Coordinates
The project brings together over twenty artists from across the global south – understood as a relation and not a geopolitical locus – to actually practise such a relation as something other than the “process” of value production, taking on with relish and a sense of possibility, the unresolved relation between nostos and polis, and not seeking to settle it. Together, we attempt a collaborative archive of “shared knowledge” – by way of maps, phenomenologies, autoethnographies – in motion, composing, assembling, and manifesting ways of reading, being, seeing, sensing, and allow “minor” itineraries of political struggle to become evident, especially where the destinations have been lost or not reached, or appropriated, or looked different than they were expected to. The deterritorial yet located nature of this “mapping,” and the difficulties therein, are not lost on us. Still, we rely on these difficulties to keep alive those epistemic struggles which promise new subjects and institutions and a future beyond capital and colony, especially when many of us feel policed by humanitarian, democratizing, or liberatory projects that also replicate orientalism, Eurocentrism, and US exceptionalism, with their purveyors refusing to learn any new lessons.
anticolonial maps
for
lost
lovers
Anticolonial Maps for Lost Lovers proceeds from the perspective, location, and time of “the unrequited” in articulating a politics of “another love” (Abbas, 2018), where political desire and its pursuits might be able to be thought otherwise. What might those “shared knowledges” look like, in which Edouard Glissant (1990) finds our redemption on the open boat — not as exceptions, but as people, as those whom Cèline Chuang calls “diasporic descendents of the displaced” (2021). Eschewing platitudes that plague contemporary salvationist discourses on the left and the right – both betrothed to unexamined epistemontologies of the wheres of our lifeworlds – this project explores mix of narrative, art, pedagogy, and theory that enacts an ongoing and capacious historical materialist method for a political understanding of location, space, and attachment, that could unlock forms of presence, connection, appearance, motion, and relation to the objects of our desire and commitment that allow the production of knowledge and political action to be something other than acts of occupation, conquest, colonisation.
A curated summer 2022 residency, Jehānuma, organized by GCAS-Jehān and Hic Rosa, with the support of the Bard Centre for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, laid the groundwork for the production of a digital archive of the process and the artworks alike, as one offering – a Chapter I, if you will – of “shared knowledges.” A launch of this archive, and a series of engagements with it, including physical exhibits where possible, and mini-symposia and panels, through late Spring into Summer and Fall 2023 are doors and invitations for this cooperative archive to grow.
ہم دم ARTIST-INTERLOCUTORS
Ali Jafri
Alizeh
Anum Sanaullah
Ashu Rai
Asma Abbas (also curator and convener)
August Clark (also intern)
Aysha Ally
Babar Naeem Shaikh
Bushra Saleem
Cèline Chuang
Forugh Farrokhzad
Charlie Yates
Diana Yaseen (also intern)
Fizza Saleem
Imraam Sheeraz (also photographer, videographer, and documenter)
Laxmi Priya
Lesley-Ann Brown
M. Wasay Ijaz (also site and interface designer and web captain)
Maham Zehra
Mahreen Zuberi
Parma Abbas (also intern)
Rabel
Radhya Kareem
Rhita Jibou (also intern)
Safdar Ali
Safi Alsebai
Samra Mansoor
Sheetala Bhat
Stephen Hager
Valerie Fanarjian
Vladimir Shcherbak
Yashfeen
Zari Rosa Abbas-Hager
Zoya Abbas
GRATEFUL FOR THESE BENEFACTORS IN SPIRIT AND MATTER
Renata Summo O’Connell, Principal Advisor for the project
Silvana Carotenuto, for being a friend and guide, for the promise of hospitality for this work at the University of Naples L’Orientale
Thomas Keenan, Michelle Song, Ziad Abu Rish, Tanya El-Khouri, and other fellow travelers at the Bard-OSUN Centre for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College at Annandale
John Weinstein, Brendan Mathews, Karen Advokaat, Anne O’Dwyer, and all the Studio mates at the Simon’s Rock Annex for Transdisciplinary, Collaborative, and Experimental Studies, Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Inspiring Critical Aesthetic Theory students at the M.Phil. in Art and Design programme at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture
Faiza Mushtaq and friends new and old at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture
Ali Akbar Naqvi and his sons, for the abundant gift of their soz
All that Karachi makes possible, and some other places
Newly beloveds, colleagues, and supporters at Al-Akhawayn University for a temporary home for the project and its curation
Sara Mugridge, Daniel Neilson, Colin Eubank, and Valerie Fanarjian for the lifelong promises and projects that sustain us
Hic Rosa family
Tipu, Zari, Steve, Ammi, and all the life they make possible