An online conversation organised in conjunction with Mobile Library: Nepal. Register: http://bit.ly/3djQftO Inter-Archives Conversations is a platform initiated by Asia Art Archive in India in conjunction with partnering institutions to facilitate interactions between art and cultural archives in the South Asia region. By engaging organisations, institutions, and individuals, this series explores forms, infrastructures, and the instituting of archives in the region, ensuring that less visible and more diverse histories, in particular those neglected by state institutions, are documented and made accessible to publics. Organised in conjunction with Mobile Library: Nepal, the first set of programmes are hosted in collaboration with university archives, art and photography archives, libraries, and documentation centres in Nepal. These will take Nepal as a point of departure and South Asia as the context of discussion, with case studies from within and beyond South Asia. Developed in collaboration with School of Arts, Department of Art & Design, Kathmandu University (KU Art+Design), the first conversation focuses on the circulation of personal art archives in the public domain. It explores how archiving processes have been embedded into university programmes and curricula, digitised materials made accessible for public platforms, and archives activated through artistic and curatorial interventions. Roshan Mishra and Sujan Chitrakar (Kathmandu, Nepal), art educators that have been formative in laying the foundation for a formal archive of modern and contemporary art at Kathmandu University, discuss the processes of training students in archiving. Artist and art historian Samina Iqbal (Lahore, Pakistan) presents the research and digitisation processes she conducted with the personal archive of the Lahore-based artist and educator Salima Hashmi at AAA. Artist Sumon Wahed (Dhaka, Bangladesh) talks about his artistic and curatorial research with the archive of Zainul Abedin, an artist and educator from Bangladesh. This session expands on the processes that underlie artistic and scholarly investigations of personal archives—initiation, organisation, thinking about gaps, and locating the materials in broader histories. The topics of these conversations resonate with the queries and vision of Roshan Mishra, Sujan Chitrakar, and their colleagues at KU Art+Design, who are working to establish an archive centre to house the ever-expanding materials, and to develop a digital portal as a resource for the university, the general public, and researchers. The paucity of documentation and teaching materials on visual arts from Nepal during the BFA classes compelled the department to rethink their pedagogical approaches. Initially, the students were encouraged to visit senior Nepali artists’ studios for in-person interviews, and to collect dossiers and related documents to share with their peers. Gradually, the process became a part of the curriculum and their dissertations during their final semesters. This event is part of Mobile Library: Nepal, supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.
