Dissertation Defence: South Asian Digital Art Archive (SADA)

Najam Ul Assar, supervised by Dr. Megan Smith, will defend their dissertation titled “South Asian Digital Art Archive (SADA): A Post-Colonial Archive of Digital Art” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Digital Arts and Humanities theme.
An abstract for Najam Ul Assar’s dissertation is included below.
Examinations are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Please email [email protected] to receive the Zoom link for this exam.
Abstract
The thesis positions the South Asian Digital Art Archive (SADA) as both a scholarly intervention and a practice-based digital humanities project that responds to the historical absence and fragmentation of South Asian digital art within global archival infrastructures. Digital art practices across South Asia have developed since the late twentieth century, yet institutional archives, art-historical canons, and digital repositories remain structurally misaligned with them. Prevailing classificatory systems and infrastructural assumptions fail to register their historical, technical, and cultural specificity. In response, the research advances re-archiving as a post-colonial methodology. SADA enacts re-archiving as a multilingual, community-driven, ethically grounded living archive in which curatorial practice, qualitative research, and technical design operate as interdependent processes. Empirically, the thesis draws on forty in-depth, semistructured interviews with digital artists across South Asia and its diasporas. Through reflexive thematic analysis, it examines how digital artistic practice forms through intersecting negotiations of memory, infrastructure, labour, ecology, gender, and artificial intelligence, among other postcolonial concerns. It treats these negotiations as conditions that shape production, circulation, and archival visibility. SADA enacts a digital philosophy grounded in design principles that foreground infrastructural constraints, ethical responsibility, and cultural context, deliberately prioritizing accessibility and multilingual metadata over scale, automation, and technological excess. The archive extends through an artist book that reworks interview material into curated narrative entries, foregrounding artists’ voices while situating their practices within broader theoretical debates. The thesis contributes to digital humanities scholarship, media art history, and archival studies by advancing a collaborative model of digital archiving grounded in critical practice. SADA shows how the approach can challenge epistemic hierarchies, support cultural sustainability, and respond to the conditions under which digital art practices emerge in the Global South.