LONDON.- Set up in 2005 as a curatorial collective, Green Cardamom is a visual arts organisation that presents a view of the international centred on the Indian Ocean. It has operated an innovative hybrid model, working on a not-for-profit basis to develop curatorial projects, while running a commercial gallery programme in London as its principal means of funding.

Green Cardamom opened its London gallery space in November 2007, with generous support from the Rangoonwala Foundation. Beginning its programme with artists from Pakistan, Green Cardamom's roster expanded to artists from the wider South and West Asia regions and beyond.

Green Cardamom's projects have been developed through exhibitions, publications, and symposia in partnership with international museums and universities, with critical input from an expanding network of scholars and curators. Partner institutions have included: Abbot Hall Art Gallery (Kendal); Manchester Art Gallery; the British Council, the British Museum, Royal Geographical Society, Tate Britain, and the Whitechapel Gallery (all London) in the UK; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), the Asian Art Museum (CA), the Pacific Asia Museum (CA), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (NY), and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (NC) in the USA; and the Sindh Museum (Hyderabad) and VM Art Gallery (Karachi) in Pakistan.

Green Cardamom has used its itinerant public programme to develop curatorial platforms around notions of innovation through tradition (Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, Beyond the Page: Miniature as Attitude, Safavids Revisited, and Calligraphic Abstraction); an expanded notion of drawing (Drawn from Life, Mashq, and In the Milieu of Fatah Halepoto); vernacular ideas of the popular (Desi Pop and A New Freedom) and the intertwined notions of memory, history, and nation (Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space). Many of these public projects began life as small-scale exhibitions in the London space, which has functioned as an incubator of ideas.

Green Cardamom will scale down and re-configure its commercial gallery programme but will continue to progress its public projects programme from Hong Kong including the on-going Lines of Control project (next iteration at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC, 2013), and Calligraphic Abstraction (with Cornell University, NY).

Green Cardamom's website, www.greencardamom.net, will be updated in due course with details of all projects, exhibitions and publications.