Chaos or Congruence

'CHAOS OR CONGRUENCE?': towards a dialogue on Asian/South Asian Contemporary Art

@ The India International Centre, New Delhi on November 18, 2001.


Background note

The contemporary Asian/South Asian cultural practitioner (artist/curator/video-filmmaker / writer / critic) is faced with an almost bewildering range of possible practices and reinvention's of practice. Although the last 50 years have seen the emergence of vigorous contemporary art traditions in many countries within the region the implicit/explicit reference point remains the 'West', the ultimate referent of modernity. Most diasporic assertions - whether critical theory or bhangra rap - are located within the same paradigm.

Our intention in this forum is to shift this reference point. We propose an examination of the possibility of thinking inter regionally, within Asia/South Asia; of seeking to understand others, and ourselves by looking, quite simply, at our neighbors. Geographic neighbors, historical cousins, ancestral antagonists, and cultural kin.

A panoply of languages - descriptive, analytical, narrative, conceptual, local, global - are available to and used by the contemporary Asian/S.Asian artist. This unprecedented range of modes of being, of thinking and making work generates a number of shared dilemmas:

The double edged inheritance of highly developed/coded art traditions, often extant;

·The ethics of appropriating artisanal forms, practices or labour;

·Forging an internationally communicable art language without losing local integrity;

·The simulation of 'ethnicity' in the face of the Western demand for authenticity;

·High art versus popular art - the pleasures and dangers of mimesis, kitsch, pastiche;

·Surviving in the midst of a capricious upper class art market and the poverty of cultural institutions:

·Increasing government or fundamentalist control over the freedom of expression;

These concerns have arisen repeatedly in any serious examination of cultural practices within the region. How have cultural practitioners negotiated these issues in different locations? Is there an Asian/ South Asian cultural identity that can be articulated from within the region? Can we create new lines of affiliation and new ways of understanding which refer to each other's experience?

A cursory look at the diverse strands that weave the cultural fabric of the Asia and more specifically of the Indian subcontinent reveals rich histories of exchange and interconnection. Each of us operates within a living matrix of ways of seeing (protocols of communication, formal methods, narratives of objects/materials) which may be perceived (or presented, especially by emergent cultural nationalisms) as 'national' culture. While in no way glossing over distinct, diverse religions, ethnicities or cultural practices, one is often startled to find that something considered quintessentially 'Indian", for example, such as the red flower, Jabbakusum, offered to Devi, (the Hindu Goddess) turns out to be an 'import', in this case from China! This example can be multiplied, almost infinitely, as can be examples of uniqueness and difference.

These cross-cultural interpenetrations are not necessarily the outcome of a mutually desired, harmonious blending. They have been, and continue to be marked by struggle, contestation, and even violence. The emergence of our variously composite/syncretic cultures contains both semiotic alteration and semiotic stubbornness, whether the interface is with the rest of Asia or the West.

Ideas about the purity of cultural heritage often flounder when examined more closely as recent analysis of the colonial 'production of knowledge' and the 'invention of traditions' has shown. The culturalist aims and strategies of early nationalist and liberation struggles rub shoulders with our continuing education within a western art paradigm: the very notion of an 'authentic identity', is rendered problematic.

To further complicate the picture, the relation between colonizer and colonized within Asia is not always between the West and its others; sometimes it lies between Asian countries (e.g. Japan and Korea), just as cultural imperialism could refer not only to western hegemony but also to India in relation to smaller South Asian neighbors.

Can we investigate pre-colonial hybridities as we negotiate the tenuous, sometimes downright hostile relations of postcolonial nation states? How do we locate our practice in an embattled cultural terrain marked by both revivalist nationalisms and hegemonic globalization? How much do we know about contemporary cultural practice within the region?

To date, cultural exchange within the region has tended to be limited to one-off showcasing events organised by governments. Attempts by civil society, principally the women's movement and the peace/human rights movement have nurtured people to people exchanges but remain beleaguered by obdurate state policy. On the other hand, film, writing, theatre and especially music, both mainstream and otherwise, forge their own routes of communication.

Physical borders rendered redundant, exploding electronic media has revolutionised notions of geographically located cultures. Economic liberalization and the 'New World Order' have brought their own kinesis, generating on the one hand an increasing need and assertion of 'authentic, indigenous' cultural identities, on the other, newer forms of hybridity. Can we scrutinise ideas such as 'new internationalism' in the arts, 'global village', 'communication revolution' etc from an Asian/South Asian perspective?

The forum hopes to open a conversation, amongst practitioners and thinkers from the region, grounded in both commonality and difference, which might wish to address some of the issues outlined here. It is an invitation to share and reflect - on the contradictions, pleasures, dilemmas and excitement of contemporary art practice in Asia/South Asia.

In initiating this conversation it is not our intention to posit an 'authentic' Asian/South Asian voice against the western construct. Rather, it is to give expression to the fluid, provisional nature of multiple identities and multiple locations. Neither the 'fixing' as 'Other 'by the continuing Orientalism of the West, nor the closure of revivalist religious/indigenous/nationalist identities can suffice today.

Experienced 'shape-shifters', we in the subcontinent have a special capacity for what I like to think of as 'creative ambivalence'. An ambivalence that creates the possibility of exploring afresh conventional binaries of tradition/modernity, Asian/Western, local/global, indigenous/international, technological/artisanal.

Sheba Chhachhi, Oct 2001