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Beyond Borders: An introduction

Ananya Jahanara Kabir , Daisy Hasan & Fareda Khan

To cite this article: Ananya Jahanara Kabir , Daisy Hasan & Fareda Khan (2011) Beyond�Borders:
An introduction, , 9:01, 1-5, DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2011.553881

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South Asian Popular Culture
Vol. 9, No. 1, April 2011, 1–5

EDITORIAL

Beyond Borders: An introduction

This special issue of South Asian Popular Culture collects writing inspired by the
symposium, ‘Beyond Borders,’ held at the Leeds City Museum on 6 March 2010.
Inasmuch as ‘Beyond Borders’ was part of the wider programme, Between Kismet and
Karma: South Asian Women Artists Respond to Conflict (BKK), the issue also celebrates
that programme and draws inspiration from the creative work it showcased. The central
element of BKK was an eponymous exhibition of eight women artists from South
Asia, at the Leeds Art Gallery (6 March – 9 May 2010). Around it were constellated a
cluster of events – artistic residencies, cross-generic interventions, film programmes,
and this symposium – that unfolded between January and June 2010 in Leeds,
Manchester, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, London, and Karachi. If we take into
consideration the locations where the participating artists work and live, this list of cities
expands to include Colombo, Delhi, Mumbai, and Dhaka. In the course of research and
development, the project team consisting of Ananya Kabir, Daisy Hasan, and Fareda
Khan travelled to Dhaka, Chittagong, Lahore, Karachi, Colombo, Kandy, Delhi,
Bangalore, Jaipur, and Berlin.
BKK connected places, venues, artists, arts programmers, and curators. Although
particularly complex and extensive, such a web of partnerships is perhaps not unusual in
the arts sector. What made BKK truly unique was the curatorial collaboration between
academia and the creative sector as well as the involvement of a range of academic
institutions, including the School of English at the University of Leeds, the Department of
Fine Art and Applied Arts at Liverpool Hope University, and the Department of Ceramics
at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, within its conceptualisation
and delivery. Both its inaugural symposium and this commemorative special issue of an
academic journal stand as testimony to the overarching partnership between the arts sector
and academia that made BKK possible.

Sharing resources, exchanging knowledge: convivial partnerships

BKK was the merging of ideas: Shisha’s ambition to work on a gender-based exhibition
focussing on South Asian women artists, and Kabir’s research on conflict, cultural
belonging and imaginative expression in South Asia. The BKK partnership was later
consolidated by the award of an Arts and Humanities Knowledge Transfer Fellowship to
Kabir to collaborate with Khan, Deputy Director of Shisha: The International Agency for
South Asian Craft and Visual Arts. The Fellowship also enabled Kabir and Khan to bring
on board Daisy Hasan as the third member of the BKK team; she, as a writer and
academic, further developed the programme alongside all the venue curators. Each partner
brought invaluable insight and skill. However, Shisha’s contribution of existing curatorial

ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online

q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2011.553881
http://www.informaworld.com
2 Editorial

knowledge and expertise in South Asian visual culture, partnership building, and securing
resources to BKK must be noted, as must the crucial input of Sara-Jayne Parsons, curator
at the Bluecoat, to the framework BKK finally assumed. Others that contributed materially
were our multiple partners in the UK and abroad, corporate sponsors and charitable
bodies, all of whom are listed in detail later. This rich mix of investment meant that the
BKK team’s challenging and exhilarating journey was also one that charted the
reinterpretation of ‘knowledge transfer,’ the then-buzzword of the AHRC, as ‘knowledge
exchange.’ By the time the project stood at delivery phrase, a new buzzword had emerged
in the British Arts and Humanities landscape: ‘impact.’ Our journey of learning together
put us in the ideal position to contribute to academia’s larger quest of calibrating and
assessing impact.
For the academic members of the team (Hasan and Kabir), used to their written
work’s dissemination to audiences whose composition and extent will remain largely
unknowable, to be able to view the expressions and hear the appreciative comments of
the audience gathered at the launch of BKK, in response to the artworks they had been
able to bring to the UK as part of the project team, was a thrilling achievement. Equally,
the team is very proud to have involved a partner from the creative sector (Khan) so
closely in the editorial process demanded by an academic journal. This transformative
potential was already in evidence at ‘Beyond Borders.’ The symposium lived up to its
title, and to BKK’s foundational philosophy of knowledge exchange through dialogue by
bringing together arts activists, arts programmers, academics, artists, and students on a
level playing field for a vibrant day of discussion, intervention, and mutual discovery.
After the talks, the delegates walked over to the Leeds Art Gallery to view the exhibition
that had inspired many of the talks, and it was a special pleasure to have with us several
of the academics, artists, curators, and filmmakers participating in the wider programme.
Fittingly, the famous local restaurant, Hansa – which specialises in East African
Gujarati cuisine and is the brainchild of Hansa Dabhi, one of Yorkshire’s most
inspirational female entrepreneurs – provided hospitality and a wonderful closing
dinner.
The spirit of conviviality and South Asian (and South Asian heritage) feminine
dynamism and creativity that the Hansa restaurant embodies was very much in concert with
the symposium itself. ‘Beyond Borders’ exemplified the unexpected connections that
opened up as a result of the genuine desire to collaborate and the evolving conversations
between the BKK team and potential partners in the museums and galleries sector.
The symposium was the culmination of these congenial and innovative relationships. To it,
we were able to bring from South Asia four of our exhibiting artists/filmmakers,
Naiza H. Khan, Tayeba Begum Lipi, Priya Sen, and Paromita Vohra. They joined the
London-based writer Aamer Hussein, Gasworks (London) Residency coordinator Catalina
Lozano, Bluecoat (Liverpool) exhibitions curator Sarah-Jayne Parsons, Leeds Art Gallery
education officer Amanda Phillips, SAA-UK (Leeds) director Keranjeet Virdee,
Bradford-based freelance curator Irna Qureshi, and academics from the Universities of
Nottingham (Srila Roy), Manchester (Atreyee Sen), Salford (Jacques Rangasamy, also
chair of Shisha’s board), and Leeds (Kim Knott). Also present as participants as well as
organisers were the BKK team members.
Panel discussions bringing together all these speakers resulted in a provocative and
border-crossing day in several senses of the term. Setting the bar high was Tamil-Malaysian-
British performance artist and dramaturge, Rani Moorthy, director of Rasa Productions,
who delivered a keynote performance drawing on her personal experiences of displacement
 South Asian Popular Culture 3

