The Remains of the Day: Re-tracing Archival Art through Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim

Abstract

The history of modern South Asian art has been fast-moving, but art that is about modern South Asian history is still in its infancy. While the art of the post-Independence era continues to wrest with the legacies of colonisation, fractured nationhood, majoritarian politics, and weakening secular legacies, there is a strain of this art preoccupied with the historical gaze. In relation to works of art by Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim, the aesthetics of representing archives and archiving can be examined in order to explore the politics of nationalism and historical change, as well as the global neoliberal economies of institutional archiving practices. The tendency to look back constantly over the region's past raises questions about whom these artistic interventions address and the archival logics at work within this distinctive field of contemporary art.

Keywords:

• archive
• South Asia
• Dayanita Singh
• Ali Kazim
• visual art
• time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).