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Ulan Djaparov. Cold Head, 2003. Photo documentation of a performance action. 80 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Ahmady Arts, The Taste of Others.
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I am pleased to share with you the second half of my discussion with Leeza Ahmady, a continuation of Aprils post. Georgia Kotretsos: Perhaps Asian Contemporary Art Week, (ACAW) and The Taste of Others are the two projects that spell out your name in caps. You create projects that may conclude organically when they have to, and in the meantime you sustain them with great dedication. Is this a personal or a professional commitment? Leeza Ahmady: Public education is a key component for both projects. It begins with selfeducation, which for me is a process of unlearning or making sense of all the dead information that one accumulates through conventional study. The task of maturity is to navigate through that jungle and that is what some people call The School of Life. I am not interested in positioning expertise, rather in creating both a personal and professional platform for inquiry and ways of confronting inertia and ignorance about very compelling, unexplored subjects in contemporary art practice and art history. At the end of each ACAW edition, essentially a biennial event involving interaction with hundreds of artists and dozens of arts institutions, I vow never to do it again. Yet the very intense exercise in scoping, identifying, listening, framing, and channeling of artistic activity, which ACAW entails is a marathon I love to run. It is both exhausting and invigorating with many stones still left unturned. History, people, communities, creativity, conflict, entropy, and Michael Neault, Content and Media Producer, Portland, OR
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The Taste of Others alludes to the fallacy of seeking objectivity in taste, or ways of being, doing, living, thinking, creating, etc. Art and taste feed off each other, as does the individual and the collective, but how our tastes evolve is dependent on our collective programming. How to engage with tastes not of our own collective conscious? Empathy is one way. For example to comprehend the taste of (or the practice of) eating with ones hands, one must abandon the fork, at least for a while. Art in Central Asia is a taste I seem to continue needing to explore. At the core is the acknowledgment that there is so much more beyond what I alone can convey. Public programs are therefore also a means of recruitment, prompting others to venture into tasting this subject profoundly on their own. University talks are particularly important to inspire students to focus their research and/or to expand their considerations of art history and how it is written and translated.
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Alexander Ugay. Still from Bastion, 2007. Video transferred from 8mm film, 3D. Duration: 5:09.
The two projects naturally feed one another. When I took directorship of ACAW in 2005, I felt I was entering a school where I am both student and teacher. There was a small consortium of interested museum curators, collectors and gallery owners that supported the initiative. I saw my entry into their fold as linking to larger dialogues about a very complex geographical and conceptual space called Asia. The term Asian, precisely because it is problematic, belongs in the title. It has served as a reminder for me to continue problematizing categorical perceptions and representation of artists, countries, people and ideas while tying them together into broader conversations. This has meant enrolling non-Asia focused NYC institutions to join the consortium and inviting artists from many of Asias less visible regions to participate. Paradigm shifts also contribute to change. As we apply new angles each year, the layers of ACAW unfold and I am forced to re-learn its workings. Many galleries have closed in New York City establishing themselves more solidly in thriving cities such as Hong Kong and Dubai.
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LA: As mentioned in your introduction, I participated in a series of seminars and workshops presented by dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul this past February. While each workshop topic was designed to create exchange for new methods of thinking, perhaps the most provocative was the idea of creating a critical art magazine critical being the key word. Alongside Mousse Magazine staff, a few of us led exercises meant to draw attention to both the conceptual framework of imagining a magazine, to imagining a product, to imagining what it means to write about art. To that end, independent curator Raimundas Malasauskas led participants through a session characterized by his ongoing project The Hypnotic Show. Tapping into the enduring relationship between cognition and art, Malasauskas shared an audio recording meant to induce a trance-like state whereby the participants experience an exhibition in their mind. While the vast majority of participants did not understand the language of narration, they were still able to access imagery induced by the narrator. The exercise led to very insightful discussions about time, space, imagination, and ended with many questions, including the difference between an artist and curator.
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Installation of video and transcripts from the art seminars presented in Kabul and Bamiyan, Afghanistan dOCUEMENTA (13).
For my own session, I introduced a level of intimacy not often breached in daily life. In the American society it is not uncommon to be questioned on what you desire out of life, and its even more common to voluntarily vocalize it. So in testing the thought processes of the Afghan participants, I posed the following set of questions and asked them to list as many answers as possible: What are your skills? What do you like to do? What do you not like to do? What do you want to do? The questions seem rather ridiculously simple, yet the participants were dumbfounded. They had never been asked anything like it, not by parents, not by teachers, and they quickly realized as they listed their replies that they had many answers that surprised them
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Creating an Art Magazine: Testing the Grounds / Finding the Language, seminar presented in Kabul, Afghanistan, February 2012 dOCUMENTA (13).
