This panel, titled Art and the Civic Imagination, features Zarina Bhimji (artist), Geeta Kapur (art critic, curator) and Ming Tiampo (Professor, Art History, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University and Co-Director, Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis). The session considers civic imagination as civic engagement, which March Meeting has a long history of tackling through its many relevant subjects and themes. The panelists discuss new social and political practices as well as artistic visions aimed at achieving a ‘better society’. As ideas of what comprises a ‘better society’ can vary widely, speakers also comment on art and curating as spaces for imagining what such a society might look like. The talk is moderated by Salah M. Hassan (Director, The Africa Institute, Sharjah and Goldwin Smith Professor, Cornell University).
Bhimji, Zarina
Through the diverse mediums of photography, film and installation, Zarina Bhimji’s practice engages with questions of institutional power and vulnerability, universality and intimacy.
Kapur, Geeta
Geeta Kapur’s work engages with issues related to national and postcolonial paradigms, heterodox modernisms, critical contemporaneity and the curatorial positioning of artworks.
Tiampo, Ming
Ming Tiampo is a curator, researcher and writer whose work engages with transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for understanding and reconfiguring the global norms.
Hassan, Salah M.
Art historian, critic and curator Salah M. Hassan is Director of The Africa Institute, Sharjah, and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Africana Studies and the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University.