Past: Future of the World is inspired by the curator’s previous community art project like Portrait of India* - which was 40 days durational journey that they’ve engaged and created a collective understanding of rural India’s cultural harmony. Here we would like to mention that Madhavan individually initiated a couple of project which has the same tendency where he connected with community life as a new space for creative engagement. He did some projects around the contemporary crisis in the context of urban life, and he re-discover the strength of the community art especially following the same method which had used in Indian pre-independence period by Mahatma Gandhi, where walking within rural India is the best way to understand the inclusiveness of this cultural flux. Whereas other-side, Kaur constantly working with a specific working area like environmental sustenance, ecological boundaries, contemporary conceptualism, and urban anxiety. Kaur had a past experience where zie’s curation is about the international crisis in Sundarbans ecological crisis-collaboration between India-Bangladesh, in Istanbul-Kaur incorporate the water bodies and future of water as a source of life, where several international performance artists collaborated in the curation. Very recent past, Kaur conceptualise a public installation in collaboration with Handyyman supported by GAIL(Gas Authority India Limited) for the Hawa Badloo campaign.
*The last October’19, after driving around 40days, we finally reached back to Delhi along with tons of colorful memories and various hidden narratives from different parts of rural India. Tentatively, we travel around 6500km from Kanyakumari to Kargil. “PORTRAIT OF A NATION” is an on-road journey of three artists with diverse art practices. Starting from the Kanyakumari to reach the mighty expanse of the Himalayas in Kargil, touching villages, towns, cities, and megalopolis, crossing diverse landscapes, seashores, pastoral agricultural areas, parched wastelands, plains, valleys, forest and mountains, - its flowers, trees, wildlife, people, climate and geography of India. to able to develop the latest curatorial (if you are curious please visit, portraitofanation.in)
Present: We started this new cultural experimentation with certain beliefs. like we understand from the alternative historical timeline that the last few centuries so many great explorers tried to re-map the cross-cultural interest (especially within South-Asian cultural harmony) by following the unknown highways. We are really surprised to see the spirit and intercultural similarities especially when we are studying orientalism from a de-colonial mindset. There are several hidden narratives we found that are still unsolved which we can try to map and make a new understanding.
The purpose of this cultural travel is not making another traveling exhibition rather it is about to explore new horizons from the missing link. We would like to choose some perspective from an open call and will work together with all those interdependent methods to able to trace the different cultures, trade, food, shelter, and subsistence. We found the Asian Highway allows us to experience firsthand the cultural margin and historical narrative from a duration mode. We consider this experimentation will help the future to understand the harmony with plural values, fluid norms, and inter-customs belief system. This journey will be not about the destination but the connecting point with the cross-cultural communication interest. It will trace the pace of everyday life, the history of mundane language age, the symphony of cross-cultural ethnicity, etc.
(It can also refer to the attempts that are made to exchange, negotiate and mediate cultural differences by means of language, gestures and body language. It is how people belonging to different cultures communicate with each other. Some Areas which is important to understand the traveling methods: Mapping the uneven similarities Language and its pluralism - Preconceptions and Stereotypes - Making a bridge between history and future perspective.)
Future: Can we ready to accept ‘departure’ as neo-form of conceptual contemporary? To begin to answer this question, we have to acknowledge that the art is now in contemporary time is not dependent on the sight of the physical outpost rather it is now broader and extended towards the struggles and the conflict. Our curatorial interest is principally trying to accommodate that perspective in a cored level. It is a project about making the understanding of lost & found language in alternative communication spaces and the crisis of expression in peri-urban social understanding of contemporary art. On one hand, we would like to make a cross-border mapping of the cultural metaphor about decolonization and departure of the mundane language between various communities both local and global perspectives. On the other hand, we are experiencing nowadays that in big cities the idea of contemporary art is so far from community engagement as if the art world is becoming a tiny bubble where movement and existence are all inside the close cluster. So in the path, we are trying to develop a communication design through recognizing parallel historical narratives. We firmly believe that traveling is not about to reach the destination rather connecting all the in-between sites where knowledge is hidden and untold for many years. We are ready to create and make an open-source cultural lab where the journey and the possibilities are available for future researchers from both the country. We are very precise that the curated travel will be an interdependent journey where navigation will be like a live podcast with local aestheticize and inclusive curatorial activism.