Reimagining the Curatorial: Sabih Ahmed on Collaborative Cultural Infrastructures
Recorded on 30 October 2021.
Sabih Ahmed’s engagement with curatorial practice emerged during his time as a researcher with the Asia Art Archive in India. Here, he had the opportunity to lead research projects in conjunction with artists, practitioners and thinkers from diverse schools of thought and lines of inquiry. Approaching curatorial work through the lens of a researcher afforded him manoeuvrability, as it opened up an array of possibilities of how he could engage with the field without a set of predetermined modalities. Over time, as he worked on several independent projects with people in varied geographies, he began to reimagine the curatorial in more expansive terms—by thinking about the web of people that inhabit it, the forms of collective thinking that emerge from it, and the modes through which it captures the contemporary.
Contemplating on his relationship with and the understanding of collaborative curatorial work in the cultural context of South Asia, Ahmed says:
“For me, what developed over time was thinking about curatorial practice as a way of testing infrastructures—of thought, of relationships, of making spaces, of doing research… not existing structures that are already rigid and dominant, but rather, what is underlying those structures, the very grid-work that is the foundation for structures to become dominant… infrastructures that are not necessarily already present and… (that) can be made possible.”
For Ahmed, who is now Associate Director and Curator at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, curatorial practice is not a solitary exercise, nor is it static. It is a dynamic, ever-changing, shape-shifting multitudinous mode of testing infrastructural possibilities within a cultural landscape.
In this episode of ASAP Cast, Sabih Ahmed speaks to Ketaki Varma about his journey as a curator; on working collaboratively with artists, practitioners and institutions; and what he thinks is the defining feature of curatorial practice in South Asia today. He delves into multiple collective curatorial projects: with the Raqs Media Collective at the 11th Shanghai Biennale in 2016 and as part of a group of curatorial mentors for Five Million Incidents in 2019-20; with Serendipity Arts Foundation, HH Art Spaces and Vishal K. Dar on The Ground Beneath My Feet in 2017; with Taus Makhacheva at Kadist and Centre Pompidou in 2019; and, most recently, with Sohrab Hura for his curatorial debut Growing Like A Tree and Growing Like A Tree: Static In The Air at Ishara in 2021.
(Featured Image: Installation view of work by Nepal Picture Library exhibited as part of Growing Like A Tree, curated by Sohrab Hura at Ishara Art Foundation. Photo by Ismail Noor/Seeing Things. Dubai, 2021. Image courtesy of the artists and Ishara Art Foundation.)
To learn more about Growing Like a Tree, please click here, here, here and here.
To know more about the Vidya Shivadas and the Students’ Biennale, one of the largest educational programmes at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, click here.
The ASAP Cast series is supported by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.
