Emerging from colonial rule post-1950s, regions across the subcontinent, Middle East, and Africa adopted revisionist political and artistic strategies, merging street culture, journalism, and folk art. Practices like montage and subversive print histories fostered connections among activist and outsider imperatives, contributing to the de-colonial movement today.
This curatorial project seeks to rethink location as a stable variable and explore the intertwined networks of art between the South Asian and Arab worlds, rooted in overlapping histories and migrant artist narratives. It emphasizes the ‘popular’ as a prism to navigate satire, gender, and social critique while theorizing fluid identities and border concepts where ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ are always churning - the lyrical flows into the evidentiary; dislocation marks embeddedness.
Artists:
Rada Akbar
Akram Zaatari
Hicham Benohoud
Hassan Hajjaj
Hadi Rahnaward
Shaima Al Tamimi
Nandan Ghiya
Ali Arkady
Scenographer: Sukanya Bhaskar
Image Caption:
Ali Arkady, War of Mosul, Iraq, 2016
Monolithography Technique
From the exposition Between Two Memories, 2022
Courtesy the artist
The Old PWD Complex
