We Are Always Working: A virtual walkthrough conversation with Waswo X Waswo & Giles Tillotson

In a world where academic and even popular discourse has moved beyond Saidian concepts of Orientalism and Othering to a new and broader terrain that encompasses “whiteness”, “privilege”, and “cultural appropriation”, the foreign white artist in Asia finds his or herself in ever more uncomfortable political/philosophical positions. For those of us who make an attempt at art making (I consider photography intrinsically linked with the other arts), the knowledge that we will probably trespass a critical line of “correctness”, intentionally or unintentionally, is always there. As an artist-photographer who has lived and worked in India for well over sixteen years, a large part of my concerns have been with navigating, responding to, or combatting what sometimes seems as an insurmountable outsider-ness both within and beyond the Indian art scene. This “outsider-ness” extends to geographies elsewhere aside from India, where both white and non-white curators question the validity of a non-Indian claiming membership in the “Indian artist club”, bringing up the issue, rightly or wrongly, of racial identity as a signifier.