Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative
Guggenheim Forum:
“Genius Loci”
What is the “spirit of place”? In a new edition of the Guggenheim’s online panel beginning Monday, September 30, artist Bani Abidi, radical cartographer William Rankin, and critic Sukhdev Sandhu will join writer Jeffrey Kastner to discuss the ways in which our routes around the world are determined by memory, desire, and cultural context.
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About the Project
The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative fosters cross-cultural interaction between artists, curators, and audiences via educational programs, online activities, and collection building. It focuses on three regions—South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa.
MAP Overview 2:11
Director's Introduction 1:01
Project Overview
Curator's Vision 3:06
Education Programming
MAP: Regarding South and Southeast Asia
Artworks
Perspectives
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Read, watch, listen to, and discuss essays, stories, and interviews by international artists, writers, and curators.
Cinema Park, a video essay by Jeanno Gaussi
Curator Leeza Ahmady introduces and provides background to Jeanno Gaussi’s poignant video and poem Cinema Park (2012), in which the artist documents and reflects on her visit to a favorite old movie theater in Afghanistan.
Fruit Picnic
“People in the fifth stage of Buddhism don’t eat fruit.” Four artists picnicking in the forest share anecdotes, myths, and memories associated with Cambodian foods, tracing connections between cultures and languages through cultivation and cuisine.
Dear Japanese: Children of War
Netherlands-based artist Miyuki Okuyama describes the genesis of her photographic project Dear Japanese, in which she portrays the offspring of Japanese fathers and Dutch-Indonesian mothers as a way to reflect on the complexities of identity.
What Can Art Tell Us about the World? Southeast Asia, China, the West, and the Rest
Recalling various key projects of the past 25 years, curator Biljana Ciric examines the status of China within a globalized contemporary art world, reflecting on its changing relationships with communities within and beyond the region.
Cheragee Pahar: Far from the Madding Crowd
Naeem Mohaimen experiences public reactions to an outdoor art event in Chittagong and reflects on the cultural makeup of Bangladesh’s contemporary art scene, which has flourished largely without the intervention of visiting critics and curators.
Books and Mortar
Can books have the impact of an exhibition? That’s the question posed by Sharmini Pereira in this account of Mobile Library, which brought publications from Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive to Jaffna in Sri Lanka.
Kedai Pati @ Pigeon Shop
In this documentary video, Roslisham Ismail, a.k.a. Ise, visits a popular Kelantanese pati street food stall, run by the gregarious Shamsul, and observes the preparation of some local favorites for a group of loyal customers.
Parts and (W)holes
Casting a critical eye over the Guggenheim UBS MAP project itself, Philippine critic and curator Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez poses challenging questions about the purpose of transnational curating and the meanings of “Asia” from an American perspective.
Abandoned in Favor of the Philippine Government
When art and officialdom collide, the results can be frustrating but also revealing. Choreographer and critic Donna Miranda tracks the fate of Working Artist Group, a portfolio held up in customs en route to Manila.
Samplings from the Zhadhya Archive Centre
Fusing speculative fiction with historical fact, Bangalore-based artist Abhishek Hazra presents a series of extracts from the diary of a member of the Kankurgachi Balloonists Society, fragments that appear to detail an unusual scientific experiment.
Karachi Pop: Vernacular Visualities in 1990s Karachi
Curator Hammad Nasar examines the work of Durriya Kazi, David Alesworth, Iftikhar Dadi, and Elizabeth Dadi, four artists who, in 1990s Karachi, reworked Pop art tropes to explore themes of the popular and the everyday.
Miniature Painting in Pakistan: Divergences Between Traditional and Contemporary Practice
Lahore-based artist and researcher Murad Khan Mumtaz plots the unique historical trajectory of miniature painting in Pakistan, detailing its roots in sixteenth-century India, the aesthetic influence of European colonialism, and the technique’s latter-day “modernized” reemergence.
Beyond the Commodity Fetish: Art and the Public Sphere in India
Revisiting the histories of two Indian art-world institutions, Gallery Chemould and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, theorist and curator Nancy Adajania demonstrates the universal and continuing vitality of alternative models for exhibiting.
Dinh Q. Lê in conversation with Zoe Butt
Talking to Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê, curator Zoe Butt uncovers a creative practice rooted in the reclamation of an officially “erased” cultural identity through the retrieval of shared memories embedded in objects and images.
Reading Spaces, Spaces for Reading
Even as an increasing amount of writing occupies digital space, print publications, bookstores, and libraries remain significant. Jason Wee looks at the culture of reading in Singapore and discovers a complex and developing “cultural ecology.”
Bombay from the Ground Up, Performance Included
Performance art in Bombay is experiencing a growth spurt. But while the scene is attracting increasing attention, it is also, as curator Susan Hapgood relates, the victim of underfunding and the subject of religious repression.
One Size Fits All; or, Whose Public Space?
Weary of officialdom, young Vietnamese artists are taking to the streets, reconfiguring public space in a way that artist and curator Veronika Radulovic characterizes as “a resourceful and humorous understanding of a reductio ad absurdum.”
The Story of Myanmar Documentary Film
Myanmar boasts a rich history of moviemaking and moviegoing, a narrative in which documentaries continue to play an important role, both culturally and politically. Filmmaker Aung Min surveys the past decade’s key artists and works.
Publics, Intellectuals, and Singapore
“The problem is not that there are too few intellectuals in Singapore, but rather that the country suffers from a prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism.” Critic Lee Weng Choy discusses the need for thoughtful public debate.
Street Art in Indonesian Social and Political Life
Attempting to trace the history of street art in Indonesia beginning with sloganeering graffiti in the mid-1940s, Leonhard Bartolomeus uncovers an underdocumented but important and still-growing form that has often been intertwined with political activism.
Laughter, Boos, and Silence: Duto Hardono in Conversation with Roger McDonald
In this audio recording, curator and lecturer Roger McDonald talks to Indonesian sound artist Duto Hardono in Tokyo about the evolution of Hardono’s practice and the multiplicity of audience responses to experimental sound art performance.
Decentralizing the Bangkok-centric Art Scene
In her dissection of the contemporary art scene in Thailand, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art House, finds practitioners continuing to establish independent projects away from the expense and overcrowding Bangkok.
Wild Place
Revisiting her homeland of Labuan Island in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, Yee I-Lann finds a young country still searching for its own distinct history and identity from within a tangled agglomeration of colonial and postcolonial influences.
Rural Life in Myanmar
Three-quarters of the population of Myanmar live in rural areas. As painter and writer Ma Thanegi reports, many of their traditional ways of life remain, at least for now, untouched by the march of progress.
Australia/Asia
Australia’s links with Asia are currently the subject of particularly intense activity and debate. Yet as curator Russell Storer points out, political, economic, and cultural relations between the two regions are long-established, complex, and mercurial.
Southeast Asia: Art History, Art Today
Identifying a number of “entry points” into Southeast Asian art history—and into the region’s diverse contemporary contexts—Manila-based art historian and curator Patrick D. Flores presents a reconsidered vision of the region’s cultural makeup.
Curating South Asia
Focusing on curatorial practice in South Asia, writer, curator, and artist Iftikhar Dadi looks at existing and potential structures for exhibition making in the region, situating them in a rich but vast and complex milieu.
Programs
The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative is supported by a variety of far-reaching educational and contextual activities, including lectures, panels, performances, films, gallery tours, multimedia mobile tours, and artist-led workshops. These programs and accompanying resource materials will evolve from a dynamic process of exchange among the Guggenheim’s curatorial and education staff, the project curators, the artists, and colleagues from participating institutions. Check this section, Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail for further details and news.
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