SADIA SHIRAZI

230 MB / Exhibition Without Objects (EwO) is an exhibition platform that transforms as it travels through cities along its designated route. EwO travels the world solely on a hard drive. It shifts attention away from the singular art object and focuses instead on artistic practice and discourse. The exhibition also plays with the fluctuating role of the curator, which lies somewhere between administrator, collector, caretaker, and disseminator of artists’ works. The show aims to engage local audiences, to move bodies from one city to the next, and to build upon pre-existing networks to further strengthen, reinforce, and engage knowledge that exists at each locale. EwO travels only as a compilation of data and then, at each site, materializes as bodies, events, and hardware that manifest the data. With its interest in the increasingly digital movement of the art object and the difficulty of moving across borders, the exhibition operates as a formal mechanism itself. It continues the lineage of artistic and curatorial experiments with the traveling show, from Duchamp's Le Boite en Valise (box in a suitcase) in France to Four Women Artists in India, as well as offline internet, file exchange networks, such as Cuba's el paquete semanal (the weekly package).

EwO aggregates as it travels, growing to include artists from each city it visits along a path towards its terminus. Tracing a line that is poignant for residents of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh alike, the exhibition’s route connects cities with mirrored experiences of traumatic population exchanges during Partition. Within our contemporary context this route is also indicative of the flow of networks of capital and labor. The cities to which EwO travels are laden with spectral resonances and market possibilities that the exhibition’s format responds to by moving artists across the border for events, political situations permitting. The show’s final destination in Dubai reflects more contemporary migration patterns, as the city has become an important hub for a range of subcontinental activities and industries, as well as a prevalent node in the wider region’s art market.

Participating Artists:
Iqbal Geoffrey
Ayesha Jatoi
Mehreen Murtaza
Rabbya Naseer and Hurmat ul Ain
Saira Sheikh
Seher Shah

Projections:

Iqbal Geoffrey
The Written Versus the Art Writ, 2013
PowerPoint slide show, 25 slides, silent; 5 minutes, looped

Seher Shah
Landscape Proposals, 2013
PowerPoint slide show, 42 slides, silent; 3 minutes 35 seconds, looped

Ayesha Jatoi
Images, 2012
PowerPoint slide show, 12 slides, silent; 1 minute, looped

Mehreen Murtaza
This Film Should Be Played Loud, 2012
PowerPoint slide show, 122 slides, silent; 11 minutes 24 seconds, looped

Rabbya Naseer and Hurmat Ul Ain
Reenactment, 2012
PowerPoint slide show, 28 slides, silent; 7 minutes, looped

Saira Sheikh
The moral rights of the Artist, 2012
PowerPoint slide show, 31 slides, silent; 2 minutes 3 seconds, looped

Press:
"Cloud Computing" by Rattanamol Singh Johal for Art India (November 2013)

Printed Material:
230 MB / Exhibition Without Objects pamphlet

Exhibition Events:

Art Histories
Wednesday, 13 February 2013, at 6:30pm
Kavita Singh in conversation with Sadia Shirazi, 60 minutes.
The discussion will address the curatorial premise of the exhibition, digital culture, and artistic and economic networks. Two of the artists from the exhibition, Saira Sheikh and Mehreen Murtaza will also be in attendance for the conversation. 

Cross Connection
Sunday, 10 February 2013, at 6:30pm
Rabbya Naseer & Hurmat Ul Ain
Skype conversation, 120 minutes.
This event occurs during the opening of the exhibition and will allow visitors to eavesdrop or participate in an ongoing Skype discussion between the two artists, for whom this software is a primary tool of communication in their collaborations. Cross Connection will expand, in this instance, to accommodate any Lahori artists in the exhibition who are unable to attend the opening in Delhi (if their visas are not issued).

Deinstall
Sunday, 10 February 2013, at 7pm
Saira Sheikh and Neha Mirza, event, 30 minutes.
Saira Sheikh presents Deinstall with museum guide Neha Mirza during the opening. Sheikh and Mirza will guide visitors through the exhibition and discuss aspects of artists’ oeuvres that touch upon prevalent concerns in the discourse around contemporary art from Pakistan.

Landscape Proposals
Sunday, 10 February 2013, at 8pm
Seher Shah and Kanu Agarwal, discursive event, 60 minutes.
Shah’s PowerPoint will function as a point of departure for this conversation between Seher Shah and architect and curator Kanu Agarwal. Shah's slideshow takes the presentation format as an opportunity to test the productive frictions produced by splicing together recent photographic works from Hinterland Structures (2011) and Mammoth: Aerial landscape proposals (2012). The conversation will focus on autonomous objects in the landscape, as well as the role of drawing within architectural proposals in negotiating scale and erasure.

The Invisible Rain
Sunday, 10 February – 17 February 2013
Iqbal Geoffrey, event, variable duration.
Geoffrey’s event is a generous offer of clouds sent from Lahore that will release invisible rain over Old and New Delhi

7 Minutes of Occlusion
Sunday, 10 February – 17 February 2013
Mehreen Murtaza and AT (Azeem Tahir), sound piece played on Mp3 player, 7 minutes, looped. 
Murtaza shared her slideshow with musician AT (Azeem Tahir) who then created an autonomous sound track as a response to her work.

Event
Sunday, 10 February – 17 February 2013
Ayesha Jatoi, sound piece played on Mp3 player, 4 minutes 54 seconds, looped.
Jatoi created an experimental percussive sound piece consisting of the overlaid sounds of heartbeats.