RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP 2011 | NIDA GHOUSE

Nida Ghouse has been selected for the Research Fellowship 2011. Ghouse was selected by a jury that included Aaron Cezar (DELFINA), Radhika Chopra (FICA), Tessa Jackson (Iniva), Dr. Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths), Grant Watson (Iniva), and guest jury member Parul Dave Mukherjee (academic and editor).        

Nida Ghouse's proposed research is an ongoing curatorial project related to the practice of Cairo-based artist, performer and writer, Hassan Khan. She enquires if there could be a manner in which the curatorial process can complement rather than detract from a commitment to formalism, while also enabling new and at times unfamiliar audiences to access and appreciate the work. One of the several lines of enquiry stems from the intention to bring Khan's practice in conversation with the contemporary cultural landscape of places like Bombay/Delhi.    

In an early account that signals the emergence of an image of the self as an artist, Hassan Khan displays an almost irreverent attitude with which an eclectic range of references are flattened, all mixed up with life, and consumed. As source materials, these references (ranging from Yassin El Tohamy to Un Chien Andalou) are not culturally accented. They are inhaled, and yet the symptoms they induce cannot be systematically traced. Even when acknowledged, the eventual referent may bear no obvious semblance to its source.   Through an exhaustive engagement with Hassan Khan’s entire oeuvre as a musician, artist, and writer, this project — which has transpired in close conversation with him and is being realised through a series of event- and publication-based formats — makes a set of formal propositions about a practice that is deeply invested and yet remains adamantly unresolved in relation to its context.    

Nida Ghouse was assistant curator for the 10th Sharjah Biennial, and is co-curator of a forthcoming exhibition for the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation at the museum formerly known after the Prince of Wales. She initiated a research-based group project about movement across the Mediterranean, an element of which was presented at Manifesta 8 in Murcia. She used to work collaboratively across two artist-run initiatives—CAMP and Pericentre Projects. Her most recent writing has appeared in publications such as ArtSlant, The Exorcist – A Play Van Abbe Journal, and Bidoun, and she previously studied literature at Tufts and Oxford. She was born to Bombay and has lived with Cairo, and to both these cities she tends to return.