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Of course, there is also a very practical intent to this initiative. Primarily the resulting magazine will be a mechanism for awareness and communication, connecting artists and arts organizations to each other and their audiences, many of whom still prefer print media over digital or, more correctly, have better access to the former. I am hoping that the publication will create a deeper awareness among individuals and organizations throughout Afghanistan, and in effect tie the community into a more cohesive, collaborative group. GK: Right about now a periodic exhibition of Afghan and foreign artists is taking place in Kabul and Bamyan that attempts to imagine and express a life beyond war and conflict in Afghanistan. An inventive visualization exercise foresees the future of the country, yet Im left to wonder why now? Do art and peace go hand-in-hand? LA: I returned from the opening of the exhibition in Kabul only three weeks ago, so I havent had time to digest things entirely. I can think mainly in adjectives right now. It was an experience tremendously positive, yet unsettling, happy and frustrating, aimless, while productive, incredibly generous, and meaningful. The project in its entirety was an undertaking, a grand poetic gesture, profound and beautiful in bringing many people and art works together. Dozens of individuals, local and international organizations, and private and governmental agencies collaborated, many for the first time, which in itself is a great achievement. Some of my favorite artists from around the world had an opportunity to make what in some cases was their best work. Of course there were many problems, discussions, arguments, opinions, disagreements, disappointments, and derailments. There was some synchronicity and process, inclusion, exclusion, and errors, some corrected, and many unnoticed, so much more to reflect on. I felt listened to, admired, provoked, ignored, offended, and appreciated. It was a total experience I may not eloquently put into words without diluting insights gained. In response to your question why now? I think it is a matter of how long it takes for dreams to be dreamed. Or how they expand to manifest as reality. I am not sure who dreamed what first, I thought it was my dream, yet there were dozens and dozens linked and looped by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, essentially a brilliant dream weaver, who followed Mario Garcia Torress dream to track artist Alighieri Boettis dream of Hotel One, which he opened and lived in the 1970s in Shre Naw, Kabul. All of which got looped into many other dreams such as Michael Rakowitz carving stones in Bamyan, Barmak Akram becoming a ceramicist in Istalif, Francis Alys filming childrens street games in the Old City, Mariam Ghani digitizing decades worth of Afghan Films, Zalmai adding sound to his photos, Adrian Villar Rojas building a massive mud wall in the middle of a palace garden, and so on, and so on. My own dream to share The Taste of Others project finally with Afghans in Afghanistan was suddenly as real and alive as being back in Kabul was normal and extraordinary. There I was inside a rented wedding hall in the midst of a gorgeous and freezing snow blizzard, pinching myself awake to five hundred students and professors of all ages, listening to me speak to them about art in their neighboring countries. After nearly two and half years of secrecy, much has been debated and a lot has been said about motivations behind dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul. It was an emotional journey for me to
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After keen observations, I see residencies unparalleled in their positive impacts on artists everywhere. There is a basic lack of critical education and practical opportunities for artists in many parts of the world. Many are far removed from transnational art centers. They are rooted and at times trapped within their given environments. They complain about societal, familial and academic expectations, which deter experimentation with new formats, mediums, and individual pursuits. Artists need diverse and ongoing channels to feed their practice and to evolve their work over time. This requires greater collaboration between artists locally, supplemented with exchange opportunities abroad.
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Abul Qasem Foushanji. Untitled, 2012. Multi-channel sound installation, black marker pen on wall. Courtesy of AhmadyArts and the artist.
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Im seeking to offer artists time and space away from their routine to see themselves and their work in light of new contexts. Its happening across the board in my work in multiple formats, which is very refreshing. For example, instead of an exhibition, I am co-curating a two-month long NYC based residency program to bring ten contemporary artists from Cambodia to New York as part of a major multidisciplinary Cambodian art festival. (April 1-May 31, 2013).
Vandy Rattana. Bomb Ponds, 2009. Digital C-prints. Season of Cambodia, 2013. Courtesy of SA SA BASSAC and AhmadyArts.
My recent trips to Afghanistan and India have led to developing residencies for artists and curators between the two countries and beyond. A large exhibition for Fall 2013 at a gallery in Taipei will focus on artists who purposefully resist location and the de-territorialization of the origin of their body of work. Again, this residency-esque development of artistic practice beyond location speaks strongly to contextualizing process, not artists or objects. Dialogues in Contemporary Art hosted by ICI is similar in spirit, where artists and curators are interviewed about select projects, from idea to inception. Audiences relish being included in the journey, the stories, motivations, struggles involved in making and exhibiting art. These are just a few activities in the works, but overall Im excited to be on a path that I feel fulfills my personal character as much as it meets certain needs that are sometimes forgotten in curatorial work.
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Lim Sokchanlina. Former DeyKrohom, East Wall, between Sothearos Boulevard and National Assembly Street, 2009. Digital C-Print. Season of Cambodia, 2013. Courtesy of SA SA BASSAC and AhmadyArts.
Posted in: > Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture, > Inside the Artist's Studio, Asia, Biennials, Exhibitions, Germany, Interviews, New York City, Social Similar posts: Inside the Artists Studio | Leeza Ahmady (Part 1) , Joy and Revolution: Talking with Adam Weiler of Ambrose, Part 2 , Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. 2 , An-My L: Small Wars at the Henry Art Gallery , Oliver Herring | Task in Seattle seeks participants Comment (1)
One Response to Inside the Artists Studio: Leeza Ahmady (Part 2) Ahmady Arts | Blog | Interviews, Projects and Articles on August 30, 2012 12:41 pm [...] Part II August, 2012 [...]
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