Initiated by Khanabadosh (Mumbai) and Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts, Draft considers contemporary art that produces, provokes and contributes to public debates. The undertaking is anchored in nine cross-disciplinary collaboratives in Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Mexico City, St. Petersburg and Zurich.
Draft was kick-started in June 2015 with a three-day conference in Mumbai and the Zurich conference will take place in July 2016. In the critical year-long interim, a range of engagements, including research and workshops, have been realised in each city. These convergences have set the pace for site-sensitive artworks that are currently taking shape.
The film tells the story of a man who carries a portable drill, clandestinely destroying the public spaces of the megalopolis he lives in. A snapshot of post-industrial China, it explores the uneasiness and inequalities caused by speedy urbanisation and technologisation.
Mossallam explores 19th century Alexandria as a hub for peripheral imaginaries, a place where Italian anarchists, Syrian artists and Egyptian workers came together to articulate new world-views and organise against existing ones. She seeks to revive these critical stances by renegotiating and restaging the surviving cultural artefacts through a workshop, performances and other public interventions.
The project aims to understand the so-called refugee crisis as a crisis of urban living. To that end, a parade—in collaboration with different political and cultural auteurs—will be organised in Hamburg in response to the ongoing discussions on abandoned properties and new housing blocks for refugees.
This project questions the tradition of Houses of Culture in the former Soviet Union. What can we learn from them and how can we imagine a new model? Rosa's House of Culture is about constructing counter-publics at a time of the closure of publicness.
Switzerland's commodity business is caught up in colonial and neoliberal economies, but public debate on such involvement is absent. With knowbotiq's performative intervention, the project seeks to understand and reveal aesthetic and affective processes bound up with commodity trade and the public culture accompanying those processes.
(1) Roger Anis, An Egyptian Courtroom, 2015 (Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, On Trials, ongoing–2017).
(2) knowbotiq, Access – The Obsession of the Planter, 2016.
(3) Ju Anqi, Drill Man, 2016.
(4) Chto Delat, Rosa's House of Culture, 2016.
(5) Alice Peragine, Soft Core, 2016.
(6) CAMP, Khanabadosh, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty, R and R, 2016.
(7) Rise of the Anti-monument for the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa.
(8) Samson Young, Pastoral Music (But It Is Entirely Hollow), 2015. Photo: Dennis Man Wing Leung.
(9) Abu Nadarra Zarqa, publication, 1882 (Alia Mossallam, Elsewhere–Struggles Across the Sea, 2016).
(10) Sethembile Msezane, Youth Day (detail), 2014.