Aveek Sen: Roots in air – „Edward Said called it Orientalism. Now it is called Context…”

houseoflove©dayanita singh

Photography from House of Love (2010) © Dayanita Singh

Do we need the classifications of national or cultural contexts in order to understand photography, and to what extent are such categorizations of cultural identity relevant in contemporary cosmopolitan society?

Aveek Sen raises these questions in his text Roots in Air and reveals deep-seated western mechanisms of reception and the feedback effect that they meanwhile have on the art of non-western artists. For Dayanita Singh it is essential that her work be read independently of rigid contextualizations or stereotypes, and Sen familiarizes us with the conceptual model of this approach.

Read his text here.

Photography from House of Love (2011) © Dayanita Singh

Photography from House of Love (2011) © Dayanita Singh

Aveek Sen is a writer and an editor for The Telegraph, Calcutta. Roots in Air is one of nine essays by Sen that are included in Singh’s book House of Love. House of Love was published in 2010 by Radius Books co-published with the Peabody Museum Press.

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