Paper short abstract:

This paper traces definitions of art through processes of making, with attention to intersections between artistic and anthropological research and to relationships between art, document and body.

Paper long abstract:

Artistic research has been formalised as an academic discipline and knowledge field during the last decades. It gives voice to artists speaking from within the making of art, hitherto marginalised by outside definitions provided by art historians and art critics. These marginalised voices are of particular interest for anthropological approaches to art, following the discipline's critical examination of representation, authorship and power relations, including structures of 'othering'. Artistic research, with its contextual variations, offers a potential to enhance the understanding of art and creative processes, and to what extent these processes can be linked to anthropological ways of working.

This paper discusses a project where the other (artist) is self-identified as me (anthropologist), continuously evolving through transdisciplinary engagements. As not uncommon in artistic research, it articulates emergent processes of making things, performances, relationships and knowledge through Tim Ingold's writings (2011, 2013; Laine 2013; 2018). The project uses collaborative photography, curation and exhibition response to convey a critical understanding of casteism in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. While encountering contradictive relationships between art, document and body, the project visualises knowledge of contemporary casteism as part of the transnational expansions of right-wing nationalism and provides alternatives to silencing notions of caste as a pre-modern practice partly modelled through anthropological understandings of structure and transaction.