In prehistoric societies, poetry was written, carved and engraved into rocks, clay tablets and papyrus, among other mediums, as a way of remembering social and cultural histories, mythologizing stories and documenting philosophical and religious ideas embedded at the time. Many ancient epic poems from Gilgamesh to Sanskrit’s Mahabharata and Ramayana to Greek’s Iliad and Odyssey were documented in this way so they could be orally transmitted, illustrated or copied later on, thereby ensuring their distribution and survival. Likewise, the eighteenth-century English painter, printmaker and poet William Blake used different methods of etching for illustrated manuscripts (for his own poems as well as extant ones) that were rife with images of gods, animals and sexuality. Because many of Blake’s ideas were considered heretical for the religious sentiments he espoused, some of the more provocative elements of his work were burned after his death. If one considers that poems have been preserved only by their transcription into an enduring medium (rather than a reliance on oral histories for example), it’s not surprising that the tradition of “visualizing poems” has continued into contemporary times.

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Recently, I was invited by the Religare Arts Initiative to view an exhibition “Found Objects, Lost Planet” with the photographic works of two artists who remained anonymous to the critic (even the title of the exhibition remained unknown to us at that time). 

The premise was to form a judgement or opinion of the works on view with no prior information about the artists or their background. In order to construe a virgin response, the art critic was required to, in a way, forget everything – put aside knowledge and experience – and come up with some answers to the works at hand. 

My question is – is this even possible? My contribution was a short argument making a case for preconditioning in art. Is it a necessity for good judgement or is it merely a pretext for ad hoc assumptions? 

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South Asian-American Diaspora art in the United States has undergone a critical ideological evolution not to mention a radical integration into the American context from the 1990s to the present day. In the Nineties – with the exception of an artist like Pakistani-American Shahzia Sikander, who broke into the art mainstream early on -South Asian-American artists were unable to even exhibit in galleries that focused on Indian art let alone mainstream galleries. New York-based galleries like Bose Pacia and Talwar for example, which are both owned by non-resident Indians, preferred to promote star artists from the Indian mainland like Atul Dodiya and Jitish Kallat. Whereas Indian artists found a platform in a western context, simply by virtue of their country’s rising position in the world (not to mention the sentimental attachments of most South Asian-Americans to their homeland), conversely their counterparts who had left India for American shores were seen as a small minority with a set of marginalized concerns in the country they now called home (America).

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Does the term ‘Diaspora Art’ mean different things to different people? Should we bother using it in today’s globalized times? Sharmistha Ray provides answers and poses questions.

South Asian Diaspora Art is varied and multivalent. If there’s one thing all diaspora artists agree on, it’s that there isn’t any singular definition of what diaspora art is. For some artists, the term itself is problematic. While their work may have social or political subtexts related to major issues surrounding the diasporic experience of cultural migration, these artists doggedly resist being labelled in this way.

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