Rahaab Allana on the ASAP App

1. For what program were the funds given? Who were the beneficiaries?

The funding was for making ASAP | art, South Asia’s first editorially driven application exploring lens-based art and media with a focus on South Asia. With over 500 posts on the platform, posts continue to be shared four times a week (it started out as one post a day). The posts themselves have an art-historical thrust, focusing extendedly on contemporary exhibitionary practices, seminars, publications, artist portfolios, grants as well as other ongoing-and-past events. The ASAP team hoped to create public engagement on the interdisciplinary nature and socio-political dimensions of visual cultures in the region. The app has been freely downloadable since early 2021, and the website now hosts an archive of all the posts on the platform.

The beneficiaries of the funding were the editor, assistant editor, copy editor, authors, and social media manager. There are more than ten authors submitting articles for the App. The public engagement, however, was for a public interested in the arts, but there was a deeper focus on building a readership also through pedagogical institutions and other educational fora.

2. What was the direct impact of the program on the attendees / beneficiaries in the short term?

Through both online forma, our aim was to globalize South Asian (arts) representation by consolidating resident / diasporic community perspectives and bringing South Asian departments into conversation, in order to introspect around the unstable politics of curating / writing regional visual histories. The commissioned texts attempted to recalibrate the politically bound arena of South Asia into creative socio-cultural formations and links, further investigation of cultural histories in our present.

A new mapping of practitioner-led groups – such as the Confluence Collective (India) or even the Drum Archive (South Africa) question where / who is South Asia/n?, so as to develop themes and testimonies, which chart socio-cultural shifts that are critical to re-imagining regional visual chronologies. With South Asian communities and arts objects (historical and contemporary) spread across the world in cultural centers – museums etc – ASAP was keen to make visible a South Asia beyond its borders.

Our short-term interest was in finding voices to re-articulate the consideration of belonging / affiliation through arts production; and in generating multicultural trajectories to understand how pluralist strategies require a fostering of new media modes as well as historical sensitivity.

As our thematics are largely with those issues that affect and influence civil society and revive elided / non-mainstream considerations in arts practice, the impact was geared towards inviting new college audiences, peer groups and developing a more inclusive approach to the arts so that the institutions we affiliate with can also enhance / alter and discuss their own positions. Our target audience has been from young adults involved in the humanities to a more expanded professional viewership who are distinctly interested in contemporary media and its history.

3. What do you believe the impact could be in the long term?

What we hoped to impact long-term with this initiative was how audiences’ see/read, learn and imagine representations of their cultural specificity. So much is edited out, stereotyped, considered subsidiary or simply shelved in our conversations / means or modes of expression while understanding ‘how’ and ‘where’ we belong. Given the ubiquity of image / lens-based culture today, we wanted to volunteer more ‘meta-data’ in the consideration of ‘where’ and ‘what’ South Asia is.

To create greater awareness and porosity in the understanding of ‘location’ as a key variable in practice. The future impact therefore may be to the process / means of regional arts data collection / management, its parameters and modes of circulation, and devising fresh methodologies for accessing, acknowledging and sharing cultural repositories, at institutional and para-institutional levels.

Our objective is broadly in capacity-building as well as awareness creation ‘in’ and ‘through’ image-production, but also raising issues around ethical parameters of engagement when one is in the field, engaging with aspects of gender-sensitivity, minority-issues, and articulating / visualizing its facets. The future purpose is a public-enhancing outreach for critical thinking about how institutions are transforming from classic centers of study to more dynamic sites of visual assertion, ideology, entertainment, and social history.

4. Do you see the potential for a ripple-effect in terms of impact on the broader community? Who else might benefit and how?

Our outcome is to question whether institutions and community perspectives are able to effectively provide a revisionist counter-structure to the present system of education and exhibitions of the South Asian region. We ask, will the coordinates – web, archive, contemporary practice, and museum – by which lens-based and other visual arts territory can be mapped and analyzed continue to evolve past their conventional documentary roles, and meld their trajectories into the furtherance of a more inclusive sub-continental image discourse? Over the last (almost) three years, ASAP, through its authors and subject selections across South Asia – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka – has tried to speak openly about notions of art and citizenship. But we need to do more to build a trans-national audience. Its impact and effect will be gauged through further continuing and consolidating institutional links.

5. How does the funding benefit your organization?

The funding has been both for content enhancement and infrastructure development. ASAP is consciously based on practices, technologies, curating and circulations of visual content. It seeks to contemplate image-making in the present and the predicament of a generation most influenced by the digital medium. As media transforms and becomes part of arts, anthropology, political science and social history departments in a more robust way; and as private and public institutions deploy images for raising consciousness, the funding has been to get younger authors to focus on secular cultures by traversing multiple chronologies (past, present, and future); multiple cartographies (inhabited / uninhabited spaces, terrains, built forms); multiple discourses (aesthetic, methodological, existential, symbolic); and multiple subjectivities (social, singular, hybrid).

The funding also went towards media sensitivity. As image-making has effortlessly transitioned into the contemporary “post-digital” cyber-moment that has drastically altered our concepts of territoriality itself, even the most minimal, casual scrutiny will expose overt and covert control mechanisms, internal legislation, patterns of consensus and coercion, policing, non-accountability, impunity, hegemony, discrimination and informal / formal censorship. The articles that were funded were meant to generate sensitive and strategic ways of managing a community-building agenda.

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