Emerging Discourse: Part I, Multiple and Overlapping Contemplations from the Diaspora

Press Release

New York, June 3, 2008--- Bodhi Art is pleased to present Emerging Discourse, a two-part exhibition curated by Shaheen Merali. Merali articulates that it may seem that recent intellectual history has been using the post-structural as a way to understand post-colonialism. In constituting the role of representations and the social constructions of reality, the artists and musicians in this exhibition have questioned the notion of modernity’s obsession with progress. The exhibition is curated unhegemonically, to provide a cultural forum, a comparative and contemporaneous mapping of multiculturality.

This exhibition Emerging Discourse Part I recognises these voices that have demanded the return of the postcolonial in cultural production. In the words of the curator, “The use of anti-fascist and de-historical consciousness and the questioning of pedagogic European culture are all assembled in this grouping of nine artists’ works. If the political only arises at times of conflict, then these repressed statements are antagonistic voices, thereby helping us to shift the role of culture towards an intellectual transformation of changing, and sometimes even polysemic, signifiers.”  

If, as Bhabha has cited – the life of memory exceeds the historic event by keeping alive the traces of images and words, then these collected works are splinters, gathered as an emerging discourse, encrusted and tinged by the barbaric times and values of mimesis.