Fatima & Zahra Hussain are reporting daily from the “The Subcontinent Newsroom”, where they compile information and reactions by artists to a fictitious document, which states that the borders of the South Asian subcontinent will once again be re-drawn, 67 years after independence, to “restore peace and harmony within the region."

Throughout the month of October, international and local artists, and art collectives are creating videos, web-based works, articles, photographs and are conducting public interventions throughout Toronto. In addition to public screenings and performances, the artists’ work will appear in three editions of newspapers, distributed throughout Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area during October.

Performing the role of newspaper editors, Fatima and Zahra Hussain, produce news and create podcasts from “The Subcontinent Newsroom,” housed at Art Metropole. The two newspaper editions published up till now are attached.

The Subcontinent Newsroom is a performative construction of the Subcontinent Satellite News Mapping System (thesubcontinent.com), in the form of interventions, publications and radio shows. The project seeks to engage artists as news-makers across geographic and disciplinary boundaries, producing and disseminating news around the line to be drawn in the subcontinent. The intervention in Toronto focuses on assembling transmissions for an audience, through an active newsroom and public talks.

Info-Bomb is a participatory and discursive way for artists and curators to speak to the ways in which information is disseminated. Employing South Asian border politics as a way in which to address such issues, all the artists and curators involved engage the public using different media and platforms to speak to the ever-changing, imaginary and arbitrary borders of the Indian Subcontinent. The project is collaboration between Other Asias and Aam Awaam, is curated by Fatima Hussain and Zahra Hussain and is being supported by SAVAC in Toronto.

EVENT LISTINGS

Engineering a Media Circus: Conversations on archive, art, and knowledge production

Tuesday, October 15, 7-9pm
Video footage by Jon Soske & Rajee Jeji Shergill, BerlinBorderCast and Monika Love; journalists (creative faculty) stationed around the world as a response to the new territories being formed on the subcontinent. The videos probe into the various social and political aspects of boundaries, information and communications. 

Discussion with Fatima & Zahra Hussain, Neelika Jayawardana, Jon Soske & Rajee Jeji Shergill to follow. Moderated by Indu Vashist.

Venue: Media Commons, University of Toronto, 3rd Floor, Robarts Library, 130 St. George St., Toronto.

Saturday, October 19, 2-4pm

No Reading After the Internet, A tribute to Tele-presence  with Fatima and Zahra Hussain.

Cheyanne Turions will be moderating this event with artists Fatima and Zahra Hussain. For this iteration of No Reading After the Internet, texts that have informed the thinking of Fatima and Zahra Hussain will be read aloud alongside excerpts from the newspaper project and will be discussed by participants within the Subcontinent Newsroom..

Venue: Art Metropole. 1490 Dundas St. West, Toronto.

Imagining geographies, concerns of borders and languages and experiments with what an alternative world could be, became part of their strategy to imagine things differently.  In their collaborative curatorial practice as Aam Awaam (an online radio), Fatima & Zahra Hussain actively engage with the happenings of the city either through sound, drawings, writings and mix-media installations, to sometimes question the role of borders and language, to create the technocrat and to imagine an alternate future. Aam Awaam is an online radio that features found and fictive sounds from in and around the city. The collaborative curatorial practice was set up by Zahra Hussain, Fatima Hussain, Asif Kanji & Abdullah Aslam in 2011. www.aamawaam.org

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Art Center) the only non-profit, artist-run center in Canada dedicated to the development and presentation of contemporary visual art by South Asian artists. Our mission is to produce innovative programs that critically explore issues and ideas shaping South Asian identities and experiences. We encourage work that is challenging, experimental and engaged in critical discussions on visual forms and processes, and which offer new perspectives on the contemporary world.www.savac.net