Draft collectively considers how contemporary art can initiate, invoke and contribute to public debates. A year-long undertaking, the project is anchored in nine cities— Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg, Zurich—and opens with a three-day conference in Mumbai.

Draft encounters and tests public spheres and the consequences of staking claim to them through contemporary art. In doing so, it also chalks out the relationship between the seemingly disparate contexts of these cities that are, in fact, always intensely entangled.

The opening conference—and the project at large—convenes a cross-disciplinary crew of artists, curators, philosophers, anthropologists and the like, who cooperate as collaboratives in wound up urban contexts.

Draft is imagined as a kind of agent provocateur; exploring our reality, such as it is, by hinting at the possibility of what else could be. If no context can ever be truly exhausted, then each exploration is a renewal of the promise of debate.

This longue durée project is, somewhat, bookended by two conferences; the closing conference takes place in Zurich in the summer of 2016. In the critical interim, a range of engagements, including research and workshops, will be realised in each of the cities. Expanding on the conference’s discussions they will set the pace for the site-sensitive artworks that will be realised in early 2016.

Draft is not ‘about’ the city but it mobilises this complicated ecosystem as a springboard for thinking through questions, claims, potentials and problems around an infinite spectrum of contemporary artistic and philosophical concerns and practices.

The project intends to do this in a transnational scenario of home-grown artistic interventions, which question the notion of identity in a world that is nothing if not hybrid. The project intends to do this in the scenario of public spheres, which question extant public spheres in an epoch where dissenting contexts are rife with the rumbling sounds of deep matter, deep memory, deep alienation and what have you.

Draft is a proposal because every context is equal parts potential, problem and provisional.

Partners: Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, and Connecting Spaces Hong Kong – Zurich ZHdK
Supported by: artEDU Foundation and ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Zinnia Ambapardiwala, CAMP, Mumbai

Shaina Anand, CAMP, Mumbai

Giorgio Biancorosso, Hong Kong

Hector Bourges Valles, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Mexico City

Cosmin Costinas, Para Site, Hong Kong

Gitanjali Dang, Mumbai

Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Chto Delat, St. Petersburg

Laura Furlan, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City

Sophie Goltz, Hamburg

Rupali Gupte, Mumbai

Christian Hübler, knowbotiq, Zurich

Rohit Jain, Zurich

Ju Anqi, Beijing

Li Zhenhua, Shanghai / Zurich

Qinyi Lim, Para Site, Hong Kong

Jens Maier-Rothe, Beirut, Cairo

Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mexico City

Jasmina Metwaly, Cairo

Alia Mossallam, Cairo

Riason Naidoo, Cape Town

Nikolay Oleynikov, Chto Delat, St. Petersburg

Jay Pather, Cape Town

Alice Peragine, Hamburg

Richard Pithouse, Grahamstown

Sarah Rifky, Beirut, Cairo

Philip Rizk, Cairo

Karla Rodríguez, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City

Christoph Schäfer, Hamburg

Christoph Schenker, Zurich

Prasad Shetty, Mumbai

Ashok Sukumaran, CAMP, Mumbai

Dmitry Vilensky, Chto Delat, St. Petersburg

Patricio Villareal, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City

Yvonne Wilhelm, knowbotiq, Zurich

Samson Young, Hong Kong

Draft is a project conceived by Gitanjali Dang, Khanabadosh, Mumbai, and Christoph Schenker, Institute for Contemporary Art Research IFCAR, Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK.

E-Mail 

contact[at]draftprojects.info

Artistic directors

Gitanjali Dang
Artistic Director Khanabadosh, Mumbai
Phone: +91 98 20 414851
Website: http://khanabadosh.info

Prof. Christoph Schenker
Head of IFCAR Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich
Phone: +41 43 446 6101
Website: www.ifcar.ch

Project associate

Phalguni Desai, Mumbai
Linda Jensen, Zurich

Office

Silvia Wambululu
IFCAR Institute for Contemporary Art Research
Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK
Pfingstweidstr. 96 / P.O. Box
CH – 8031 Zurich
Phone: +41 43 446 61 01
Email: info.ifcar[at]zhdk.ch

Partners

Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council
Connecting Spaces Hong Kong – Zurich, ZHdK

Supported by

artEDU Foundation
Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation
ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Website design and programming 

Hubertus Design, Zurich
taywa gmbh, Zurich

Image captions and credits

Cairo collaborative: Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk: Out on the Street, 2015, film still. Courtesy: the artists. Cape Town collaborative: Sethembile Msezane, Untitled (Freedom Day), 2014, Courtesy: the artist. Hamburg collaborative: Alice Peragine, Application Operation, 2014, site-specific performance at Galerie Genscher Park Hamburg. Courtesy: the artist. Photograph: Marcel Peragine. Hong Kong collaborative: Samson Young, Liquid Borders, 2012 – 2014, image documentation. Courtesy: the artist. Photograph: Vanessa Law. Mexico City collaborative: Teatro Ojo, NO?!, 2008, image documentation of first action: Each generation wants its own 1968, Zocalo Square of Mexico City. Interventions and creation of image-actions in public spaces in Mexico City, forty years after the 1968 Student Movement. Courtesy: the artists. Mumbai collaborative: CAMP, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, 2013, video still. Courtesy: the artists. Shanghai collaborative: Ju Anqi, There's a Strong Wind in Beijing, 1999, film still. Courtesy: the artist. St Petersburg collaborative: School for Engaged Art, Chto Delat, Atlas is Tired, 2014, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artists. Photograph: Vadim Lurie. Zurich collaborative: knowbotiq, MacGhillie_just a void, 2010. Courtesy: the artists. Photograph: Christoph Oeschger.