Arnika Ahldag
Arnika Ahldag is the associate curator at the Museum of Art and Photography in Bangalore. As an art historian, she investigates the representation of labor in Indian contemporary art. She co-founded the Feminist Syllabus, which is part of the workshop series Pact of Silence − How to break it?, a programme for intersectional feminist discourses in the arts. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Connected Material
Beyond the objects in any given archive is a myriad of people, encounters and exchanges. The desire to locate the human element beneath archives is challenged by new technology. As part of ‘Life Stories and Archives’, we began a virtual ‘common archive’. Our collaborative thread addresses pertinent questions arising from shared interests in how individual’s origins, biases, networks and political struggles fuel the need to collect.
Delving into the notion of the desktop as an archival site and methodology, this contribution presents two divergent outputs resulting from collaboration between the participants and co-conveners of the Academy workshop “Desktop Shortcuts”: an in-development simplified database of hyperlinks, and a poetic game of disorder.
A conversation about the entanglement of biographies and archives under the impressions of current social and political ruptures.