'Destination Asia- Flying over Stereotypes' Conversation- 1 is the third phase of a collaboration between Indian, Pakistani and Central Asian art practioners. The project “Destination Asia” began as an investigation about a possibility of an exchange to introduce the contemporary art practices of the three countries. The project involves artist residencies, seminars, exhibitions and publications, which will unfold over a period of three years 2007-10. A total of 30 artists were selected to participate in this project. Elementa is proud to exhibit the collaborative efforts of all these artists in an exhibition which will be divided into two parts; CONVERSATION 1 and CONVERSATIONS 2. The second half of the exhibition will be held towards the end of the year.
Ideas were exchanged examining impressions about the other, their shared histories, and relative ignorance despite the geographic proximity. Issues that started to develop through more elaborate discussions into concretes ideas which formed the basis of the project were issues of urbanization, issues of migration, dispossession, developing economies and its unequal distribution, seemed to emerge as commonalities of these developing countries. Also examined were the roles of terrorism/religious intolerance- an issue plaguing South Asian communities.
Salima Hashmi, a prominent artist from Pakistan, writes, “I am sometimes amazed that we who have so much in common in terms of shared histories, music, languages, and so much else are so distanced from one another… The Silk Route connected so many peoples and cultures, centuries ago, but recent histories made us very remote!” In this case, the absence of political and economic interests of different Asian countries in each other involves the absence of cultural interest: As Salima says, for example, the very rich culture of India, including its historical and contemporary platforms, is virtually unknown in the post-Soviet part of Central Asia. After more than seventy years of “the Iron Curtain”, the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia are still in cultural isolation from the rest of Asia.
Thus, the goal of the project is to comprehend the reasons for the break of intellectual connections, to search for ways of getting closer and integrating with each other as a part of the global process of establishing multi-polar global and multicultural world, and the inclusion of governmental institutions into the process of integration on the cultural level as an important element of sufficiently active relations on the political and economic levels that bring a mutual understanding and collaboration between regions.
Within this juxtaposition of images, we hope to evoke conversations between these works, playing with assuming and altering stereotypical and archetypical images.... deconstructing contemporary realities using the self.... fall between the real and the imagined, between the artistic and the actual, where use of materials and props commentate on the rituals of life, culture and tradition, of belonging to the ancient...side by side to the globalised and contemporary consumerist societies in urban settings.
Elementa is proud to present and support the third phase of this collaboration where one tries to look at the common threads apparent within the artists' work. This show has been curated by Sharmila Samant, Valeria Ibraeva and Quddus Mirza as part of an on going project to help bring about an understanding through the similarities of the cultures rather than the diversities, through the integration of regions and democratization of the cultural space.
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