Other Asias: Transnational Contemporary Art Currents
'Should we train our imagination to allow 'Asia' to emerge as a continent?' (Gayatri Spivak, 2008)
Other Asias is an ambitious artist-led initiative that challenges contemporary navigations of Asia as region, as potentiality, as memory, as imagination and investigation through an arena of fluid exhibitionary structures. Our organisation activates chains of exhibitions, film screenings, fictions, forums, performance, plays, walks and talks, historical revisions, reading circles, archives, taxonomies, political vocabularies, public education and transnational circulation towards a post-West cultural horizon.
Other Asias operates as open assemblage of artists, writers and designers that weaves together reanimated alliances and counter-cartographies. We grew discontented with the ossification of official "cross-cultural" departments, institutionalised post-colonial studies and new internationalism, embodied in the systematic mediocrity of the first Asian Arts Triennial (Manchester 2008). We sought an opposing space to the corporate/ NGO strategies of organisations like Asia House and the current superficial commercial booms of Eastern economies, bureaucratic state-sanctioned "diversity" initiatives, Han Ulrich Imperialist vanity projects and all such like. We were dismayed by the cliquey whiteness of artists run-spaces in Black & Asian migrant majority settlement areas (from Deptford to Tower Hamlets to Peckham), the entrenched Eurocentrism of professional "critique" and artschool academia and the structural racism of artworld bookshops.
Before its formal organisation Other Asias started as a conversation between friends on a bus that evolved in the Central Saint Martins library on Charing Cross road after a screening of Bangladeshi short films in East London. Its context was the plethora of regional survey shows from the recent commercial booms of Asian economies, the crescendos around "crisis of Multiculturalism" in parliamentary rhethoric, the rise of Asian global power and decline of unipoplar West. Over time we collectively discussed bad "Human rights" arts, humorous misreadings by ignorant Westerners, crass and harmful representations of Islamic peoples, the shortcomings of BME public inclusion strategies and the NGOisation of third world subjects. We stole our name from a Gayatri Spivak book.
Other Asias works as a grass roots networking organisation that aims to provide up-coming creatives a platform and portal for multi-poplar orbits of distribution and exchange. Every current is fertile investigation, configuring a dynamic new team of visiting artists, curators, designers and writers - determined to generate transformations across localities, communities and continents.
Other Asias is a based in London (UK), Lahore (Pakistan) and Dhaka (Bangladesh) with a satellite network of links across the Asian continent. We are an independent, not-for-profit arts organisation run by an open collective of volunteers.
(The current web banner has been designed by artist Shafiq Dadd. The copyright remains with the artist)
Contact
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Latest News:
OtherAsias Hamja & Riffat shall be on PRESS TV RCP talking about Palestine art projects this week http://www.presstv.ir/pr... yesterday reply
OtherAsias 17th Jan - 24th Jan Hamja & Fatima will be in residency at Porapara Artists Space in Chittagong (Bangladesh) www.porapara.com/ 9 days ago reply
OtherAsias REDO PAKISTAN @ Watermans (London) until Dec 1 http://bit.ly/uv9cB 18 days ago reply
OtherAsias Interview with Hamja & Fatima(Click feature 6 - Interview Other Asias) 15 min REDO PAKISTAN http://opticalradio.com/.... 29 days ago reply
OtherAsias Hamja & Riffat shall be on PRESS TV RCP talking about Palestine art projects this week http://www.presstv.ir/pr... 19 hours ago reply
OtherAsias 17th Jan - 24th Jan Hamja & Fatima will be in residency at Porapara Artists Space in Chittagong (Bangladesh) www.porapara.com/ 8 days ago reply
OtherAsias REDO PAKISTAN @ Watermans (London) until Dec 1 http://bit.ly/uv9cB 17 days ago reply
OtherAsias Interview with Hamja & Fatima(Click feature 6 - Interview Other Asias) 15 min REDO PAKISTAN http://opticalradio.com/.... 28 days ago reply