With the outbreak of Covid-19, 95% of museums across the world were forced to close their doors.

Commemorating World Museums Day, Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai invites you to a panel discussion with distinguished museum leaders to address how museums have creatively dealt with the challenges of the pandemic. Panelists will showcase strategies for exhibiting their collections, reaching audiences globally and nationally to fulfill their mandate of cultural access and public education, building new skills, and developing new models for future sustainability.

The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum has made great efforts to remain connected with the community during these difficult times and to provide support and relief to beleaguered families and friends through programming that is thought-provoking and entertaining. We will discuss how we hope to change paradigms of future engagement and what will be the Museum's role in the new landscape that confronts us in the face of unprecedented challenges. We hope you will join us and share your views on how we can better serve the community.

Panelists:

- Tasneem Zakaria Mehta,

Managing Trustee and Honorary Director, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai

- Sabyasachi Mukherjee,

Director General, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai

- Douglas Hegley,

Chief Digital Officer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Moderator:

- Ravina Aggarwal,

Director, Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai

Join us for a webinar 'The Future of Art Exhibitions in Public Spaces - Museums and Biennales' on Sunday, 17 May 2020 at 5 pm. Nikhil Chopra, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Gayatri Sinha and Tasneem Mehta will be in conversation to discuss the future of art exhibitions in museums, biennales, and public spaces in a post pandemic world.

Panelists:

Nikhil Chopra

His artistic practice ranges between performance, theatre, painting, photography and installation, exploring issues regarding identity, autobiography, and the politics of transformation. Since 2005, the artist has successfully exhibited and performed globally including at Documenta, the MET Museum, Havana & Sharjah Biennales, Yokohama Triennale, New Museum, and Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta

An artist, filmmaker and writer Sengupta is one of the initiators of the Sarai programme with the RAQS Media Collective. The practice locates them at the intersection of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory. The RAQS Media Collective is the artistic director of the Yokohama Triennale 2020. Their works have been exhibited at the NGMA, Delhi, Documenta, Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney and Sao Paulo Biennales. Sengupta was the Keith Haring Fellow in Art & Activism at Bard College, New York (2015-2016).

Gayatri Sinha

As art editor, critic, and curator, Sinha’s primary areas of inquiry are gender and iconography, the study of classical texts and media. She has lectured widely on Indian art, including at the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, MoMA, Arken Museum of Modern Art, National Museum and NGMA. Sinha has also edited numerous publications including Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists (Marg 2010), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857- 2007 (Marg Publications, 2009), and Indian Art: an overview (Rupa Books, 2003). In 2011, Sinha established an online archive for Indian art called Critical Collective which has received much acclaim.

Moderator:

Tasneem Zakaria Mehta

Mehta is an art historian, writer, curator, and the Managing Trustee & Honorary Director of the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. She spearheaded the Museum's restoration & revitalisation, and has introduced a successful contemporary art programme at the Museum. She is also the Vice President of the MoMA International Council and former board member of NGMA, NID and the Museums Expert Committee, Ministry of Culture, GOI.

Portuguese Goa was at the centre of a web of music and dance that stretched across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, connecting the Goans with expressive culture enjoyed by their counterparts in Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola, Sri Lanka, the Malaccas, and Portugal. Into this transoceanic inheritance also flowed songs, dances, and stories deriving from Goa’s position in the Deccan peninsula and on the Konkan coastline.

Rápsodia Ibero-Indiana is a collection of ‘Hispanic, Portuguese, and Goan songs and dances’, composed by Carlos Eugenio Ferreira of Corjuem, Goa. It was locally published as a booklet of musical scores in 1929. The personal archives of the Ferreira family provide a glimpse into Portuguese Goa’s centuries-old music and dance history that encompasses European sacred and secular genres of motets, contradanças, polkas, and waltzes, as much as the local genres of mandos, dulpods, and dekhnis. The talk will discuss the local identities that emerged through this unique cross-cultural transfusion and the fate of an inherited mixed culture in a post-colonial framework.

