The phenomenon of the postcolonial diaspora has, in recent decades, allowed for the emergence of artistic practices that are able to zigzag productively between varied and often asymmetric scenes: that is, they move transversely among the often makeshift, small-scale economies of cultural production that characterize the Global South, and the more established, global circuits of cultural production that characterize the Global North.
Praneet Soi and
Allan deSouza embody different aspects of this historical situation: Soi transits between Kolkata, Amsterdam, and Buenos Aires and deSouza’s family history relates him to multiple displacements, from India via East Africa to the UK and then the US. Both have developed their translocal practice around a processual, strategically adaptive, self-archiving poetics. Their chosen forms of artistic insurgency rupture the relatively self-contained cultural histories of each locus they inhabit, as they permit research findings and evolved productions from one context to spill over into others. How do such artists craft a location for themselves within the institutions of an art world that, while seemingly unified, is in fact striated and fissured by regional demarcations and inherited narratives of exclusivist identity?
Moderated by
Ranjit Hoskote.