MPhil/PhD Advanced Practices

I believe my association with the Advanced Practices (Curatorial/ Knowledge) programme has significantly contributed to my ability to approach curatorial challenges with a new framework informed by global intercultural interaction.

The first appeal of the Advanced Practices (Curatorial/ Knowledge) PhD programme at Goldsmiths College, for someone engaged in full-time teaching, as I am at the Visva Bharati University (Santiniketan, India), is its unique flexibility that allows working professionals to simultaneously pursue their study. Furthermore, the dialogic design and the interdisciplinary direction of the programme, opens up multiple possibilities in the fields of curation and critical thought, for a researcher-practitioner. This approach to curating, which lays equal stress on the visual and the conceptual, helped to strengthen my research ideas around ‘Borderlands’, an area of curatorial engagement I thought significant in the contemporary context, but least attended to in 2007, when I started my PhD.

The orientation of the programme also encouraged me to approach other projects actively during the tenure of the PhD study, as opportunities to work out curatorial ideas generated in the process. The Santhal Family exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art (MuHKA) in Antwerp, Belgium (2007-08), was one such, where I was co-curator. Conceptualised around a particular site-specific sculpture located in Santiniketan, a past context of migration was revisited in this exhibition, with a new critical, transnational and cross-cultural focus. In 2014, I worked in the Tagore Pedagogy and Modernity project, which straddled three locations- Santiniketan (India), INIVA (London) and NGBK (Berlin), and approached the Tagorean idea of education from multiple points of view and from the recipients’ perspectives. I collaboratively developed the Black House Project, around the Black House building in Santiniketan, in 2015. This was an interdisciplinary project involving architecture and visual practices, which attempted to contemporise an indigenous, early twentieth-century experiment in architecture, through public interactivity. Currently, I am engaged as official Indian researcher for the forthcoming Bauhaus100 project, and am also working as a curatorial collaborator, connecting the pedagogic aspects of Rabindranath Tagore’s educational programme for a project by Valand Academy, Sweden. I believe my association with the Advanced Practices (Curatorial/ Knowledge) programme has significantly contributed to my ability to approach curatorial challenges with a new framework informed by global intercultural interaction.

Image: Project Borderland – A workshop scene from Assam, 2012

The think-tank structure makes us learn from each other as much as learning from the programme.

The think-tank structure makes us learn from each other as much as learning from the programme. The environment encourages the act of thinking beyond disciplines and shapes my professional practice as a curator.

My time and studies with Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge) has transformed my life. It allowed me to develop a situated vocabulary as well as practice regarding the conflict in the Middle East and the Palestinian struggle from lived experiences, unfinished histories, and entangled modernities and friendships.

The Advanced Practices Program began initially as Curatorial/Knowledge. When I joined, it felt more like a think-tank of brilliant people who had been already working internationally in art institutions and self-organised spaces while teaching in a University of Arts and Design, yet, felt an unease and dissatisfaction with the established norms including one's own limits to practice a radically different approach. Instead of joining a classical curatorial-studies program, therefore, I was fully compelled by the Goldsmith visual culture' program that would allow me to unlearn and to challenge modernist-imperial principles of exhibition making, exhibition architecture, art-making, collaborations and making knowledge public in the light of a migratory post-1989 world in permanent crisis.

For me, the futuristic horizon of Advanced Practices is the focus on knowledge as a political, trans-cultural, difficult, contemporary, emancipatory and social process. Knowledge is not a subject to master but a condition to develop, to process, to unlearn and to share with, for example, my fellow students from all over the world. Small-scale seminars or lectures with global intellectuals such as Ariella Azoulay, Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher, Griselda Pollock, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Eyal Weizman, and many more, made me feel to be part of a community to learn from. Doing my PhD with that Program has prepared me more than I could have ever expected to help my career as an international curator, theorist, writer, as a woman and currently professor to grow organically, confidentially and collaboratively.

Generally speaking, my time and studies with Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge) has transformed my life. It allowed me to develop a situated vocabulary as well as practice regarding the conflict in the Middle East and the Palestinian struggle from lived experiences, unfinished histories, and entangled modernities and friendships, not by studying it in an academic-normative manner but by studying it as a practice of thinking and living with places, moments, encounters and friends in Ramallah or Beirut.

In 2019, I was awarded with a four-year research grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS) for Decolonizing Socialism: Entangled Internationalism. The grant allows me to built a team at HEAD GEneva in collaboration with the University of Basel, the VanAbbe Museum, and HKW Berlin for realising a trans-disciplinary, academic as well as curatorial process.