art
Community voices Ishara Art Foundation’s latest exhibition, Growing Like A Tree, continues to shed light on complex perspectives from South Asia from its hub in Alserkal Avenue WORDS BY MOHAMMAD EL-JACHI
Aishwarya Arumbakkam, from the series ka Dingiei (2016-ongoing). Archival pigment print, 61 cm x 61 cm. © Aishwarya Arumbakkam. Image courtesy of the artist and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography 2019, SSAF.
U
pon entering Ishara Art Foundation, visitors are greeted by a complex web of pencilled-out associations between friends and collaborators. A sketch by curating artist Sohrab Hura is a microcosmic representation of the bonds that make up Growing Like A Tree, the exhibition that is currently on show at the gallery. From its inception in 2019 with the exhibition Altered Inheritances: Home Is a Foreign Place to its current showcase, the foundation continues to map a complex topography of South Asian identities and perspectives from its home in Alserkal Avenue in Dubai. The foundation has made a point of featuring both established and emerging artists from the Global South. The intergenerational Altered Inheritances: Home Is a Foreign Place by Shilpa Gupta and Zarina explored placehood and belonging. Amar Kanwar’s 2020 Ishara showcase Such A Morning also ran in tandem with multimedia exhibition The Sovereign Forest at the NYUAD Art Gallery, bringing the seminal artist’s works in 26
film and installation to a collegiate audience in the neighbouring emirate. Through a research-led approach, Ishara has engaged in exhibitions both on and offsite as well as online, in addition to education initiatives in and outside the UAE. Its activities have effectively established and deepened ties to a rich network of South Asian and international creative networks, from artists and academics to similar foundations and institutions. Growing Like A Tree features works by 14 artists and collectives from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Germany, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Singapore, several who have never exhibited institutionally on a regional or international level. It also marks Sohrab Hura's first curatorial project as a photographer and filmmaker. The exhibition encapsulates a collective moment in the lives of images that are often fleeting and obscured. “How can an exhibition capture new geographic alignments in the 21st century?” asks Sabih Ahmed, associate director and curator of Ishara Art Foundation, in a question he posed to