Vasl Artists’ Association invited interested participants to join a Zoom talk with award-winning documentary photographer, Steve Cagan.

The Lecture ‘From Documentary Photography Towards a Committed Photography: Notes on the Politics of Photographic Representation’ focused on how photography has a great power in convincing one that it is telling the truth. In this session, we looked at some challenges, such as social and ethical obligations imposed by the very strength of the medium on photographers who want to document social conditions and contribute to compaigns for change, especially while communicating across cultural borders. 

About Steve:

Steve Cagan has carried out major projects in Latin America and industrial towns in USA over extended periods of time. His work explores strength and dignity in everyday struggles of grassroot people.

Steve has been a professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey; Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA; Universidad de El Salvador and Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Germany and is frequent speaker at national and international universities and institutions. His book, This Promise Land, El Salvador, won the 1991 Book of the Year Award of Association for Humanist Sociology. His latest book, with artist Mary Kelsey, appears in two versions, The Prince of Gold in English, and El Percio der Oro in Spanish.

Artists and curators have historically given public articulation to dissent and social causes and offer a transcendent refuge in times of crisis. 

Vasl Artists’ Association hosted a series of online lectures on art curation that aim to generate imaginative discussions on cultural possibilities and the role of curator in todays milieu. 

Vasl invited five distinguished international curators who spoke on the themes of assimilating and disseminating uncharted ways of conceptualizing art practices.  

‘Insistent Presences’, Ginwala presented a series of slides which showed art works which were displayed at exhibitions in various parts of the world.  Ginwala discusses her beliefs regarding the tasks of curators and how curators should listen deeply to what has been simmering beneath and amongst us in the art world. During recent, trying times Ginwala discusses how people are the infrastructure to mobilised cultures. She mentions artists composing the ‘Insistent Presences’ which enables plural visions, scores and maps that allow readings beyond individualist and censored relations to the disjointed present. Ginwala articulates the lack of museums and collection-based institutions, where culture organisations are chorus to their circumstances and how more relevant organisations transform with changing times.

Participants:

Dr. Furqaan Ahmed, Natasha Malik, Rahul Gudipudi, Saira Danish Ahmed, Seher Naveed, Sehrish Mustafa, Shaheen Jaffrani, Sophia Balagamwala, Veera Rustomji, Zahabia Khozema & Zena Khan.

Tarun Nagesh, curator at Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery was Modes of Curation’s second guest lecturer. His online lecture, ‘Shifting Contexts for Asian & Pacific Art: From Field to Institution’ discussed various topics such as the formulation of the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) which began in 1993 as a series for 3 exhibitions. The Asia-Pacific Triennial was initiated into order to make cultural and artistic links with the Asia-Pacific region. Nagesh mentions history and colonisation, how it brought strong feelings or links to the western world. This was a major shift in pushing economic, business and cultural policies. He brings up how APT’s shows are political in a sense where artists are presenting works that represent political issues. These artists give the opportunity of political contexts and histories to be explored by a diverse audience. In ‘Shifting Contexts for Asian & Pacific Art: From Field to Institution’, Nagesh makes our participants realise the importance of questioning, how artists and curators, in a meaningful way, deal with subjects regarding political sensitivity or trauma in contemporary art exhibitions. 

Participants:

Ambereen Siddiqui, Dania Shah Khan, Dr. Furqaan Ahmed, Maha Minhaj, Natasha Malik, Rahul Gudipudi, Saira Danish Ahmed, Shaheen Jaffrani, Sophia Balagamwala, Veera Rustomji, Zahabia Khozema & Zena Khan.

Ryan Inouye, Sharjah Art Foundation’s curator held his Zoom lecture, ‘What Going On?” on September 5, 2020. Inouye’s discussion begins with the topic of informality in curatorial spaces. He discusses how there has always been an interest in the role of the informal or informal conversation. Inouye divulges into how there is a need for institutions to make space for more informal works and how these institutions should adapt these informalities as a generative mode of guiding programming in a curatorial aspect. Inouye addresses the question of ‘What’s Going On?’ as the basis of his lecture. He reflects upon the invitation of pondering over the present moment during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has changed a lot for people, such as the order of the way curators will now have to work, structure exhibitions, how we think, conceptualise and understand ourselves to be in conversation with one another. However, this lecture also delves into the idea that, it can also be said or assumed for some that nothing has changed. The pandemic could have just intensified or accelerated existing inequalities, injustices or structures.

Participants:

Ambereen Siddiqui, Amna Hashmi, Maha Minhaj, Natasha Malik, Rahul Gudipudi, Saira Danish Ahmed, Seher Naveed, Shaheen Jaffrani, Sophia Balagamwala & Veera Rustomji.

Alexie Glass-Kantor is ArtSpace Org’s Executive Director. Kantor’s lecture, ‘Not One Version’ was based on how one can think of various ways of assimilating and dissimilating unchartered ways of thinking about art practices. ‘Not One Version’ is the way in which language or forms of accumulative practice shift and alter the spaces in which one can think about how we name or expand the definition or meaning. She speaks about how in thus particular moment, that different projects carry resonance. She mentions how curators think in adaptive forms about curatorial practice and how through the various roles she holds with ArtSpace as the Executive Director. Kantor discusses how curators are reorienting and rethinking about the space between things in order to be responsive, in terms of curatorial practice towards the conditions and circumstances given the profound unpredictability the curators have found themselves in. 

Particpants:

Dania Shah Khan, Faraz Aamer Khan, Natasha Malik, Rahul Gudipudi, Saba Khan, Saira Danish Ahmed, Salima Hashmi, Shaheen Jaffrani, Sophia Balagamwala, Veera Rustomji & Zena Khan.