by Kurchi Dasgupta (an Indian artist and writer based in Kathmandu can be reached at kurchi.dasgupta@gmail.com) I The Kathmandu International Art Festival (a biennial event now turned triennial) and the Colombo Art Biennale (CAB) stepped into the international circuit in 2009. The entry of these two new regional events happened in a year that embodied little economic respite or expectation. Ever wonder why, especially when the art world has been proved to be such a barometer of global economics? One possibility: the biennale represents an ideal/utopian space where the mechanism of the art market recedes and allows art to be produced from the hearts and minds of artists in an unrestricted manner. Beside playing its very important role as the 'most vital and visible sites for the production, distribution, and public discourse around contemporary art today' (as found inscribed on the International Biennial Foundation's website). Second possibility: the organizers totally bypassed the issue of global economics because they lacked understanding. Neither event received any significant state support though both were proudly presented as national events, and the two nations stood to benefit most in terms of enhanced cultural capital and therefore, prestige. (Not to mention the advantage of future economic gains through tourism, sales etc.)i It would be wise to keep in mind that both KIAF and CAB were initiated, and continue to be run, by two very successful private gallerists. Both women, incidentally! Did the events then take shape simultaneously and in two countries in the same neighborhood quite by accident? (Note: both nations had just come out of crippling, long- drawn civil wars.) Or was the coincidence a reflection of the fact that both countries lay at the periphery of the global economy and therefore, felt the economic crunch as mere ripples in already turbulent financial waters muddied by the aftermath of violence? = The business of art, like all other manufacturing businesses, requires an expanding market and cheap-er labour in far-flung outsourcing centres. The international art economy achieves this by outsourcing products to peripheral production zones - new artists are picked up from
unexplored hinterlands as long as their work superficially represent the other but ideologically reinstate the core values and tastes reigning at the centre. The triumph of multicultural postmodernism is a case at point, when local identities were (and still are!) rallied to strengthen the universally global. For in a globalized world, culture itself has been globalized and 'in every spot of the planet, you can see this new cultural stratus, coexisting with the layer of traditional culture and some local specific contemporary elements' and to deny this would be 'a pure denial of the worldwide violence of the capitalist system, or an extreme naiveness' (Nicolas Bourriaud in conversation with Bartholomew Ryan, March 2009). As the centre reaches out a grasping hand across newer and newer cultural territories in an informatically shrunk world, economies at the edge of the ever-expanding boundary seduce and preempt such incursions in the guise of promoting a benign, cross-cultural hybridity