CultureAsia: Connecting Asian Cultural Actors!
Inspired by the success of the Arterial, the Pan-African conference on vitalizing African cultural assets in 2007, Hivos and the Open Society Institute initiated an intensive and interactive conference among the stakeholders of the Asian arts and culture sector. The CultureAsia conference, organized between 14 and 16 December, will bring together about 80 stakeholders from autonomous arts and culture sectors and civil society groups.
The conference will include artists, cultural theorists and activists and national and international donor agencies active in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Tajikistan) and South-East Asia (India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka). The participants have been chosen from diverse cultural, socio-economic and political contexts.
Cultural practitioners from Central Asia struggle with the Soviet cultural inheritance and the contingencies of the post-Soviet independent states, with weak institutions, competing ideological projects, mass impoverishment and cultural isolation despite the penetration of global cultural products.
The Indian counterparts work in a parliamentary democracy with huge regional differences and deeply ingrained inequalities despite the post-industrial boom, the growing participation in a global economy and the emergence of a middle class. Cultural production in Sri Lanka is marked by a protracted civil war. In Indonesia, a fragile democratic order is being tested by enormous cultural differences, socioeconomic stratification and radical politics inspired by religion.
Hopefully the conference will result in the formation of an active platform that would enhance reflection, exchange and cooperation in the fields of capacity building, strategy and lobby for culture, which would in the long term strengthen cultural sector and vitalize the civil society in Central and South-East Asia. In addition, the conference will motivate the funding bodies from within and outside Asia, and help realign their priorities and programs. The Asian media will be involved in order to highlight the cultural dimension of civil society development in Asia.
The CultureAsia conference is organized by Hivos and the Open Society Institute in cooperation with the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS).
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