Category: Arts

GOETHE-INSTITUT FELLOWSHIP AT HAUS DER KUNST

The program will award each fellowship for one year.

Haus der Kunst is a non-collecting public museum and a key global center for contemporary art located in Munich, Germany. It is dedicated to the exploration of the diverse histories of contemporary art based on a foundation of focused exhibitions, research, and education. The museum’s aim is to establish research as an integral cornerstone of its vision, and to develop a context for scholarship that allows for the interplay of art, culture, politics, and society in the way modern and contemporary art are understood on a global level. The “Goethe-Institut Fellowship” is an important building block towards this aim. Supported by the Goethe-Institut, the “Goethe-Institut Fellowship at Haus der Kunst” is designed for international emerging scholars whose research focuses on global perspectives on modern and contemporary art in the second half of the 20th century and 21st century.
The inaugural fellowship shall concentrate on the research for a comprehensive exhibition project on the global art historical developments of the Post-war era. It will be the first of a trilogy whose second and third chapters will be devoted to the periods of Post-colonialism and Post-communism. One of the main tasks is the research and organization of a series of seminars, colloquia, an international symposium in preparation for the project.
Please find further information like Qualifications and Requirements or Conditions over here: http://www.hausderkunst.de/index.php?id=899&L=1.
Christina B?ns
Program Office
Goethe-Institut Bangladesh
House 10, Road 9 (new)
Dhanmondi
Dhaka 1205
Tel.: +880-2-9126525, -9126526
Fax: +880-2-8110712
Please Retweet #art #museum

River Bloom

By Ranjit Hoskote.

Art in America Column: Atlas Bombay (extract)

If you think of South Asian art today, you likely focus on the subcontinent?s metropolitan centers; on the gallery scenes in Bombay, New Delhi and Bangalore in India, and on artists? circles in Karachi and Lahore in Pakistan. Not surprisingly, it?s the artists who work in these populous, kaleidoscopic hubs of activity, transiting between there and West Europe and North America, who are most often selected by curators to embody the specificity of their place and time.
But where, I suspect, many curators are not yet looking is several thousand miles away from South Asia?s metropolitan centers, in the northeast of India and in Bangladesh, at the geographical edge where the South Asian subcontinent shades away into the Himalayan foothills of Tibet to the north and the tropical lushness of Burma and Thailand to the south. Continue reading “River Bloom”

Calcutta's Biggest Folk Music Festival

This year, other than the bauls and fakirs of West Bengal, we will have a big team from Kushtia in Bangladesh and there will be a special programme of qawwali by Mohammed Ahmed Warsi and team of Rampur, taking the festival beyond Bengal, such as we did last year by inviting Prahlad Singh Tipaniya.

The 8th Baul Fakir Utsav of Shaktigarh, Jadavpur, will take place in the weekend of 5-6 January 2013. As you know, we do this entirely with friends’ support–personal contribution, advertisement in our journal, space for your banners and posters, support towards our CD from last year’s festival, stalls on the festival ground and so on. But this is a non-corporate, non, NGO, no-governmental event and so far it has worked this way. A bit of a struggle, but the rewards are big. For those of you who have been here, you know that it is a wonderful free and shared space for listening to great music by great musicians. For those who haven’t, try and make it to the utsav this year. Also, there is a group on facebook, which you might like to join.?http://www.facebook.com/groups/Baulfakirutsav/.

Site Imaginaries

Kochi Muziris Biennale Symposium
Date: December 15th – 16th
Venue: Outset Carnoustie Pavilion ? Aspinwall
Co-organised by: Marieke Van Hal (Biennial Foundation)
Symposium advisors: Gayatri Sinha (Critical Collective), Paul Domela (Liverpool Biennial)

The location of India?s first biennale in Kochi marks a seismic in the way art will be seen in the subcontinent. In replacing the model of a state supported metropolitan exposition ? that continued from the late 1960s to the early 2000s ? the Kochi Muziris Biennale celebrates the political and cultural aggrandisement of the region. In terms of curatorial initiative it also claims another level for the artist in the domain of entrepreneurial activism.

Erase by Srinivasa Prasad. Photo Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

The challenge for the new biennale in South Asia is not to reflect global parameters; rather it is to create sense of an aesthetic moment as it unfolds before us. At the same time shifts in location and structure imply a shift in politics in India as much as in art. Continue reading “Site Imaginaries”

Young Magnum: The hotshots ready to take their place in history

Peter Popham views the work of four young photographers at various stages of the harrowing selection process. Independent

