall. Those scribbles aren’t imagined. My parents let me practice writing the alphabet directly on the walls. They encouraged that kind of learning. That portrait is about education in the home and how formative it was. From it, I made a ceramic chalk box with a panther on top as a companion object (fig. 7). When I started looking up references, I realized there’s a very popular Indian brand called Panther Chalks. It’s completely ordinary, mass-produced. So, I thought, I’m going to use it. I’m going to take this panther and make it mine.

MV: In works like Panther Chalks, you’re clearly engaging the panther as a symbol, but not by reproducing the Black Panther image directly. Instead, you draw from the Indian leopard. Where does that image enter your thinking?

SNS: Yes. The specific panther I’m referencing was made by Subash Awachat, for a cover of Manohar Magazine (fig. 8). It wasn’t published by the Panthers themselves. It comes from a lineage of progressive print culture in Pune. The artist was representing the Indian panther, the leopard. I really loved that, because that’s also how I like to approach the Panthers. I don’t use the Black Panther panther in my work. I don’t think I ever have. That is not the panther I’m speaking through. It has its own legacy and its own history, and there was a reason the Dalit Panthers used that symbol in the 1970s. But now, from this moment and place, I use the Indian leopard. And even within the movement at the time, people were trying to visualize an Indian connection.

MV: It’s interesting because you’re creating new connections and lineages for this symbol. Now that you’re also working in the United States around the other lineage of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement, has the panther taken on new meaning for you?

SNS: I’ll be honest: I don’t force myself to go looking for it. If something comes up naturally, I follow it. I had an opportunity in Chicago—a print workshop paired with a talk on the Dalit Panther Archive—at an event called “From Panther to Panther.”⁹ People who had engaged with both movements were there, and I met some former Black Panthers. That experience felt like being at home. But I don’t want to seek things out in a way that feels imposed on me. I also don’t want to exoticize Black history or Black political struggle by chasing after parallels. I do seek connections, but only when they’re organic. And there hasn’t been enough time for me here to explore that [connection] deeply. I also don’t want to replicate the dynamic of some white visitors in India who arrive and say, “Tell us everything.” I don’t want to replicate that here by demanding access to Black histories. If I was a tourist, I might spend all day in museums and archives. But when you live somewhere, you need to find your place in the culture instead of declaring, “I’m here now; love me.”

It would be a disservice to both communities and both political movements to place them side by side as if they’re the same. The contexts are entirely different, including [with regard to] the role of women in each movement. And while I feel deep solidarity with African American, Caribbean, and Indigenous communities here, I don’t want to impose that solidarity. It’s like any relationship: It has to be reciprocal. You can’t force it. It has to have time and space to emerge. That’s why I haven’t rushed to draw strict parallels. But when genuine connection happens—when I tell someone here about the Dalit Panthers, and they feel an immediate kinship—it’s beautiful. It feels like meeting someone from home, even though they belong to a different history.

MV: That’s why I find the leopard illustration so compelling. It’s not about superimposing one history onto another; it’s about finding forms of solidarity that grow from where you’re rooted.

SNS: The main reason that the leopard resonates so much with me is its relationship to Bombay. Its life inside that city, with its shrinking habitat and environmental pressures—that context matters. When the Black Panthers chose the black panther, there was intention: The animal’s sleekness, its quiet strategy, its defensive intelligence. If you look at the Indian leopard through the lens of Bombay, its survival carries a different meaning: Its connection to the land, to Indigenous communities, to environmental neglect, to the fact that leopards are often sighted near the Kanheri Caves—all of that is present. So when I use the leopard, I’m thinking very specifically about the leopard of Bombay, the context of the Dalit Panthers, and what it means that we come from the same place as this animal. That authenticity, that rootedness, is at the core of how a culture becomes deep enough that it can’t be erased. The Dalit Panthers as an organization didn’t last long, but the culture [that its members] generated runs deep. The same is true of the Black Panthers. The culture they built endures through the imagination of Black women, community programs, healthcare initiatives, the Free Breakfast for Children Program, etc. These are the things that sustain a movement, and they’re also what sustains culture.

It’s the same with art. The same energies that sustain political movements sustain visual culture. So the work has to keep reactivating itself. As an artist, I have to stay tuned to that. I don’t want the work or the culture we’re building together to be something that can easily disappear. There are always people ready to erase it the second they get a chance. I don’t want that chance to exist, and I want my art to offer a mutual sustaining, a feeding of each other.

The post “It’s not about superimposing one history onto another; it’s about finding forms of solidarity that grow from where you’re rooted.”: Maya Varma in Conversation with Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar; Part II appeared first on post.