Art South Asia Project (ASAP) is a UK-based arts education and development agency. As part of the New Perspectives season, ASAP is supporting three initiatives to widen the engagement with contemporary visual arts through Pakistan and its diaspora.
1. Art Reproduction in Pakistan: Research Project by Dr. Samina Iqbal and Mrs. Salima Hashmi
The project sets out to explore some of Pakistan's famous old master’s artworks' reproduction for commercial purposes. Its aim is to trace the history of how these reproductions make their way into the mainstream market and will be conducted by Dr. Samina Iqbal and Professor Salima Hashmi.
2. Inventing the Nation: Making Histories and New Possibilities – Sofial Balagamwala
Inventing the Nation explores collections and politics of the museums in South Asia, and its impact on nation building and identity formation.
Balagamwala’s project will look at the presence of imperial and national narratives in specific collections and institutions, and the entanglements of colonial legacies in such projects. She will be studying the systems of archiving, narrative building, and framing history within museums and archives, and question how these framings are able to convey or contradict histories and existing bodies of knowledge with a lens on both modern visual art and pre-modern art and objects.
Her project will encompass research at select institutions in Pakistan and the UK with a series of study sessions and an experimental publication, which will be available online on the ASAP and British Council’s websites.
3. Art Murmur – Ambreen Siddiqui
Art Murmuris is creating a series of webinars for artists, curators and arts educators to help create both local and global communities around research-based art practices in Pakistan and the UK. The goal of the webinar is to communicate approachable ways of incorporating research in one’s practice while providing practical next steps.
Artists will also be informed of ways in which they can look for opportunities to further their research, including applying for residencies, writing for academic journals and submitting applications to conferences and panel discussions.