26th June - 18th July, 2008 at Bodhi Art, New York




Part I: Multiple and Overlapping Contemplations from the Diaspora

Jaishri Abichandani, Chila Kumari Burman, Sophie Ernst, Maryam Jafri, Karsh Kale/ Luis Banuelos Arechiga / Vikkal Parikh, Aki Nawaz, Hetain Patel, Sara Rahbar, Tejal Shah

It may seem that recent intellectual history has been using the post-structural as a way to understand post-colonialism. In constituting the role of representations and the social constructions of reality, artists and musicians have questioned the notion of modernity's obsession with progress. In revealing the crises of mono-culturalism and universalism, postcolonial work can be construed as both performative and constructed from a notion of identity.

The exhibition Emerging Discourse recognises these voices that have demanded the return of the postcolonial in cultural production. If the political only arises at times of conflict, then these repressed statements are antagonistic voices, thereby helping us to shift the role of culture towards an intellectual transformation of changing, and sometimes even polysemic, signifiers. Bodhi New York is a dedicated space for the concretisation of the imaginative for a multicultural audience and towards an art production that truly reflects current world culture. The programme allows the interplay of political agencies with vocabularies to provide what we see as isolated realities, which broaden and challenge defined functions of art and archives. The use of anti-fascist and de-historical consciousness and the questioning of pedagogic European culture are all assembled in this grouping of nine artists' works. The exhibition is curated, unhegemonically, to provide a cultural forum, a comparative and contemporaneous mapping of multiculturality.

If as Bhabha has sited -the life of memory exceeds the historic event by keeping alive the traces of images and words, then these collected works are splinters, gathered as an emerging discourse, encrusted and tinged by the barbaric times and values of mimesis.

Curated by Shaheen Merali

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New York, NY 10011
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F: +1 212 352 2638
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