Saturday, 19 October 2013
Art Metropole (1490 Dundas Street West)
2PM
Free
In conjunction LIFT, SAVAC and Art Metropole, this salon will feature a selection of texts compiled by visiting artists Fatima and Zahra Hussain.
Fatima and Zahra Hussain in attendance.
Fatima and Zahra Hussain, founders of Other Asias, a transnational art collective, and Aam Awaam, an online radio station, are Artists-in-Residence with SAVAC at Art Metropole. Taking theorist Paul Virilio’s concept of the “Information Bomb” from the book of the same name, Fatima and Zahra Hussain will be reporting daily from the “The Subcontinent Newsroom,” where they will compile information and reactions by artists to a fictitious document, which is the kernel of Info-Bomb.
This fictitious document, written by Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Sir Cyril Radcliffe in 1947, has been discovered in 2013. The document states that the borders of the South Asian Subcontinent, will once again be re-drawn, 67 years after independence, to “restore peace and harmony within the region.”
Other Asias has commissioned a group of artists and writers to respond to this document. Throughout the month of October 2013, international and local artists, and art collectives will create videos, web-based works, articles, photographs and conduct public interventions throughout Toronto. In addition to public screenings and performances, the artists’ work will appear in three editions of newspapers, which will be distributed throughout Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area during October.
Info-Bomb is a participatory and discursive way for artists and curators to speak to the ways in which information is disseminated. Employing South Asian border politics as a way in which to address such issues, all the artists and curators involved engage the public using different media and platforms to speak to the ever-changing, imaginary and arbitrary borders of the Indian Subcontinent.
For this iteration of No Reading After the Internet, texts that have informed the thinking of Fatima and Zahra Hussain will be read aloud alongside excerpts from the newspaper project and will be discussed by participants within the Subcontinent Newsroom.
Fatima Hussain is an Artist-Curator/Theatre Practitioner based in Pakistan. Her work over the last few years has addressed multiple issues bringing into it the political, the historical, the everyday, and whether with intention or escape, ‘art’ for her, has fallen within a larger interpretation of the colonized structures, languages and territory. She founded Other Asias, a transnational in 2011 that voices fictive and found sounds in order to create and inform technocratic society. Her recent curatorial projects include Info-Bomb, SLICE and Redo Pakistan, mostly nomadic in nature, curated in the form of newspapers, websites, radio shows and public events. Fatima is a 2005 graduate of the National College of Art (Lahore) where she was trained as a painter. She moved on to Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London for her MFA (2007-2008).
Zahra Hussain is a Theater practitioner, Research Architect and Activist based in Pakistan. She initiated various workshops such as “Safe guarding Heritage trees” for the Heritage Foundation. She has hosted Tea sessions, a discussion forum in Lahore and Islamabad. She is a research collaborator on Center for Research Architecture project “Forensic Architecture” that centers upon visually presenting large-scale humanitarian violence. She is the founder and Director of Laajverd, and co-founded Aam Awaam where socio-economic inquires are made visible through various means of communication. Zahra is a 2009 graduate of the National College of Art (Lahore) and did her MA in Research Architecture, Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University, UK.
This meeting of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is supported by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto.
No Reading After the Internet 