Member-only story
In the shadow of the pandemic, locked down with travels only via the internet’s warrens of pixelated glitches, so much conversation is about imagining a future marked by lodestones from the past. Catching up with friends and artists online hasn’t yet matched that kopi aroma we were supposed to share by now in Yogyakarta and Kuala Lumpur, nevermind the fine brew found here in Sydney.
Europe as an idea has been real for us, partly because Farid from Indonesia’s art collective RuangRupa and Khaled the Arab-Danish curator are wondering how they’re marking progress with staging documenta15 and art documentation respectively. And partly because we’ve grown our own modernist ideals in these post-colonial societies from a once universal, European-derived human rights idea, where there was room for individual liberties in inclusive societies that celebrated diversity, where there was the rule of law rather than rule by law. For us,where to be modern was to savour the freedom of expression, and freedom from racism, bigotry and the banal was not an abstraction but modernism writ large.
Khaled and I talk today like we did in person 15 years ago, when we met at a Danish festival that celebrated the arts and culture of the Arab world. Back then, I was writing about the astonishing work of Arab artists Emily Jacir, Sharif Waked and Lara Baladi, so hot with humanity and warm in universal embrace for the wintry…
