The Draft Project
Draft is a year-long project that is anchored in nine cities across the world, and will engage with critical discourses and practices in relation to the public sphere.

Draft collectively considers how contemporary art can initiate, invoke and contribute to public debates. A year-long undertaking, the project is anchored in nine cities - Bombay, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Zurich -and opens with a three-day conference in Bombay on 4 June 2015. 

Draft encounters and tests public spheres and the consequences of staking claim to them through contemporary art. In doing so, it also chalks out the relationship between the seemingly disparate contexts of these cities that are, in fact, always intensely entangled. 

The opening conference-and the project at large-convenes a cross-disciplinary crew of artists, curators, philosophers, anthropologists and the like, who cooperate as collaboratives in wound up urban contexts. 

Draft is imagined as a kind of agent provocateur; exploring our reality, such as it is, by hinting at the possibility of what else could be. If no context can ever be truly exhausted, then each exploration is a renewal of the promise of debate. 

This longue durée project is, somewhat, bookended by two conferences; the closing conference takes place in Zurich in the summer of 2016. In the critical interim, a range of engagements, including research and workshops, will be realised in each of the cities. Expanding on the conference's discussions they will set the pace for the site-sensitive artworks that will be realised in early 2016. 

Draft is not 'about' the city but it mobilises this complicated ecosystem as a springboard for thinking through questions, claims, potentials and problems around an infinite spectrum of contemporary artistic and philosophical concerns and practices.

The project intends to do this in a transnational scenario of home-grown artistic interventions, which question the notion of identity in a world that is nothing if not hybrid.

The project intends to do this in the scenario of public spheres, which question extant public spheres in an epoch where dissenting contexts are rife with the rumbling sounds of deep matter, deep memory, deep alienation and what have you. Draft is a proposal because every context is equal parts potential, problem and provisional. 

Partners: Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, and Connecting Spaces Hong Kong - ZurichZHdK 
Supported by: artEDU Foundation and ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Project directors:
Gitanjali Dang / Artistic Director Khanabadosh, Bombay
Prof. Christoph SchenkerHead of IFCAR, Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich

Participants: 
Alice Peragine, Hamburg
Ashok Sukumaran, CAMP, Bombay
Christian Hübler, knowbotiq, Zurich
Christoph Schäfer, Hamburg
Christoph Schenker, Zurich
Cosmin Costinas, Para Site, Hong Kong
Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mexico City
Dmitry Vilensky, Chto Delat, St. Petersburg
Giorgio Biancorosso, Hong Kong
Gitanjali Dang, Bombay
Hector Bourges Valles, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City
Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Mexico City
Iris Long, Beijing / Shanghai
Jens Maier-Rothe, Beirut, Cairo
Jasmina Metwaly, CairoAlia Mossallam, Cairo
Ju Anqi, BeijingLi Zhenhua, Shanghai / Zurich
Laura Furlan, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City
Nikolay Oleynikov, Chto Delat, St. Petersburg
Ntone Edjabe, Chimurenga, Cape Town
Patricio Villareal, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City
Philip Rizk, CairoKarla Rodríguez, Teatro Ojo, Mexico City
Prasad Shetty, Bombay
Qinyi Lim, Para Site, Hong Kong
Rohit Jain, Zurich
Samson Young, Hong Kong
Shaina Anand, CAMP, Bombay
Sophie Goltz, HamburgRupali Gupte, Bombay
Sarah Rifky, Beirut, Cairo
Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Chto Delat, St. Petersburg
Yvonne Wilhelm, knowbotiq, Zurich
Zinnia Ambapardiwala, CAMP, Bombay

For more information on the project click here.