Haema Sivanesan is a Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia. Her curatorial work typically focuses on art from South Asia and its diasporas, with an interest in non-western, post-colonial and trans-national histories and practices. In 2016, she received a prestigious multi-year grant from the Robert H N  Ho Family Foundation, Hong Kong, to research for a major exhibition titled "In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art and Social Practice" (forthcoming). In 2018 she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship. She is an active member of the Canadian arts community, participating on a number of Boards and committees. Since 2014, she has been a Consulting Curator with the Bengal Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh.  

Abstract: This paper reflects on curatorial practice as a site of critical cultural (self-) exploration and representation. Traditionally, curating has meant to care for objects and collections, derived from the Latin word curare, meaning to care. Care, in this context, usually refers to the scholarly, taxonomic, materialist and administrative ways by which objects, disassociated from traditional contexts of production and use, are reified with (new) meaning. But in recent years, curatorial practice has become increasingly focused on exhibition-making and display such that issues of identity, representation, race and coloniality are being necessarily revealed as embedded in, and inherent to, discourses on curatorial practice.  

Reviewing almost 25 years of my own curatorial work, this paper draws on personal experience and professional reflection to examine representations of South Asia and South Asian diasporic identities in art museum settings. Drawing on specific institutional and exhibition examples, this paper will discuss how the paradigm of art history, the rhetoric of diversity, and now the catch-cry of de-colonization, de-limit terms of diasporic representation in Canadian art museums, such that diasporic identity remains an open-ended and enigmatic site of contestation and negotiation. I advocate for a method of the imaginative “re-storying” of objects and history as a means to consider culture and identity within complex networks of trans-national and cross-generational contexts of encounter and exchange; and as a means for exhibitions to act as fluid sites of inter-action, conversation, and experience.