and survival through multiple conflicts. A full complement of postgraduate students from
the University of Leeds’ School of English enthusiastically participated both as energetic
audience members and dedicated volunteers, especially in the gathering of feedback and
the documentation of the proceedings.

From the Symposium to the Special Issue: creative collaborations

The contents and format of this special issue reflect, we believe, the unusually
collaborative and conversational spirit of the day. The issue includes a photo-essay (N.H.
Khan), a creative piece about women’s creativity (Hussein), reflective pieces (F. Khan;
Kumar), essays charting creative practice (Moorthy; Qureshi; Vohra), and more
conventional academic essays (Bolognani; Hasan; Kabir; Sen and Thakkar) – although
even these break the mould wherever possible, either through overt collaboration with
creative practitioners (Sen and Thakkar) and arts programmers (Bolognani), or because of
an unusually self-reflective and introspective nature (Hasan; Kabir).1 In keeping with our
own learning curve along the route of knowledge exchange, we have grouped the writings
into as dialogic and interruptive mode as possible. We hope to replicate thereby some of
the positive energies that emanated from the symposium’s clamorous and conversational
creativity which is also, of course, the hallmark of South Asian popular culture in general.
Our intention in this special issue has been to move beyond borders: those borders
that keep apart the ‘discursive’ from the ‘creative’; the ‘academic’ from the ‘artistic’; the
postcolonial (artwork) and the post-imperial (exhibition space); and the ‘popular’ of the
bazaar, the folk, and the artisan workshop from the ‘high art’ of studios and museums.
Equally, the essays reflect South Asian women as cultural producers who are conscious of
the potential of artistic and imaginative representation to move beyond the borders and
boundaries of social class, ethnicity, gender, and national belonging. Ananya Jahanara
Kabir’s essay, ‘Dis-comforting bodies: Postcards from the edge in Between Kismet and
Karma’ charts some of this history as a background for understanding the dis-comforting
bodies that confronted the viewer of BKK, as does Fareda Khan’s, ‘As a woman my
country is the whole world: Representations of partners, people and places in Between
Kismet and Karma,’ where she reflects on the web of partnerships that made BKK possible.
That the multiple borders constricting women’s agency in South Asia can actually catalyse
the creative process and infuse it with passion and urgency is vividly illustrated in
Moorthy’s essay, ‘Acting out the Laws of Man(u), and my part in its downfall,’ which
draws attention to the deep structures of patriarchal oppression against which South Asian
women particularly in the Diaspora have to struggle. Interestingly, for cultural producers
located within South Asia, class barriers rather than patriarchy per se become a focal point
of both conscience and creativity – as differently explicated by the two collaborative
pieces, Atreyee Sen and filmmaker Neha Thakkar’s conversation about Mumbai:
‘Prostitution, pee-ing, percussion, and possibilities: Contemporary women documentary
film-makers and the city in South Asia,’ and Irna Qureshi’s work with Naiza H. Khan
about Khan’s partnership with a male artisan of Karachi: ‘Women artists and male artisans
in South Asia.’
A different kind of male-female collaboration is ‘Rokeya, painting,’ an excerpt from
Aamer Hussein’s moving novella, Another Gulmohar Tree, along with an introductory
note written especially for this issue. Like the Gulmohar, a species transplanted to South
Asia, the ‘Rokeya’ of the story is a woman artist transplanted from Europe to Pakistan. The
multiple adjustments of Rokeya’s creative impulse to her new environment makes her as
emblematic of the South Asian woman artist as the Gulmohar has become of South Asian
4 Editorial