About the Speaker-

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialisation and forgetting. Through an ERC Advanced Grant (2013-2018), she led an interdisciplinary investigation into African-heritage social dance and music across language worlds. With several books to her credit, Professor Kabir is currently writing ‘Alegropolitics: Connecting on the Afromodern Dance Floor’. Her new research projects explore the concept of transoceanic creolisation through cultural production connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

Date: 22 February 2020

Time: 6 pm - 7:30 pm

Venue: Education Centre, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum

The lecture is free and open to all.

Limited seating on a first come, first serve basis

RSVP: ccardoza@bdlmuseum.org

Imagined Homeland (2013-19) is a seven-year-long surrealistic exploration of the mythical life of the indigenous Lisu tribe living inside the dense forests of Namdapha National Park on the India-Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh, India. By harnessing mythological symbolism, De attempts to evoke an aura of the mythical world inhabited by the Lisus, animals, and nature, as well as offers a cultural engagement in favour of finding new aesthetic approaches.

What is represented and what is not? How is it represented, and why? Do photographers present the mere body in their work, continuing our fetishistic obsession with the material, or do they also capture the spirit and other intangible qualities mankind inherits while telling stories of communities? If the classical representational approaches - the sensationalism of photojournalism or aestheticisation of suffering in documentary practice - have divided us instead of bridging the society, then what alternatives do we have today?

Through an illustrated talk, De will discuss the problems of representation and present his work as a form of cultural resistance against classical approaches, encouraging exploration of alternate aesthetics.

Sharbendu De is a lens-based artist, academic and writer from India with over 15 years of experience. His philosophy is influenced by deliberations on human society, gender, climate change, environmental degradation, and its impact. He has MA in Photojournalism from the University of Westminster, London (2010). Alongside his practice, he presently teaches photography and Visual Arts at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, and Sri Aurobindo Centre for Art & Communication, New Delhi.

The lecture builds upon little known histories of the exhibitions of the antiquities of Ancient Assyria within the city of Bombay (Mumbai), during the late 1840s and the 1850s. The antiquities came from the spectacular archaeological excavations at Nimrud (North Iraq), which were undertaken by the British diplomat and explorer Austen Henry Layard (1817-94) who had dug at the site in the belief that this was the Biblical Nineveh. They were first displayed in 1846 in Bombay (Mumbai), then an ascendant cosmopolitan city and international port. It is significant that the exhibition preceded their sensational reception in London and the subsequent vexation of the European world with their exoticism.

Following the travails of ‘Nineveh’ in the city, the lecture also draws attention to the immense historical possibilities of the practices of curation, collecting and museum-making, and the many meanings that antiquities accrue within their material life.

Dr. Sudeshna Guha is an Associate Professor of History at Shiv Nadar University (near New Delhi). She researches on histories of archaeology, museums and heritage making, and has a long career in curating photograph collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge). The lecture draws into a chapter of her book Artefacts of History (SAGE 2015). She is at present completing a book on Objects and Histories (Hachette India).

After the revolt of 1857, the British Crown took over the direct rule of India from the East India Company, and there was a shift in not only the governance in India but also in the social and cultural milieu. Changes were also noticeable in the clothing preferences of the Rajas, Maharajas and upperclass Indians. India was a melting pot of cultures and ideas, with the coexistence of the British, Turks, Arabs, Chinese, French and Portuguese, among the Indian community.

The lecture will discuss how politics and technology influenced the courtly attire in India from 1857 – 1947, from jamas as seen in the miniature paintings of the 17th Century, to sherwanis as seen in the photographs during the 1940s.

Dr. Toolika Gupta, Director, Indian Institute of Crafts and Design, is a fashion historian, researcher and educator in the field of crafts and design. She has a Ph.D. in History of Arts (Dress and Textiles) from the University of Glasgow, U.K. She is one of the thirteen founding members and the secretary of the society – TCRC (Textiles and Clothing Research Centre) in India.

The late 1960s were a time of fundamental change in art museums in Europe and America. Led by the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas Hoving, museums began to focus on attracting audiences in the then-revolutionary ways by introducing ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. These programmatic spectacles not only resulted in larger audience numbers and higher institutional profiles within the cultural sphere but also in a tradition of retail, dining and other amenities that have made museums social centers as well as sites for education and aesthetic experience. Art museums have now expanded around the globe in ways not imagined half a century ago.

