Baum Gallery of Fine Art,
University of Central Arkansas

August 22 - September 28, 2000

Presented in collaboration with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective)

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective) was founded in 1993 by a group of artists in Toronto, Canada. SAVAC was created to facilitate the production, presentation, and distribution of Diasporic South Asian contemporary art. Since then, SAVAC has become a collective with year-round programming, including exhibitions, artist talks and skills- building workshops. SAVAC continues to develop a network of alliances, nationally and internationally, and this exhibition will be the collective's first project in the United States.

Contemporary Art and Identity: South Asian Diaspora in North America brings together eleven visual artists from Canada and the USA who have exhibited with SAVAC and the Desh Pardesh Festival/ Conference in Toronto. As a historical survey of the 7-year exhibition history of SAVAC, the project aims to highlight some of the diverse practices being explored by South Asian artists in the Diaspora. Focusing on the range and variety of visual expressions that are being produced by these artists at the turn of the century, this is not a thematic or media-specific exhibition. Many shared concerns and formal relationships do exist in the works of the participating artists, but the exhibition also highlights the disparity that can arise out of cultural and geographic specificity. The works resist the homogenizing tendencies of the dominant South Asian identity, and hopefully, facilitate a rich and textured reading of the contemporary views of the artists.

Rashmi Varma
SAVAC Steering Committee

Sylvat Aziz		Shelly Bahl
Ameen Gill		Allan deSouza
Annu P. Matthew		Alia Hassan-Khan
Tamara Zeta Sanowar-Makhan	Rina Banerjee	Kiren Budhia
Nikolas Groot		Neena Arora