Tentative Collective

04/12/2017

A three-year project celebrates art from the north of England and South Asia

19/10/2017

For Cosmopolis #1, our video project dealt with these concerns and concepts.

"Shershah and Other Stories"

Here are a series of intimate insights, serially revealing transitioning economies in an aspiring city on the Indian Ocean. These videos made in Karachi collectively attempt to create a portraiture that does not describe totalities, but allows a multifaceted immersion into spaces typically flattened by the screen. A portraiture that points to global shifts in production by engaging in the intimately local rhythms of work, the desires for work, and the desires for visibility and opacity. A portraiture as a resistance to narratives of catastrophe in the critique of the contemporary age. A portraiture that creates a series of nonlinear windows into present moments of urban life, collaging together questions regarding the valuable and the wasted.

We work with an aspiring (unpublished) poet, a family of cap makers, a carpet making business in the process of being sold, and an investor/ middleman who deals in metal scrap in the vast junkyards/ warehouses of Shershah, Karachi.

17/10/2017

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/145713/cosmopolis-1-collective-intelligence/

Cosmopolis #1: Collective Intelligence // October 18–December 18, 2017

16/10/2017

Cosmopolis #1 will be open to the public on Wednesday, October 18, during the normal Centre Pompidou hours (11am-9pm). There will be talks from 7pm that day, including a conversation with Ravi Sundaram that we will be a part of.

The official opening event will then take place on Thursday, October 19, from 6pm to 9pm. From 7:45-9 pm, the evening will feature a conversation moderated by Kader Attia with some of the artists and collectives whose work is featured in the show.

Centre Pompidou's press release and detailed program can be downloaded via these links:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz7dRh3PSWWnaXpteWVVWTdXZFU

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz7dRh3PSWWnanJCMllBUk1vZkE

14/10/2017

We are really excited to present a new video project at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, opening next week!

Our multi channel installation titled, "Shershah and Other Stories", is a close reading of spaces of work and value that are changing in Karachi - often becoming wasted or redundant under pressures of economic liberalization and global progress.

The project is part of Cosmopolis #1: Collective Intelligence, gathering alternative collective practices from around the world.
Show opens October 18, 2017

We are thrilled to have been included in this list of fantastic artists:

Arquitectura Expandida (Colombia)
Art Labor (Vietnam)
Chimurenga (South Africa)
Chto Delat (Russia)
Polit-Sheer-Form-Office (China)
Council (France)
Foundland Collective (Netherlands/Egypt)
Iconoclasistas (Argentina)
Invisible Borders (Nigeria)
Laagencia (Colombia)
Mix Rice (South Korea)
Por Estos Dias (Colombia)
Ruangrupa (Indonesia)
The Tentative Collective (Pakistan)

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the show. Details to follow...

29/09/2017

Early 2016, we were invited by the Manchester Art Gallery to participate with a project for the New North South Network, an initiative being launched to commemorate 70’s year of Independence or should we say Partition. After being in conversation with the wonderful curator Clare Gannaway and working on a project for over a year, little did we realize that the actual project will be facilitated by the visa officer, who spelled out for us the notion of ‘The New North and South’.

Using a condescending tone, our visa applications compiled over a month, were dismissed by an anonymous referee with a simple sentence, “I am not satisfied”.

This is not the first time artists have been denied visas to attend regional shows, however it points to the persistent difficulties of building relationships between regions once part of a common wealth. The legacy of colonization haunts us 70 years later as we increasingly inhabit suspicious islands surrounded by walls. It forces us to create distinctions between regions that have the potential to be fluid, giving them identities such as North and South, that reinforce binary differences based on the privilege of verticality.

27/09/2017

We urgently need to send a hard drive to Paris from Karachi. Anyone flying this week?

18/08/2017

We are very excited and honoured to be part of the 'New North and South' network's programming in Manchester this September! We will be presenting alongside all these amazing practitioners from South Asia as well as the UK. Details of our project will follow soon...

22/05/2017

Portraits of a city: Shershah metal scrap yards, Karachi.

