WHAT'S SAUCE FOR THE GANDER

Tom Finkelpearl takes us through the various stages of Jaishri Abichandani's career as an artist and activist.

THE UNITED STATES' CONSTITUTION MANDATES THAT EVERY TEN years the government will conduct a census that counts every single person living in the country. This is a notoriously cumbersome project and its results are invariably inaccurate. Hundreds of thousands of people are left out of the count - which is a pity because there is a lot at stake for them, including federal funding and seats in the House of Representatives.

In 2000, a young artist and activist named Jaishri Abichandani signed up to assist with the census as a "South Asian Specialist." She spent months interacting with communities that she knew well - the complex South Asian social networks of New York - and making sure that people understood that they needed to fill out the census forms to be counted. Although Abichandani was employed by the federal government, this project was thoroughly consistent with her artistic practice. She was working with and for underrepresented communities, using her vast network to facilitate their social and political visibility.

In the nine years that have followed, she has continued to walk a fine line between community action and aesthetic expression, between socializing and organizing, between life and art. Over the last four years, her personal artistic creations have begun occupying more of the limelight, but her centrality within New York's community of South Asian artists remains a complex issue.

Abichandani arrived in New York from Mumbai in 1984 at the age of 15. She finished high school in Queens and attended Queens College, New York, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1991. In the 1980s and 1990s, Queens contained a huge mix of ethnicities. In the centre of the most culturally diverse county in the United States (138 languages are spoken here), Abichandani lived in a building where Hindi echoed through the halls along with Russian, Spanish and a host of other languages.

Like many artists, Abichandani started with the familiar and the local. Her early photographic work, created just after college, focused on her family and the immigrant communities that had helped develop her social and aesthetic imagination. In 1997, seeing the need for increased aesthetic interchange, social networks and public recognition for South Asians, Abichandani founded South Asian Womens' Creative Collective (S.A.W.C.C., which is pronounced 'saucy'). On the model of other New York City coalitions, like the feminist 'Guerrilla Girls' and the Asian-American collective 'Godzilla', S.A.W.C.C. organized festivals, retreats, panels, exhibitions, and perhaps, most importantly, created opportunities for critical discourse and mutual support. The organization has grown to include 1100 women in New York and chapters have emerged in other cities.

Meanwhile, Abichandani's photography projects continued to develop, and after the turn of the millennium, she was beginning to show more frequently and be noticed. In The New York Times, critic Ken Johnson called her photographs "absorbing" and "sumptuous," comparing them with the "snapshot" sensibility of Nan Goldin (August 23, 2002). And her life as an arts administrator progressed too. As Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art, she presented large-scale events and organized shows. Many of these projects continued to focus on modes of South Asian cultural expression, including a series of events and an exhibition called Fatal Love - drawing its title from an essay on South Asians and conflict by Suketu Mehta, another Mumbai native, who landed in Queens as a 15-year-old. But, Abichandani's focus was broad and encompassed instituting a series of gay and lesbian programs and organizing the museum's biennale.