What Is A Trade Text Panel

The Art of Collaboration One of Donald Fels’s primary artistic strategies is to ask provocative and difficult questions. Rather than seek a single answer, Fels prefers to allow people to come to their own conclusions and relishes the myriad creative responses his questions generate. What Is a Trade? provides virtually unlimited possibilities for raising questions about the West’s interaction with India. As a Westerner inserting himself into South Indian culture, Fels expected and found great cultural differences that significantly impacted his ability to orchestrate the collaborative project that became What Is a Trade? He believes that his first art form is performance, by way of bringing people together to generate interpersonal exchanges—and that the paintings are the documentation of these efforts. The cultural differences that Fels navigated throughout the process included race, religion, language, class, and the lingering effects of colonialism. Fels’s experience working with Indian collaborators follows in a centuries-long history of interaction between the West and India. Dr. Samuel Parker, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at University of Washington Tacoma, aptly points out in his catalogue essay for What Is a Trade? that the history of trade between India and the West is complex and began centuries before Vasco da Gama’s 1498 voyage. Key historical moments include Alexander the Great’s military excursions into India in 326 BCE, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps on Asian elephants in 218 BCE, and the extensive spice trade between Imperial Rome and India more than 15 centuries before Vasco’s voyage. The West maintained limited contact with India through the Middle Ages, mainly through the spice trade that was closely controlled by Arab and Persian middlemen. What Is a Trade? is deliberately paired with Oasis: Western Dreams of the Ottoman Empire from the Dahesh Museum of Art. Both exhibitions address Western conceptions and representations of the East. Both raise questions about how these views affected and continue to affect relationships and cultural exchange between the West and the East.