Emplacing and Excavating the City: Art, Ecology, and Public Space in New Delhi
Transcultural Studies 2015.1 75 Emplacing and Excavating the City: Art, Ecology, and Public Space in New Delhi Christiane Brosius, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Every claim on public space is a claim on the public imagination. It is a response to the questions: What can we imagine together?… Are we, in fact, a collective; is the collective a site for the testing of alternatives, or a ground for mobilising conformity? (Adajania 2008) Introduction Contemporary art production can facilitate the study of a city’s urban fabric, its societal change, and its cultural meaning production; this is particularly the case when examining exhibition practices and questions of how, why, when, where, and by whom artworks came to be emplaced and connected to certain themes and concepts.* Emplacement here refers to the process of constructing space for certain events or activities that involve sensory and affective aspects (Burrell and Dale 2014, 685). Emplacing art thus concerns a particular and temporary articulation of and in space within a relational set of connections (rather than binaries). In South Asia, where contemporary “fine art”1 is still largely confined to enclosed spaces like the museum or the gallery, which seek to cultivate a “learned” and experienced audience, the idea of conceptualising art for and in rapidly expanding and changing cities like Delhi challenges our notions of place, publicness, and urban development. The particular case discussed here, the public art festival, promises—and sets out—to explore an alternative vision of the city, alternative aspirations towards “belonging to and participating in” it.2 Nancy Adajania’s question “What can we imagine together” indirectly addresses which repositories and languages are available and can be used for such a joint effort, and who should be included in the undertaking.
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