FEATURES

Current Affairs
An Epidemic of Archive Fever
By HG Masters

Toward the end of the third and final day of the Sharjah Art Foundation-organized March Meeting (March 13–16), Sebastian Lütgert of the online film and video database Pad.ma cautioned: “It is possible that 2010 will be remembered as the year of the archive. And that is fabulous but also terrible, because then next year everyone will have decided to think about something else.” [more]

Personal History
Sarnath Banerje: Wondrous Capers
By Hemant Sareen

Sarnath Banerjee came to wide recognition in 2004 with the release in India and France of his first graphic novel, Corridor. This work was the product of a fellowship awarded by the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago to, as he put it then, “research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities.” Though the book’s publishers celebrate Corridor as India’s first graphic novel, Banerjee willingly passes that accolade to compatriot Orijit Sen’s long out-of-print River of Stories (1994). Nevertheless, it was Corridor that introduced the Indian publishing industry to the graphic novel. A modest but growing list of Indian titles have since appeared, two of which were released by Phantomville, a publishing house specializing in graphic novels that Banerjee co-founded in 2002 with business partner Anindya Roy—an enterprise that won him the British Council’s Best Young Publisher Award in 2008. [more]

On Location
Setouchi Inland Sea
By Sophie Richard

In the past two decades, a growing number of striking museums and intimate site-specific installations have been established on Naoshima and other small islands in Japan’s scenic Seto Inland Sea. Located far from the center of contemporary art activity in Tokyo, between the western cities of Setouchi and Takamatsu, these seven islands can only be reached via local trains and ferries. Although they are remote and home to small fishing communities, they attract a growing number of visitors in search of a relaxed and intimate experience of Japan’s visual culture—370,000 people in 2009. [more]

Siah Armajani: Return to Exile
By Murtaza Vali

Siah Armajani’s most recent work, Murder in Tehran (2009), shown at New York’s Max Protetch Gallery late last year, is a memorial to the victims of the violent crackdowns on the popular mass protests against the reelection of Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last June. Looming large within the gallery’s small project space, the 11-foot-tall rectangular structure consists of a black wooden frame and walls of alternating horizontal bands of black and clear glass. A heavy curtain inside the frame conceals most of the interior space; visible in the exposed base is a bloody cleaver and white casts of human limbs, partially buried in gravel. And leaning over a balcony at the top is a headless effigy with its arms raised. Dressed in black and smeared with red paint, it recalls Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman shot by a plainclothes Basij security officer one week after the election; with her death caught on video, she emerged as the face of the protests. Finally, emblazoned on the structure’s walls, in green, the opposition movement’s color, is a foreboding verse by the dissident Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000)—imprisoned both under the Shah and in the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution—that warns of state violence. [more]