For more than 60 years, Magnum photographers have been giving the world lessons in how to see: from the piles of corpses inside the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, from the burka-clad women of Srinagar to the teddy boys of Southend, their work opened our eyes to what was going on in the world around us like no one and nothing before.
Collectively, randomly, with fierce and fiercely differentiated gifts, they painted the history of the post-war world with their Leicas, Nikons and Pentaxes. The work was so compelling that having seen, say, Vietnam through the lens of Philip Jones Griffiths or James Dean through the lens of Dennis Stock or a starving Bihari peasant through the lens of Werner Bischof, those subjects and the ideas and debates that surrounded them would never be the same again: without resorting to hyperbole, they materially affected the discourse of our times.
All that?s in the past tense, in the same way that one talks of Stalin or Watergate in the past tense: Magnum put its stamp on an era ? a long one ? with such unforgettable gusto that it became part of that era. Yet the founders of Magnum had the foresight to organise themselves in a way that allowed the brand (to use a word many of them would probably cringe at) to survive beyond that long wave of greatness. That is why today we are able to offer? you Young Magnum: four photographers in their late-twenties and early-thirties with the spark of brilliance, the individuality of eye and the ferocious commitment for older members of the co-operative to recognise them as fellow spirits, and haul them inside.
Continue reading “Young Magnum: The hotshots ready to take their place in history”

Images of Independence, Finally Free

By JAMES ESTRIN New York Times Lens Blog

The photographs were shockingly graphic, detailing the torture and execution of men suspected of collaborating with pro-Pakistani militias during Bangladesh?s 1971 war for independence. Featured on front pages and magazine covers around the world, they provoked outrage and won awards, including World Press Photo and a Pulitzer ? both shared by Horst Faas and Michel Laurent.

Members of Kadiria Bahini – a guerilla independence militia – bayoneted a collaborator of the Pakistani Army, in Dhaka after the Liberation War. 18th December 1971.

Only three Western photographers were on the scene of the executions: Mr. Faas, Mr. Laurent and Christian Simonpietri. The Magnum photographer Marc Riboud left the scene minutes before and later said he did so because his presence was only encouraging the brutality.
But there was another photojournalist there, whom the others didn?t know: Rashid Talukder, who worked for a Bangladeshi newspaper. Though he also made dramatic images, he did not publish them. He couldn?t. Mr. Talukder knew that ? unlike the foreign photographers ? he would not leave Bangladesh and dash to the next overseas hot spot. He would be staying. And the men behind the executions were among the most powerful in the country. Continue reading “Images of Independence, Finally Free”

Shumon Ahmed, Home Land

Art and Deal. Issue 53, Nov 12. Page 43

“Shumon Ahmed uses photography to record a new history whilst rewriting
its past, his multiple pictures of Bangladesh, show the angst, isolation and
sprawl of the (modern) metropolis in a manner (fitting) of Woody Allen?s
(cinematic) images of New York City” – Anwar Akhtar

Photographer Shumon Ahmed lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh; a country plagued by extreme weather conditions but equally resourced by fertile land. Since a boy, Ahmed has watched his mother country become something all its own.? Despite the jarring climatic and agricultural fluxes, aesthetics has come to the fore, and the Bangladeshi contemporary art scene reflects a more positive potential for the county?s inherent cultural and social structures; culminating in the inaugural Dhaka Art Summit 2012 in April this year . Continue reading “Shumon Ahmed, Home Land”

The price of freedom. Foreword

Bangladeshi refugee in relief camp in India. 1971. Raghu Rai

Foreword by Shahidul Alam
?Kill three million of them,? said President Yahya Khan at the February conference (of the generals), ?and the rest will eat out of our hands.?
The executioners stood on the pier, shooting down at the compact bunches of prisoners wading in the water. There were screams in the hot night air, and then silence. (Payne, Massacre [Macmillan, 1973], p. 50, p 55.)
There were to be no witnesses to the massacre. The foreign journalists had all been sent back. The media had been taken over.. Those of us in East Pakistan, Bangalis, Paharis, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, were all labeled Kafirs. The genocide was to be presented as a holy war. They expected no resistance to ?Operation Searchlight? They couldn?t have been more wrong. The brutality was unparalleled, but so was the resistance. Continue reading “The price of freedom. Foreword”

The Empty Frame

Shahidul Alam, on why he thinks India?s photography movement hasn?t taken off yet

BY Ronny Sen EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

?I had such a big influence on the community at large that there was a tendency [towards] cloning, the classical black-and-white documentary approach to photography, beautifully composed perhaps, but in a predictable way, in a I-have- seen-it-before way? (Photo: RONNY SEN)

?I had such a big influence on the community at large that there was a tendency [towards] cloning, the classical black-and-white documentary approach to photography, beautifully composed perhaps, but in a predictable way, in a I-have- seen-it-before way? (Photo: RONNY SEN)
In the world of photography, Shahidul Alam needs no introduction. He started as a photographer of children, and went on to make a substantial contribution to the medium and its practice not just in his country, Bangladesh, but in the Subcontinent. He set up a photography school, Pathshala, in conjunction with the World Press Photo educational initiative. And he was instrumental in starting Asia?s very first photo festival, Chobi Mela, which attracts the world?s top professionals. In this conversation, he tells Open why the Indian photography movement lags others?, and how Bangladeshi photographers have finally quit cloning his work. Continue reading “The Empty Frame”