#iftikhar dadi

[tammmarind]

Iftikhar Dadi & Elizabeth Dadi

They Made History, 2002.  Metal, plexiglass, LED, duratrans prints, circular light box/es. 

[kanjukutadashi]

Postwar Conference: KEYNOTE BY IFTIKHAR DADI / 22.05.14

[halfwaythruthedark]

Iftikhar Dadi. Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, Routledge, 2012.

[cornellcas]

History of Art professor invited to Asian art symposium

Iftikhar Dadi, associate professor of the History of Art, is one of the members of the Asian Art Council visiting Thailand this week as part of a symposium on Southeast Asian art at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. He is joined by dozens of museum directors, curators, art critics and scholars pooling ideas.

Thailand’s Culture Ministry and the US-based Guggenheim Museum are sponsoring the symposium.

"By creating an international community of thinkers and practitioners, the Asian Art Council promotes a curatorial mandate based on international exchange, critical conversation and cultural awareness," says Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim's Samsung senior curator of Asian art. 

Read more from the Guggenheim about the Asian Arts Council.

[nokiabae]

Urdu Film Series (1990-2009) - Iftikhar Dadi // Pakistan 

C-print Diasec, 64 x 52cm

A suite of photographs of Urdu-language films shown on state-controlled television in the 1970s, examining television as a way of imagining and shaping collective ideas of ‘success’ or ‘urban modernity’ as exemplified by the interiors, fashion, personae and gestures of the films. Taken at slow shutter speeds, they capture scanning lines of the television screen and produce a grainy, blurred effect that suggests a dream or trance-like state, several steps removed from the ‘reality’ of the depicted scenes.

[tarakutz]

At its best, curating is an intellectual and social passion, but it is also a “profession,” in the sense that any successful curatorial intervention requires interaction with physical and mental ecologies and infrastructures. Curators must ascertain and negotiate the availability of art-historical research; gain access to artifacts and archives; understand the conditions of display spaces such as museums, galleries, and public arenas; canvass patronage; envision the publics being addressed; and navigate considerations of legality, social permissibility, and free speech. In South Asia, however, all these fields of endeavor are still at an early stage of formation. Ideally, curating should not be confined within the existing limits of such structures—or simply make use of them—but also contribute to their development.

Curating South Asia

[contemporarypakistaniart]

David Alesworth, Elizabeth Dadi, Iftikhar Dadi, and Durriya Kazi with Bacchoo, Shaukat Lala, Mairaj Nicklewala and sons, and Yousuf and family.

Heart Mahal.

Beaten stainless steel, painted MDF, and lightbulbs, installed inside shipping container.

1996-1999. 

  "One manifestation of this new creative energy is the group’s Heart Mahal, 1996. This collaborative effort between the artists and teams of urban craftsmen is a 20-foot-long container, the innards of which have been transformed into a shrine-like space that evokes decorated trucks and rickshaws, weddings, religious rituals, and Bollywood film sets. On the container’s far wall, hundreds of colored lights pulse to suggest a pumping heart. Their light reflects off beaten stainless steel side walls lined with embossed interpretations of the artists’ drawings and toy figurines nested in mihrab-like niches.

In its collaborative origin, evocative material composition, and dramatic staging, Heart Mahal straddles the gaps between the overused binary oppositions of traditional/modern and local/foreign. Its production reveals the paradox that in an age when capital, media, and technology all move fluidly around the world, people (at least all but a certain rarefied class) don’t. And it is in these non-circulating people’s usage of freely circulating materials (containers, toys) that Heart Mahal fashions a coherent collective expression.

In Heart Mahal the artists’ collaboration moves beyond the gestural through their decision to work with craftsmen, not just on production, but also on fundamental questions of aesthetics, design, intent, and utility. This is not a celebration of utopian democracy, but rather a knowing arbitrage between the artists’ agency in their work’s circulation and the craftsmen’s facility of use, expressed through their painted panels, the beaten steel and the intricately arranged lights."

(via Karachi Pop: Vernacular Visualities in 1990s Karachi)