08/05/2017

Guys we are urgently looking for a transcriber based in Karachi for about three days worth of work. The audio is mostly in Urdu. We would need someone to listen and write down all the text in roman english if possible. This would be a paid gig and we are ready to start as soon as today! So please message us if you are free.

04/05/2017

Thrilled to have contributed a piece in the current issue of The Funambulist magazine! Our photo essay was a response to the call for a 'political walk' through the city. We grounded our ideas around a metal scrapyard at the periphery of Karachi and wrote about dizzying development around us through the lens of accumulation and excess. This was a very productive part of the process in a long term exploration of things that get left behind by progress.

If you follow the link you can access the magazine via a paid digital subscription. If you can, please support this lovely magazine and the wonderful people who run it. (If you really really can't afford it, send us an email)

warm regards,
us

https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/designed-destructions

MAY-JUNE 2017

05/04/2017

Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema remembered

Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema celebrates the life and times of Karachiites through an art by the people and for the people

26/02/2017

After an eventful few days in Lahore, experiencing the heavily securitized aftermath of a blast, we finally saw "Digging Deep Crossing Far, Encounter 4" open despite the odds. This exhibition has traveled from Bangalore to Karachi to Berlin and finally Lahore and will be up through March 3rd at the Alhamra Art Center. We learned so much about ourselves from piecing together forgotten histories and perspectives of Indian soldiers in World War I. And in writing our screenplay, we re-translated, re-framed and juxtaposed fragments of the past that point to the many gaps of history, paying attention to tiny moments of resistance by Indian prisoners in the context of war, colonization and struggles of class. The show was put together by the tireless work of curators Julia Tieke and Elke Falat with tremendous support from Stefan Winkler and Huma Tassawar at the Goethe Institute. Stop by and take a look at the many wonderful works in the show. https://www.facebook.com/digging-deep-crossing-far-1621579148103771/

06/11/2016

Tentative Collective's project, The Gandi Engine Commission (initiated as part of a multi part program, 'Ancestors' which was curated by Natasha Ginwala) is on view at Carnegie Mellon University Nov 4- Dec 11 as part of the Climactic: Post Normal Design show. If you are nearby, do make a visit to the Miller Gallery for a viewing!

15/09/2016

This past May, we participated in another conversation about public space in Berlin with academics, artists, architects and curators over the course of an intense 36 hour long 'factory of thought'. In our roundtable presentation, we questioned the rhetoric of public space that creates exclusions and binary representations of place, and introduced a new body of work on 'waste' that we are developing for next year.

We are so happy to share a transcript of this presentation at the Akademie der Künste, published also as an online issue courtesy of The Funambulist and New South :) Enjoy!
https://issuu.com/akademie_der_kuenste/docs/fights_and_fictions_finalised_print/1

An Editorial Project by The Funambulist and New South. Commissioned by The Akademie der Künste and The Goethe-Institut. www.adk.de/fights-and-fictions

11/09/2016

Sept 9, 2016. 'Transcribed Text For a Lost Moment' - a screenplay about an Indian prisoner of war in a WWI German camp around 1917- is on view at the Kunstraum Bethanien Berlin starting this weekend. Curated by Julia Tieke and Elke Falat, this group show includes many fabulous artists from South Asia, Germany and Africa. We are in Berlin for another 5 days, come say hi!

30/05/2016

We are also happy to share "Transcribed text for a lost moment", a work in progress, at the Karachi Arts Council, running from May 29th to June 4, 2016. This textual work is part of the "Digging deep, crossing far - second encounter: Karachi" project initiated by Julia Tieke and Elke Falat. Our work is a response to the fascinating audio archives of Indian soldiers who were prisoners of war in the Halfmoon camp near Berlin during World War I.

28/05/2016

"Waste Agency" video projection / reading in the stunning Akademie der Kunst theater, Berlin, exchanging thoughts about consumption, waste and wasted lives, followed by images of our roundtable presentation on the symbolism of public space. Thank you to our wonderful hosts at the Akademie der Künste!!