The World Awaits You like a Garden
LATITUDE 28, New Delhi, April 26–June 30, 2022
Artists: Gopa Trivedi | Manjot Kaur | Priyanka D’Souza | Radhika Agarwala | Wardha Shabbir
Curatorial Advisor: Sugata Ray
Step out from the cave to encounter the world like a garden, the eagle and the snake urge Zarathustra. Or so Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For the German philosopher, the garden is a geophilic site of sensorial engagement, a space where the wind carries heavy fragrances and songbirds teach us to sing. Imagined in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s world as a garden is not the human-earth or the Menschen-Erde, a putrefying cave of anthropogenic climate change, but an uncanny landscape that can only be occupied through an ethics of care. The form of practice that emerges therein is heuristically arranged with the world rather than against it. Let us step into Nietzsche’s garden.
– Sugata Ray
Curatorial Note and Press Release: https://www.latitude28.com/exhibition/the-world-awaits-you-like-a-garden/
LATITUDE 28
F 208 First Floor, Lado Sarai
New Delhi 110030
Crisis and Creativity: Virtual Artists in Residency
The South Asia Art Initiative, UC Berkeley, October 25–27, 2020
Artists: Mithu Sen | Brendan Fernandes
Curators: Allan deSouza | Atreyee Gupta | Asma Kazmi | Sugata Ray
Artists’ residencies and their affiliative senses of travel and mobility with which we are by now all too familiar is all but nada in the time of a global pandemic. Yet, the word residency is inundated with the sensibilities of being in place, of domicile, and of dwelling. Recapturing these senses, Crisis and Creativity: Virtual Artists in Residence at the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative has invited artists Mithu Sen (New Delhi) and Brendan Fernandes (Chicago) to experiment with new forms of making, translate embodied creative processes into a digital realm, and craft new modes of audience engagement across dispersed latitudes and time zones. The 72-hour residency was livestreamed from 12:00am PST on Sunday, Oct. 25, 2020 to 11:59pm on Tuesday, Oct 27, 2020.
Five Tables of the Indian Ocean
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, December 5, 2019
From mythical perceptions of vast oceanic waters to porcelain excavated from shipwrecks, from the visual culture of port cities to depictions of marine life, this edition of Five Tables mines the BAMPFA collection to unearth global histories of the Indian Ocean—the earth’s third largest body of water and the site of the world’s oldest cultural continuum, facilitating the mobility of people, objects, and ideas around the world. Curated by students in UC Berkeley Professor Sugata Ray’s Fall 2019 course Introduction to the Art and Architecture of South and Southeast Asia, this presentation explores how such oceanic networks also shaped global histories of art. The catalog—written by students in the class—was produced with support from the UC Berkeley Museum Social Justice Initiative (download here).
December 5, 2019, 4 PM -7 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704
https://bampfa.org/event/five-tables-indian-ocean
Love Across the Global South: Popular Cinema Cultures of India and Senegal
Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, University of California, Berkeley, September 2017–February 2018
Love across the Global South: Popular Cinema Cultures of India and Senegal explores interconnections between South Asian and African popular cultures through film posters, footage, and memorabilia. Focusing on the circulation of Bombay cinema, South Asia’s largest film industry, in Senegal, West Africa, the exhibition foregrounds the role of transnational film cultures and fan clubs in shaping affinities across the Global South. Highlighting archival material held by UC Berkeley—including a collection of twentieth-century popular film magazines and films housed at the Media Resources Center—the exhibition harnesses library holdings to nuance campus debates on race, globalization, and visual representation while experimenting with new curatorial practices that emphasize Afro-Asian connections in an expanded Indian Ocean imaginary.
The exhibition is curated by Sugata Ray (Assistant Professor, History of Art), Ivy Mills (Lecturer, History of Art), Liladhar Pendse (Librarian, Central Asian and Eastern European Studies), and Adnan Malik (Curator for South Asian Collections, South/Southeast Asia Library).
Cinephiles, Fandoms, and Global Media Cultures: Indian Cinema from a Transcultural Perspective, a roundtable focusing on the transcultural nature of Indian cinema, was held in conjunction with the opening reception of the exhibition. Organized by Rachael Hyland and Shivani Sud, speakers included Ajay Gehlawat (Sonoma State University), Jayson Beaster-Jones (UC Merced), Usha Iyer (Stanford University), and Lalitha Gopalan (University of Texas, Austin). The roundtable was made possible with the support from the Townsend Center of Humanities, the Institute of South Asia Studies, the History of Art Department, the South and Southeast Asian Studies Department, and the Asian Art and Visual Cultures Working Group.
The UC Berkeley Library Story on the exhibition (click on image for full story):
(processing) – Bay Area Artists and the Archive
Worth Ryder Art Gallery, 116 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley Campus
(processing) – Bay Area Artists and the Archive is an exhibition of ten Bay Area artists whose work addresses society’s endless accumulations. These artists approach the archive in a variety of ways. They work with institutional collections of irreplaceable cultural objects, and personally significant items some might call junk. They do research in libraries, attics, on the internet, on the road, and in the wild. They offer reappraisals of buried histories, and tell fanciful stories about imaginary worlds. They take abstract information and make it immediate and sensual, and use spreadsheets to collate the ineffable. They borrow, they steal, and they give back. They organize and they scatter. At a time when many feel betrayed by an information age that has seen our private lives abducted by the database, these artists offer strategies of processing “the archive” that are intimate and intuitive, yet critical and research based.
Participating Artists:
Bay Area Society for Art & Activism
Carrie Hott
Rose Khor
Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang
Heather Murphy
Sugata Ray
Danielle Schlunegger
Andrew Ananda Voogel
Tali Weinberg
