[Sarai Newsletter] Opening :: Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition

[The Sarai Programme]

Sarai Reader 09
18 August 2012 – 16 April 2013

Curated by Raqs Media Collective

A collaboration between Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, and Sarai-Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

Opening: Saturday, August 18, 6:30 PM

Devi Art Foundation, Sirpur House, Plot No. 39, Sector 44, Gurgaon 122033,India

www.sarai.net

Sarai Reader 09 is a nine month exhibition that will unfold as a process
generative of visions, concepts, speculations and projections which, in turn,
make room for heresy, for new modalities of being, for exchanges, relays and
interferences. The exhibition will posit a situation of shifting co
inhabitation in a space by many agents and actors, in diverse, multiple,
conjoined and contradictory ways. It intends to investigate the nature of the
sensation of thinking, and its resonating extensions into the myriad worlds
that we inhabit and invent. 

Sarai Reader 09 will gather works incrementally over the nine months. Artists,
researchers, scholars, curators, critics, filmmakers, writers,
performers,dancers, musicians, magicians, activists, scientists,
photographers,archivists, architects, poets, journalists, and more, are invited
to make proposals that can be timed for specific durations. The exhibition space
will keep transforming. 

Sarai Reader 09 opens at 6:30 PM on 18 August 2012, with: 

Architectural interventions in the space of Devi Art Foundation, with Sayantan
Maitra 'Boka' and Zuleikha Chaudhari. These interventions are to create an
“empty space”, and so, to open it to multiple readings and transformations
by participating artists over the nine months of the exhibition.

A proposal room, where proposals by artists for works in the exhibition,invited
through an open call, will be available for reading. At the opening, there will
be proposals by 30 artists for works that will commence after the opening.
These will grow to over 100 proposals over the nine months.

A 1:1 architectural prototype (3x6x9 m) of the Cybermohalla Hub, by Nikolaus
Hirsch and Michel Müller, in collaboration with Cybermohalla Ensemble, Sarai
CSDS, Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education; with Engelessman Peters
Engineers, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Daniel Dolder, Ana Farfan,
Snehal Gada, Sayantan Maitra ‘Boka’, Steffen Sendelbach and Omar Siddique.
The question of infrastructures for creative and intellectual life emerged in
2006 in Cybermohalla, a dense conversational milieu that has formed in Delhi
over a decade (2001 onwards), and a project of Sarai-CSDS and Ankur. In 2007,
architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller were invited into this
conversation. A design of the Hub was proposed by them through conversations
with Cybermohalla, and the first prototype was created in “The Rest of
Now”, part of Manifesta 7, co-curated by Raqs Media Collective, Bolzano,
2008. It was then hosted by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (T-BA 21),
Vienna, for one year. In 2011, a prototype of the Hub was made at the Louisiana
Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, as part of 'Living Frontiers of Architecture
III-IV'. Sarai Reader 09 brings the most ambitious iteration of the Hub to
Delhi. 

Release of the book ‘Cybermohalla Hub’, edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and
Shveta Sarda (Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, and Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2012). This book
is a reflection on urbanism, architecture, writing and time by Cybermohalla
Ensemble and Nikolaus Hirsch/Michel Müller, with contributions by Hu Fang,
Naeem Mohaiemen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jacques Rancière, Raqs Media Collective,
Superflex, Graham Harwood, Ivana Franke, Amitabh Kumar, Aman Sethi, Bhrigupati
Singh, Can Altay, Nina Montman, Solomon Benjamin, Martand Khosla, Rana
Dasgupta, Sharmistha Mohanty, Christoph Schäfer, Prasad Shetty, Ravi Sundaram,
Rupali Gupte, Daniela Zyman, Lawrence Liang, Zak Kyes, Vahni Capildeo, Matthew
Fuller, Vivek Narayanan, Mathias Görlich, Nico Docx, Helena Sidiropoulos and
Michel van Beirendonck. 

Release of the book ‘P.T.O’, an appreciation of the listening, walking,
reading, interviewing, collecting, questioning, mapping, recording, drawing,
image-making and writing done by the hundreds of Independent Fellows associated
with Sarai over the last decade. The works by the Fellows have been publicly
archived through postings in the Sarai Reader-List and in the Sarai
archive(in-house at Sarai-CSDS). P.T.O. is an edited, highlighted and
re-sequenced version of these works, to bring alive the various dimensions and
modalities of thinking and making. Edited by Shveta Sarda (Sarai-CSDS, 2012)

A talk by the curators, Raqs Media Collective, introducing the exhibition. 

An evening of experimental sounds and electro-acoustic music featuring Ish
Shehrawat (edgeCut | diFfuSed beats | Sound Reasons), Andi Teichmann (Teichmann
Brothers), Brian Citro and Ignat Karmalito.

Release of ‘The diFfuSed beats (diF) Audio CD’, synthesised out of sounds,
noises and field recordings from New Delhi, Munich, Zurich and around the world
(Sound Reason banner). diFfuSed beats is the duo comprising Konrad Bayer and Ish
Shehrawat as they engage with sound with both philosophical and de constructive
aesthetics. 

The exhibition will be punctuated through “episodes” – points of focus
and dispersal – where processes that have been undertaken by artists will
gather impetus and open out across concentrated moments of public attention.
Each episode will be a day-long public event, with workshops, performances,
talks, discussions, special screenings and music.

Episode One: 13th October, 2012
Episode Two: 15th December, 2012
Episode Three: 3rd February, 2013

The exhibition takes its name from the Sarai Reader book series, which have
been widely recognised as a site of critical and creative thinking. The making
of the book ‘Sarai Reader 09 (Projections)’, will accompany the exhibition.

Open Call for proposals for the exhibition: 
http://www.sarai.net/practices/media-forms/sarai-reader-09-exb

Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition is supported by The Royal Norwegian Embassy,
New Delhi.

The prototype of the Cybermohalla Hub for Sarai Reader 09 is supported by
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.

Cybermohalla Hub (book) is supported by Graham Foundation (Chicago), HIVOS
(Bangalore), and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen).

The sound performance for the opening is supported by Max Mueller Bhavan
(Goethe Institut), New Delhi. ‘The diFfuSed beats (diF) Audio CD’ is
supported by Goethe Institut, Pro-Helvetia and Sarai-CSDS.