< All Programmes
ARThink South Asia 2019
ARThinkSouthAsia is a management, policy, and research programme in the arts and culture sector. Initiated in 2010, the programme is dedicated to founding and supporting a cadre of arts managers committed to the cause of capacity building in the South Asian region, encompassing Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
About this edition
The tenth edition of ARThinkSouthAsia brought together fifteen cultural practitioners and arts managers from Mumbai, Kolkata, Kochi, Chennai, Sikkim, Gunvanthe, and Bengaluru in India, Dhaka and Rajshahi in Bangladesh, Kabul and Bamiyan in Afghanistan, Kathmandu in Nepal, Tehran in Iran, and Karachi in Pakistan. In accordance with the programme’s overarching vision that is geared towards capacity-building, these Fellows were trained by experts in the essential managerial skills of fundraising, digital marketing, human resources, and strategic planning. This coming together of participants from a wide array of socio-cultural milieux resulted in a rewarding coalescence of various creative and professional interests that is very much in alignment with the goals of ATSA as an inclusive intervention in the socio-political ethos of South Asian arts and culture. A few of the projects that have been taken up by the 2019-20 Fellows, in the capacity of founders, directors, or coordinators, are: the music festival Dhaka International FolkFest that is hailed as the biggest in South Asia; the flourishing Chennai Photo Biennale; the Bamiyan Cultural Centre that has established itself as an anchor for the arts within provincial Afghanistan; the pioneering collective Bangladesh Photographers that aims to provide a wider platform to practitioners in the country; the emancipatory Masculinity Project that used photo-narratives to encourage conversations around masculinity and its (dis)contents in Bangladesh; the bi-monthly magazine ARTEM that covers arts and culture stories in India’s north east; the Women of the World Festival in Karachi that celebrates the rendering of women’s narratives in creative practice; the not-for-profit CCD Bangladesh that campaigns for a free press in Bangladesh; the multi-faceted not-for-profit space Walkin Studios in Bengaluru that functions as a studio and a residency space for artists working with new media, etc.
This event is part of ARThinkSouthAsia