landscapes. The same may be said of many of our contributors, whose personal and
professional trajectories reveal the thriving of creativity in the midst of displacement and
change. The relationship between these trajectories and public policy, as it plays out in the
landscape of multicultural Britain, is charted by Marta Bolognani’s essay, ‘Communities,
audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the showcasing of South Asian
art,’ while Daisy Hasan, in ‘Between Kismet and Karma: Charting the impact of an HEI
and cultural sector collaboration’ provides a reflective evaluation of the collaborative
nature of BKK in the climate of new policy developments for arts and humanities research.
Despite the generic differences between the different contributions to this special
issue, what they do have in common is the desire to keep the female ‘I’ at the centre of the
writing and reflecting process. Exemplary of this strategy is Paromita Vohra’s essay,
‘Dotting the I: The politics of self-less-ness in Indian documentary practice,’ which
combines a rare history of documentary practice in India together with self-reflection on
how she, as a woman documentary filmmaker, situates herself vis-à-vis this history.
Another shared interest among all contributors is the conviction that ‘conflict’ is not a
given premise to simply ‘respond’ to, whether that response might be creative or analytic.
Pushing the premises of BKK’s tagline, ‘South Asian woman artists respond to conflict,’
the contributions reveal the assumptions behind the categories ‘women,’ ‘response,’ and
‘conflict’ as subject to dialogue, debate, and contemplation: as suggestively captured in
Naiza Khan’s photo-essay, ‘Between the temple and the playground: Explorations of
geography and gender,’ and Kshama Kumar’s reflective piece, ‘Negotiations with art,
identity, and space: Reflections on Between Kismet and Karma.’ Overall, the issue opens
up new avenues for understanding women’s agency in South Asia: as engaging
productively with external forces (which we label, tongue-in-cheek, as ‘kismet’ and
‘karma’), and as nourished by an aesthetics and politics that are afraid neither of being
feminine in the embrace of ornament, adornment, sensuality, and desire, nor of being
feminist in ideological orientations. Finally, holding together this issue, right from the
micro-level of each essay’s composition to the macro-level of its co-editing, is our shared
understanding of the collaboration as a productive mode that is full of creative potential.
Nowhere is this creative and collaborative spirit more apparent than in the long list of
thanks that is due to our contributors and to ourselves as co-editors; we wish, additionally,
to thank those partners and participants in the symposium, and other well-wishers, who
could not contribute to this special issue but whose support has been invaluable: Tanja
Pirsig-Marshall, Sara-Jayne Parsons, Sara Perks, Kate Pryor-Williams, Catalina Lozano,
Srila Roy, Tariq Jazeel, Kim Knott, Jacques Rangasamy, and Professor Hasan. We are
grateful for the generosity of Hansa, Mumtaz, and the City Inn, all in Leeds, for
hospitality; of the Leeds City Museum and the Leeds Art Gallery for the provision of
venues; and of the Commonwealth Foundation which provided financial support towards
the symposium. All the student volunteers at the symposium deserve a heartfelt round of
thanks; in particular, Kshama Kumar and Abha Talesara went beyond the call of duty. We
also thank Ed Powell and Kamran Ali for expert documentation of the symposium.
Without the hard work and meticulousness of Pippa Kenyon-Leigh and Angela Harris of
Shisha, and Sharron Huyton and Gill Gray of the University of Leeds, the organisation of
the symposium would have been impossible. We remain grateful to and inspired by our
participating artists and filmmakers: Shilpa Gupta, Lin Holland, Yasmine Kabir, Naiza
H. Khan, Tayyeba Begum Lipi, Anoli Perera, Sadia Salim, Priya Sen, Sabiha Sumar,
Paromita Vohra, and Sujeewa Kumari Weerasinghe. And finally, a big ‘thank you’ to
 South Asian Popular Culture 5

Rajinder Dudrah, for his belief in this special issue and his encouragement, support, and
patience throughout the editorial process.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir
University of Leeds
with Daisy Hasan
University of Westminster
and Fareda Khan
Shisha

Note
1. Abstracts of the essays by Marta Bolognani, Rani Moorthy, and Atreyee Sen and Neha Raheja
Thakker will be published in the forthcoming Between Kismet and Karma: South Asian Women
Artists Respond to Conflict programme catalogue, ed. Fareda Khan and Pippa Kenyon-Leigh, to
be published by Shisha (2011).