Contemporary South Asian Art: Panel Discussions

Panel One: The Urgency of Art Making
Bani Abidi was born in Pakistan and lives in Berlin. For the past two decades she has worked with video, photography and drawing, consistently blurring the edges of fact and fiction and gleaning from the dark absurdities of everyday life.

Nikhil Chopra’s artistic practice interweaves live art, drawing, photography, sculpture and installations. His performances, in large part improvised, dwell on identity and its construction, autobiography and authorship, the pose and self-portraiture. He co-runs HH Art Spaces in Goa.

Devika Singh (moderator) is Senior Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was previously Curator of International Art at Tate Modern and has curated exhibitions in the UK, UAE, United States, India and Bangladesh.

Munem Wasif’s image-based works explore the notion and forms of trace. His complex installations often mix photographs with moving images, archive documents or collected paraphernalia to reveal notions of impermanence and insecurity.

Panel Two: Exhibitions as Infrastructure
Jeebesh Bagchi is an artist and curator based in New Delhi. He is co-founder of the Raqs Media Collective, who have curated large-scale exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale and the Yokohama Triennale.

Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor and Chair of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art. His artwork (in collaboration with Elizabeth Dadi) explores questions of identity and borders, and the capacities of the informal urban realm in the Global South.

Hammad Nasar (moderator) is a curator, writer and strategist based in London. He has been Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, and co-led the London, Asia project at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Sharmini Pereira is Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka. She is the founder and director of Raking Leaves and co-founder of the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna.

Presented by the Hayward Gallery in collaboration with Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation and Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Image Credit: Raqs Media Collective, Autoluminous (Everything is Burning), 2024. © Raqs Media Collective. Courtesy the artists.