3,657 Unknown prints by Arshi Irshad Ahmedzai

A young artist of Afghan ancestry, living and working in Kabul and New Delhi, Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai’s works reflect the absence of female agency in patriarchal societies, in the contexts of history and religion.
Her coarse sketches of women are faceless, often surrounded by spools of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic “The words are often stories that are closely related to the visuals.
At other times, they lose their structure to make space for words that may not be coherent narratives, and in this way,
speak of how the lives of women are thought of as devoid of meaning,” she explains.

Current INLAKS awardee working on few projects in Afghanistan.

Languages of resistance in Kashmir A lecture by Tanveer Ajsee

RE-LOOK [42] : Lectures on Indian Art
curated by Pushpamala N

Languages of Resistance in Kashmir

a lecture by

Tanveer Ajsi
Art Historian, Bangalore

@ 6.30 pm, Wednesday 2 October 2019
at 1. Shanthi Road Studio/ Gallery,
Shanthi Road, Shanthinagar, Bangalore

About the lecture:

Upon the hard rock of oppression, humiliation, war, subjugation and injustice, a young generation of Kashmiris have forged a culture that has enabled them to articulate their deepest feelings, hopes and dreams. Away from the institutionalised cultural practices meant for keeping culture as a fixed condition, they mobilise the ability of culture to react creatively and responsively to the realities of life. The music they create, the songs they write and sing, the art they make challenge convention, shatter complacency, shift awareness and question the ways people outside – and they themselves – look at and understand the troubled world around them. This lecture will focus on the work of a select set of hip-hop performers, visual artists and poets who continue to create something unprecedented, altering the course of dominant official narratives on Kashmir.

About the Speaker

Tanveer Ajsee is an art historian and arts professional whose recent work reflects his interest in the political and cultural history of Kashmir. As an art historian, covering a range of artistic practices, his essays have appeared in various national and international journal and magazines. He has served as Consultant, Publications and as gallery in-charge, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. He was visiting professor at the Department of Art History and Art Appreciation, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Following this, he was appointed as curator of the MF Husain Art Gallery at JMI. Tanveer also co-founded a series of provocative, experimental performance pieces, titled Harkat, along with performance artist, Inder Salim. He sits on various Boards and Advisory Panels.

Badimo and These Letters

Badimo and These Letters

By Azah Given Mphago and Manola K. Gayatri

Badimo and These Letters shapes a yearning of the living and the dead to find creative utterance in and through each other.
Callings sent and unsent, heeded and ignored,
riff through space, struggle, land, language and love.
Could Indian and South African experiences of teaching, creating and becoming reimagine the emergence of a decolonial aesthetic and pedagogy from the South?

Duration - 1 hour (40 min Performance, 20 min discussion)

Azah Given Mphago
Tinyiko Mpho Mphago wa Mabasa also professionally known as Azah is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, musical director cultural activist, educator and philanthropist from the South African Jazz capital Mamelodi in Pretoria.  

He is a brilliant, versatile and multitalented musician and is known as one of the finest South African
percussionists of our generation – and for good reason. Born into a family of traditional healers, he began playing drums at the age of 8 and formed a decidedly passionate bond with drums and percussion as not only healing instruments but also as a way of artistic and spiritual expression.

Azah pursued musical training at the Musical Theatre of the Tshwane University of Technology and this gave him the traveling future he had dreamed of, seeing him perform across Europe and South America with Gregory Magoma’s Vuyani Dance Theatre productions Ketima and Beautiful Us. He then joined Dr. Philip Tabane’s famous band Molombo – a moment he cites as one of the proudest of his life. He then formed Azah, the 8-piece band which continued to grow his musical diversity as a singer and composer by exploring and incorporating genres such as high life, soukous, jazz, Afro-soul, Afrobeat and indigenous folk sounds into a world music offering.

Manola K. Gayatri
Dr. Manola K. Gayatri is a praxis-oriented writer, researcher, performer and teacher.
She has immense faith in the creative arts as the most dynamic medium of helping us a society
become the most generous, healing and exciting version of ourselves, especially when allied with
innovative pedagogies in the Humanities and allied with progressive social and political movements.

She is currently Asst Prof at Centre for Development Practice, Ambedkar University Delhi and Postdoctoral fellow, at Witwatersrand School of Arts hosted by Drama For Life. She received her doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University where she traced a feminist genealogy of womxn’s poetic utterance. She was a postdoctoral project partner in UGC-UKIERI project “Gendered Citizenship: manifestations and performance” (the University of Warwick and JNU) where she conceived seminars on “Negotiating Solidarities Through Difference” and contributed a chapter on “Witnessing and Embodied Empathy: Sexuate Agency and Autonomy in Kashmir Violence” co-written with Kashmiri academic and activist, Inshah Malik. 

She was a resource person for body empowerment in Panchayat leadership training programs with Aagaz Academy, Karnataka. 

She has taught at the Drama Dept University of Pretoria, School of Arts and Aesthetics JNU and co-founded The Institute of Leadership and Transformation, South Africa. She is co-current convenor of the Performance as Research Working Group, International Federation of Theatre Research.

Messy Archives

Messy Archives is a messy work about messy things in messy times performed by a messy academic working on a messy project called Wild Zones.

Dr. Myer Taub is the award-winning South African academic, multi-disciplinary artist,
innovator, deviator, goat, and perverse-pirate-priest who most recently wrote the one-woman play called “Florence” which premiered to critical acclaim at the Market Theatre,
Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2018.
He lectures in the theatre and performance division (TAP) in the Wits School of the Arts. 
He was formerly a Senior Lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Pretoria, where
he taught theatre studies and performance studies for five years.
 His most recent performance works include: “Adore” for the Trans, Bag Factory Exhibition
(2018) at the UJ Arts Centre, “Time Flies and the Spruit of Braams Fountain” for JoziWalks
2018 and “Birds of the Grove” specifically commissioned by The Trinity Sessions and the
Johannesburg Development Agency. As part of an ongoing performance project, he has been working and walking the water-spruit in the Johannesburg suburbs of Waverly and
Melrose, as part of an embodied ecological investigation into the counter urban narratives of the city and water.