Other Asias is an ambitious artist-led initiative that challenges contemporary navigations of Asia as region, as potentiality, as memory, as imagination and investigation through an arena of fluid exhibitionary structures. Our organisation activates chains of exhibitions, film screenings, fictions, forums, performance, plays, walks and talks, historical revisions, reading circles, archives, taxonomies, political vocabularies, public education and transnational circulation towards a post-West cultural horizon.
Other Asias was founded in 2008. Before its formal organization, Other Asias started as a conversation between friends on a bus that evolved in the Central Saint Martins library on Charring Cross after a screening of Bangladeshi short films in East London. Its context was the plethora of regional survey shows from the recent commercial booms of Asian economies, the crescendos around “crisis of Multiculturalism” in parliamentary rhetoric, the rise of Asia global power and decline of unipolar West.
Over time we collectively discussed bad “Human rights” arts, humorous misreadings by ignorant Westerners, crass and harmful representations of Islamic people, the shortcomings of BME public inclusion strategies and the NGO-isation of third world subjects.
We stole our name from a Gayatri Spivak book.
Directed by Fatima Hussain and Hamja Ahsan www.otherasias.com info@otherasias.com
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