Tania Roy – Reflection on Munem Wasif’s “Seed Shall Set Us Free”
Writer and academic Tania Roy has meticulously crafted a compelling text that delves into the intricate tapestry of artist Munem Wasif’s work and practice.
Before approaching each of these works more closely, we might pause at the syntax of simple futurity in the title that frames the display as a whole; and which is borrowed from the installation, Seeds Shall Set Us Free II. By deploying the grammar of inclination and determination in its title, this core work of the exhibit cues us to discern moments of subaltern resistance within larger histories of catastrophic ecological exploitation and social exclusion in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.
— Dr Tania Roy
On the occasion of the exhibit „Seeds Shall Set Us Free,“ co-curated by European Kunsthalle (Rike Frank) and Fotogalleriet (Antonio Cataldo and Miki Gebrelul), writer and academic Tania Roy produced a text reflecting on artist Munem Wasif’s work constellation for the exhibition presented in Oslo.
Tania Roy full text is available here.
Dr Tania Roy is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Graduate Programme in English Literature at NUS (National University of Singapore). She is the author of Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-century Novel (Routledge, 2020). Roy serves on the editorial boards of Prose Writing, the Journal of South East Asian Ecocriticsm, Migrating Minds; and as a member of the core editorial team, with a special focus on the visual arts for Cultural Politics. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and has taught and studied on exchanges at the Humboldt and Freie Universities in Berlin.
Seeds Shall Set Us Free II, 2017-2021, Archival Pigment print, 13 x 9 inch, Framed.
Seeds Shall Set Us Free II, 2017-2021, Archival image, 7 x 5 inch.
Onabadi (Uncultivated) (2023-Ongoing), Collage on paper, Archival pigment prints, Text on paper, Mounted on Dibond, 20-17 inch each, research supported by The Gwaertler Grant.
Courtesy of Munem Wasif and Project 88.