In 2011 ISCP launched an annual residency for an international contemporary art organization. The residency was initiated to support cultural exchange by bringing an international perspective into a local context. Clark House Initiative, Bombay will be the second organization to undertake this residency. Beginning in November 2012, Clark House will bring their program to New York and will organize an exhibition, series of discussions and performances, as well as a meeting between Burmese artists Htein Lin and Sitt Nyein Aye.

Clark House Initiative is a curatorial practice about a place, which in sharing a junction with two museums and a cinema, mirrors the fiction of what these spaces could be. It was established in 2010 by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma as a curatorial collaborative concerned with ideas of freedom.

This exhibition tells the story of the friendship shared between Burmese artists Htein Lin and Sitt Nyein Aye in the Manipuri forests, India in 1988, and with the comedian Zarganar in Yangon, Burma in the 1990s. Htein Lin and Sitt Nyein Aye have not seen each other since their first meeting in 1988. The two sides to Htein Lin’s practice, his aesthetics and satire, are mirrored in the combined influence of his mentor Sitt Nyein Aye, an artist and political refugee who lived in Delhi, and Zarganar, a comedian, often in prison for this satire. The exhibition is also about the spirit and vitality of comic force against the formality of the law and the courts.

Clark House will present rarely seen selections from Sitt Nyein Aye’s archive containing drawings of his journey from Burma to India, the camps and refugee communities in which he lived, his own writing and editorial work, his autobiography, catalogues of his exhibitions, and the important publications he edited and published from the makeshift set-ups of printing machines in Yangon, the border forests between India and Burma, and finally in Delhi.

A video documenting the artist Htein Lin’s second performance, at an exhibition opening in Yangon, Burma in the 1990s, will also be on view. This video had been kept secret since its creation and was only returned to the artist in 2012.

Drawings on the Forest Floor: Htein Lin and Sitt Nyein Aye in conversation Saturday, November 10th, 5pm

This will be the first meeting of Burmese artists Htein Lin and Sitt Nyein Aye since they fled to the border hills following the repression of the democratic protest against the military regime in Burma that began on August 8, 1988, now known as the 8888 Uprising.

The young law student Htein Lin first met the celebrated Mandalay painter Sitt Nyein Aye in the Patkai range in Northeast India. Htein Lin will reflect on the influence of the elder artist, and how their discussions of art and life led to a turning point in Htein Lin’s life from his pursuit of becomimg a lawyer or joining the democratic resistance movement to instead becoming an artist. “Sitt Nyein Aye asked me if I knew the work of Francis Bacon, and when I shrugged vaguely, he said, ‘oh but I must explain to you the work of this amazing man’, and he drew pictures in the mud” (from a conversation with Htein Lin).

Together they will speak about art and philosophy, duty and ‘the artist’s way,’ recapturing the content of their discussions from 24 years ago, and Sitt Nyein Aye’s imparting of an art education through drawings on the floor of the forest.

Collective Practices Discussion Thursday, November 15th, 6:30pm

Clark House is currently working on the idea of cultural transfer – how a work of culture can be transferred to another cultural context, which may be another geography or from another time. Curators Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma will present works using skype, video and assemblage to discuss their on-going research of collective practices from various parts of India, especially the Northeast.