Curating for Culture

Karnataka’s diverse cultural landscapes are a home to a wide-range of historic sites, ecological assets, cultural experiences and community collections. However, only a few of them have been recognised and very many are difficult to access even today by people from all walks of life. The state of heritage management in the many urban or regional centers thus remains contested under the agendas of development and growth. This call for participation is rooted in the idea of action for change, wherein the participants are urged to think about ways in which local residents can get involved, discussions can be initiated with bureaucrats, various professionals can be engaged and sustainable ways of preservation can be sought out for celebrating the rich heritage of Karnataka.

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Parallel efforts concerned with material, aesthetic, and historical meaning-making include the preservation practices of the Dhaka Urban Study Group and Bombaywall Historical Works; the transnational digital Asia Art Archive: the archiving, curatorial and library science initiatives of Jackfruit Research and Design and Curating for Culture; and the ephemeral festivals aiming to capture the creative gestalt, from Lahore to Dhaka to Panaji. These endeavors, to name only a few, have shaped and opened the architectural archive in order to grow South Asian narratives of the modern.

- Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Introduction: Architecture as a Form of Knowledge, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 40, Number 3, December 2020, pp. 495-506 (Article). Published by Duke University Press.