Asia

My interest in the countless visual languages of the Asian continent is summed up by the Caravan Café project I founded in the 1990s, which traces how nomadic sobriety slips into visual turmoil within the Indian subcontinent. As a whole, this project represents a kind of phantasmagoric bazaar that began with two key exhibitions (1998 and 2003) at the Rocca di Umbertide Center for Contemporary Art in Italy and were accompanied by a publication with the same title published by Acas in Orvieto, Italy (2001). On display was the then almost unknown visual palimpsest of Central Asian cultures, together with war rugs and rugs depicting the planisphere and world flags, ancient felts from nomadic traditions, the most daring contemporary art (in particular from Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan), as well as artifacts unrelated to the typical visual genres, such as the decals decorating the bags of rice sold in the bazaars of Peshawar and Quetta.