SCROLL Part 2: It is Not the Seas that Scare Me

In a world where exhibitions largely exist in a time-based format in physical white cube spaces, usually organized at a high cost and with limitations of audiences, we propose that the magazine can be an alternative as a low-cost, effective and permanent mode of curatorial dialogue. Published from Karachi, SCROLL brings foreword the perspective of a cosmopolitan Global South citizenry, and emanates it into the world. Without seeking to find singular answers, we propose multiple modes of viewing binary narratives. In doing so, we seek to interrogate timely and overlapping concerns around border cultures, citizenship and statehood, migration and mobility for subjects of the Global South and marine and land exchanges. Through our project, where the magazine can be circulated cheaply in physical and digital format, we seek to disrupt borders and divided communities to build solidarity and imagine new futures.

Our second issue It is Not the Seas that Scare of Me is created in collaboration with Colomboscope 2019. For this issue, the oceanic frontier becomes a jumping off point for artists and writers to examine concerns around trade & exchange, economy & colonization and sexuality & the surreal.

The resulting contributions by Jyoti Dhar, Krishnapriya Tharmakrishnar, Hira Nabi, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Abdul Halik Azeez, Shadman Shahid, Henry Tan & Partners, the Living and the Dead Ensemble, Jagath Weerasinghe and Fazal Rizvi offer a diverse array of projects and exist both as a dialogue with the 6th edition of Colomboscope as well as a complete exhibition in its own right. None of the works here offer resolutions or final answers, but rather proposals for many of the ways in which the marine both shapes us and is impacted by us.

As the Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant poetically begins his timeless treatise Poetics of Relation:
‘One way ashore, a thousand channels’

Let us then, in this fractured and divided world of ours, find our answers in the fluidity of the ocean – a reminder that even if our journeys are separate, our destinies are intertwined.