Olga K Sooudi | University of Amsterdam (original) (raw)

Papers by Olga K Sooudi

American Ethnologist, 2024

In much anthropological reflection on value creation through objects, value is conceptualized as ... more In much anthropological reflection on value creation through objects, value is conceptualized as created in circulation. Yet objects’ social lives are punctuated by periods of waiting as much as they are by movement. Waiting can thus be theorized and examined as a critical pause in the circulation of objects, one that enables their value transformation and creation via social actors, institutions, and valuation processes. Demonstrating this can be accomplished ethnographically by following the consignment, exhibition, and sale of a group of objects—in this case by the artist Maqbool Fida Husain via a Mumbai art gallery. As objects wait, the art world turns around them, setting valuation and other value-making processes in motion. This moment of waiting is precisely when our methodological and analytical gaze should turn to the object’s social relations and to the collective activities of the art world.

Global Art in Local Art Worlds: Changing Hierarchies of Value, 2022

This chapter develops a notion of circuits of valuation, through which artists and artworks from ... more This chapter develops a notion of circuits of valuation, through which artists and artworks from India are validated within the local and national contexts. Circuits of valuation denotes the global circuits, comprised of patterned, repeated routes, with particular stops along them, via which artists and artworks from India circulate. Furthermore, it indexes how, in circulating along specific global circuits, artists and artworks are validated and acquire value. This chapter examines how artists, art dealers, collectors, and other art world actors construct, imagine, and rely upon these circuits to validate artists and artworks from India that often circulate back to the national context, as artists return home and artworks are acquired by local galleries and collectors. These global circuits of valuation traverse nodes that may be art institutions, sites of commercial transactions, or textual platforms. Thus Indian art acquires value in local (or national) contexts in part by moving through these global circuits that valuate this art. In drawing attention to how global mobility and encounters of artworks and artists across borders and sites create meaning and value in particular places, this chapter illuminates some of the dynamics of how art from southern contexts acquires value within a globalized art system.

Seminar - The Monthly Symposium, 2022

From Seminar #753, Theme issue on Patronage: A symposium on support for cultural labour, 27-34.

Arts, 2020

This article explores what alternative, or artist-led, spaces are in Mumbai today and their role ... more This article explores what alternative, or artist-led, spaces are in Mumbai today and their role within the city's artworld. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two alternative spaces, it argues that these are artist attempts to exercise agency in their work for an uncertain market context. In other words, these spaces are a strategy for artists to exercise control over their work in an uncertain art market, and a means to counterbalance their dependence on galleries in their careers. Furthermore, artists do so through collectivist practices. These spaces, I argue, challenge models of artistic and neoliberal work that privilege autonomy, independence, and isolation, as if artists were self-contained silos of productive creative activity and will. Artists instead, in these spaces, insist on the importance of social bonds and connection as a challenge to the instrumentalization and divisive nature of market-led demands on art practice and the model of the solo genius artist-producer. At the same time, their collective activities are oriented towards supporting artists' individual future market success, suggesting that artist-led spaces are not separate from the art market, and should be considered within the same analytical frame.

Poetics, 2018

This article examines the role of collective memory in mediating market change. It focuses on the... more This article examines the role of collective memory in mediating market change. It focuses on the experiences of Mumbai artists, dealers, and curators as they remember a recent period in the art world’s collective biography: the “boom” in India’s emerging art market that culminated in 2005–2008. Actors rely upon their diverging interpretations of the past, and the performance of these memories in the present, to make sense of marketization and to express ongoing conflicts and inequalities among art world actors wrought by these processes. Their memories articulate a threefold experience of art’s marketization: acceleration, art as spectacle, and standardization. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai and focusing specifically on a short-lived but influential art gallery of the boom period, Bodhi Art, as a key memory site in the Indian art world, I argue that memories mediate ongoing anxieties and conflicts related to the marketization of Indian art that, while discursively located in the boom period, actually relate to how the market has come to be centrally embedded in practices of art production, display, and exchange in art contexts around the globe.

Keywords
Contemporary art; Art markets; Emerging art markets; Marketization; Collective memory; Memory sites; Dealers; Artists; Art worlds; Mumbai; India

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Apr 2016

India's art world has garnered significant attention as an ‘emerging art world’, but we know litt... more India's art world has garnered significant attention as an ‘emerging art world’, but we know little about how such worlds emerge and are experienced by those working within them. This article explores this question of ‘emergence’ through an ethnography of the Mumbai art world. Gallerists, artists and other insiders generally perceive local conditions as insufficient and in-the-making. They juxtapose Mumbai against idealised, more established art worlds, and engage in creative, improvised ‘makeshift’ practices to remedy the limitations they see. Despite their provisional nature, these makeshift practices produce new spaces, networks and mediators in the Mumbai art world: in other words, art worlds emerge through practice.

Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art, 2015

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material inf... more Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Mar 2011

This article explores the concept of authenticity, and its articulation with longstanding Japanes... more This article explores the concept of authenticity, and its articulation with longstanding Japanese discourses of modernity, among contemporary Japanese lifestyle migrants in New York City. Considering the cases of artists in particular, it examines how migrants narrate the ideals and goals of life in New York City, thereby elaborating on concepts of the self, authenticity, meaning, and national cultural identity.

Books by Olga K Sooudi

Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals w... more Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals who live and work there—young English students, office workers, painters, and hairstylists. New York City, one of the world’s most vibrant and creative cities, is also home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. Among them are artists and designers who produce cutting-edge work in fields such as design, fashion, music, and art. Part of the so-called “creative class” and a growing segment of the neoliberal economy, they are usually middle-class and college-educated. They move to New York for anywhere from a few years to several decades in the hope of realizing dreams and aspirations unavailable to them in Japan. Yet the creative careers they desire are competitive, and many end up working illegally in precarious, low paying jobs. Though they often migrate without fixed plans for return, nearly all eventually do, and their migrant trajectories are punctuated by visits home.

Japanese New York offers an intimate, ethnographic portrait of these Japanese creative migrants living and working in NYC. At its heart is a universal question—how do adults reinvent their lives? In the absence of any material or social need, what makes it worthwhile for people to abandon middle-class comfort and home for an unfamiliar and insecure life? Author Olga Sooudi explores these questions in four different venues patronized by New York’s Japanese: a grocery store and restaurant, where hopeful migrants work part-time as they pursue their ambitions; a fashion designer’s atelier and an art gallery, both sites of migrant aspirations. As Sooudi’s migrant artists toil and network, biding time until they “make it” in their chosen industries, their optimism is complicated by the material and social limitations of their lives.

The story of Japanese migrants in NYC is both a story about Japan and a way of examining Japan from beyond its borders. The Japanese presence abroad, a dynamic process involving the moving, settling, and return to Japan of people and their cultural products, is still underexplored. Sooudi’s work will help fill this lacuna and will contribute to international migration studies, to the study of contemporary Japanese culture and society, and to the study of Japanese youth, while shedding light on what it means to be a creative migrant worker in the global city today.

Japanese New York: Migrant Artists and Self-Reinvention on the World Stage

Book Reviews by Olga K Sooudi

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2017

Imagine the predicament of the contemporary scholar of Japan who seeks to communicate the country... more Imagine the predicament of the contemporary scholar of Japan who seeks to communicate the country’s politics and diversity. Most any student of Asia knows that other major Asian nations—India, Indonesia, China, Myanmar, Malaysia—host a panoply of ethnic and religious groups, and have emerged through historical flows of global migration, capitalism, and empire. In contrast, modern Japan is—outside its twentieth-century imperial history—invariably seen as pathologically isolated and insular. The historian or anthropologist of Japan who seeks to place it alongside other Asian nations in terms of social heterogeneity and cross-border flows fights an endless battle against the deluge of cherry blossoms, calligraphy, samurai, flower arrangements, tea ceremonies, geishas, uniformed schoolgirls, sex-themed manga, and gory anime that seem to prove that Japan, and the Japanese, are inextricably particular, peculiar, and homogenous. Thus a country whose linguistic DNA incorporates neighboring East Asian grammars, which since the nineteenth century has seen perpetual immigration from and emigration to the Americas, whose imperial project embedded the Japanese in the Philippines, Java, Korea, and Manchuria, is commonly reduced to an inward-obsessed outlier, the exception to inter-Asian connectivity and global diversity. On the one hand, the uniqueness of Japan must be brandished for it to be relevant; on the other, this singularity makes it impossible to see Japan as a comparative site of scholarly investigation, for it to illuminate anything beyond itself. The compulsion to constitute “Japan as an object of desire,” as Leo Ching has argued in a different context, still informs scholarship. To study it, one must do so by looking at what is properly and fully classified as Japanese, and to translate their essence to a broader world. Accordingly, most research on Japanese society still proceeds from, and

Journal of Asian Studies, 2017

Multi-book review essay

Talks by Olga K Sooudi

The Global Circulation of Art and the New Markets: Abu Dhabi Art Talks 2018, 2018