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CAMP’s Wharfage Project: Recasting the Indian Ocean as a Space of Contact and Exchange
Murtaza Vali
November 1, 2009
Synopsis
Recent post-colonial scholarship has challenged traditional interpretations of oceans as spaces of separation, articulating, instead, the specific types of encounters and exchange they enable and the syncretic identities, cultures and nationalisms that result from such interactions. Drawing on these theories, Murtaza Vali will discuss Mumbai-based CAMP’s Wharfage (2009), a public art project presented at the recent 9th Sharjah Biennial that examined current trade—conducted exclusively by wooden dhows — between Sharjah’s old port and contemporary Somalia. Successfully foregrounding the millennia old nautical ties linking the Gulf, South Asia and East Africa, Wharfage recasts the Indian Ocean as a space of connection, communication and exchange and posits cross-cultural interaction across it as integral to the culture of Sharjah in particular, and more broadly, the Gulf. By doing so it subverts the “nationalist focus” and “ethnic absolutism” that characterizes discourses of history and culture in the U.A.E., where a pure “Emirati” identity is promoted and safeguarded above all.
Bio
Murtaza Vali is a Brooklyn-based and Sharjah-based independent critic and art historian. A regular contributor to Bidoun and ArtAsiaPacific, where he is a contributing editor, his writing focuses on contemporary art, culture and politics in the United States, South Asia and the Middle East and the complex intersections between these spheres post-9/11. He was co-editor of the 2007 and 2008 editions of ArtAsiaPacific’s annual Almanac issue, an encyclopedic year-end review of contemporary art across Asia. His criticism has also appeared in ArtReview and Art India and he has penned catalog essays on various artists, most recently Reena Saini Kallat and Emily Jacir. Also a freelance curator, his upcoming exhibition “Accented” will be presented at BRIC Rotunda Gallery in early 2010, as part of their Lori Ledis Emerging Curator Program.
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