I had the chance, yesterday, while wandering across the artworks, to assist to a discussion about the situation of Asian arts.
The partners of dialogue - held in English - were Anupam Poddar, New Delhi-based collector and Founding Director of Devi Art Foundation (right in the picture below) and Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York. The background was the exhibition
Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India at the Deutsche Guggenheim.
The focus on Asian - geographical terms covering, from the bureaucratic point of view of the museum' bureaucracies: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran - is on the rise for a long time already. Private and public collectors, all over the world, are interested to gather, systematically or not, piece of work from these areas. But, as Anupam Poddar explained, at the regional level, the artistic dialogue is not easy at all, as various visa and political restrictions are diminishing and even blocking the purposive generosity of the intellectual dialogue. The acquisition, by an Indian collector, of an artwork from Pakistan, might be an extremely nervous and time consuming adventure. Hence, the focus on photography and video art, even, for this part of the world, the tradition of a non-imagistic history of arts, following the religious environment, is more representative. I would be interested, for example, to watch a video made by an Iranian artist, but I would be more keen to see the current trend in the traditional Persian painting.
From the local point of view, the scarce state resources must be the another problem for those interested to share the local artistic heritage. As long as the public resources for cultural initiatives are lacking, the museums cannot enrich their collections, and there are serious gaps in keeping the pace with the very diverse artistic live. For example, in the case of India, the acquisitions stopped eight years ago and the country was not able to have its own Pavilion at the Venice Biennial this year. In this case, the private galleries and collectors are playing a vital role in supporting the artists.
Based on a long family tradition, Anupam Poddar made public his mother collection - of more than 7.000 artworks - in 2008. In the same time, he encouraged various programs of creating skillful and professional curators and arts education in schools. A first step of a different kind of philanthropy, predominantly focused by now in exclusively social projects.
