Bringing South Asian Digital Art to Life

For years, digital art from South Asia has circulated without a stable home. It appears in exhibitions, festivals, online platforms, and social media feeds—often celebrated, sometimes misunderstood, and frequently detached from the cultural, political, and historical contexts that shape it. The South Asian Digital Arts Archive (SADA) was conceived in response to this absence, and it begins, deliberately, as a book.

Distributed between a series of outcomes, an archive, books, publications, and exhibitions, South Asian Digital Art is here to stay!

SADA Volume 1 is not an attempt to define a canon, nor to fix a rapidly evolving field in place. Instead, it offers a curated snapshot of digital practices across the region at a moment when technology is reshaping how stories are told, preserved, and contested. The book brings together artists working across photography, video, sound, animation, AI, and experimental digital media, foregrounding their voices through long-form conversations and close readings of their work. The emphasis is less on spectacle than on context—on how digital tools intersect with memory, politics, migration, ecology, and everyday life in South Asia.

The need for SADA emerged from a persistent gap. South Asian digital artists are often folded into global narratives of “new media” without acknowledgment of local histories, infrastructural realities, or cultural specificity. At the same time, regional documentation has tended to be fragmented, informal, or ephemeral. SADA responds by slowing the process down. The book format allows for depth, reflection, and permanence, resisting the speed and disposability that define much digital culture.

Yet SADA is not nostalgic. The book is designed as the first chapter of a larger platform—a living archive that will grow through future volumes, digital publishing, exhibitions, and research. Its aim is not only to preserve work, but to ask harder questions: Who gets archived? Who decides what is worth saving? And how might digital archives be built without reproducing the extractive logics that have shaped so many cultural institutions?

South Asian Digital Art Mission Statement - I

South Asian Digital Art Mission Statement - II

South Asian Digital Art Mission Statement - III

South Asian Digital Art Mission Statement - IV

South Asian Digital Art Mission Statement - V

South Asian Digital Art Mission Statement - VI

Bringing SADA to life is, at its core, an act of positioning. It asserts that South Asian digital art is not a footnote to global discourse, but a critical site of innovation, resistance, and imagination. The book invites readers to encounter the region’s digital practices on their own terms—and to see the archive not as an endpoint, but as an evolving conversation about the futures we are already living in.