This lecture will chart major trends in museums over the last 50 years as it also focuses on recent issues that confound the trajectory of earlier assumptions of expansion as the art museum sector grows, including calls for responsible philanthropy, ambitions for equity, diversity, and inclusion in staff and trustees, and the post-colonial claims for the repatriation of objects, claims that have the potential of significantly altering the collections of the so-called “universal”, “encyclopedic” museums of the West.

Dr. Michael Conforti is Director Emeritus of the Clark Art Institute, a museum and research centre in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which he led from 1994-2015. A former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (2008-10), he holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and subsequently served as a curator of sculpture and decorative arts and chief curator in San Francisco and Minneapolis respectively. He currently addresses these subjects along with issues of museum history and practice and cultural exchange while teaching in the graduate programme in art history at Williams College. A Fellow, Resident and former trustee of the American Academy in Rome, CIHA (Comité international d’histoire de l’art) and ICOM-US, he is currently on the Executive Committee of The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft.Worth, and serves on the Board of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, the Menil Collection, Houston, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the (Philip) Guston Foundation. He is also a member of the International Advisory Council for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Zentral Kustodie of the University of Göttingen, and the Aspen Institute’s Artist Endowed Foundation Initiative.

Gurcharan Singh (1896-1995) is one of the founders of Indian studio pottery, one of the many craft forms that developed in modern India. Making his acquaintance with clay in the colonial-era construction of New Delhi, Singh traveled to Japan to learn industrial ceramics. There he encountered mingei or folk art at the center of the growing Imperial-era Japanese arts and crafts movement. Entering into a dialogue with mingei's aesthetics and philosophy, Singh befriended its leaders including the art critic and philosopher Yanagi Muneyoshi, Hamada Shoji, Kawai Kanjiro and the British potter Bernard Leach. With them, he imbibed an enduring commitment to the local, the folk and the aesthetics of wabi-sabi and learned the craft of studio pottery. Returning to India in 1922, he also made an important and enduring relationship by choosing Abdullah, a hereditary potter from a community of Afghani ceramists who came to Delhi in the Lodi era and were renowned for their distinctive blue tiles, as his teacher. Singh founded Delhi Blue Pottery, an early center for studio ceramics in India and also established pottery research laboratories in Kashmir and Punjab.

The talk will reference Singh's kamandalu coffee set and his Delhi blue tea set to understand how he took the global aesthetic discourse on craft, folk art and the local to create Indian studio ceramics for design-conscious consumers in post-Independence New Delhi.

Dr. Annapurna Garimella is a Delhi-based designer and an art historian. Her research focuses on late medieval Indic architecture and the history and practices of vernacular art forms in India after Independence. She heads Jackfruit Research and Design, an organization with a specialized portfolio of design, research and curation. Jackfruit’s recent curatorial projects include Vernacular, in the Contemporary (Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi) and Faith: Manu Parekh in Benaras 1980-2012 (Art Alive, New Delhi) and Drawing 2014 (Gallery Espace, New Delhi), Mutable: Ceramic and Clay Art in India Since 1947 (Piramal Museum of Art, 2017) and Barefoot College of Craft in Goa (Serendipity Arts Festival, 2017-18). Her newest book is an edited Marg volume titled The Contemporary Hindu Temple: Fragments for a History (2019). In 2017, she was awarded the India Today Emerging Curator of the Year Award. Garimella is also the Founder and Managing Trustee of Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, a not-for-profit organization that runs a public art library, conducts independent research projects and does teaching and advisement for college and university students and the general public. She is also a director in the Exotic Heritage Group, a leader in boutique tourism and hospitality.

In collaboration with U.S. Consulate General Mumbai

Why is it important to preserve the old places of our cities? What benefits do old places provide? Join author Tom Mayes for a talk on his recent book, 'Why Old Places Matter'. The author explores the many reasons that old places help people flourish, from memory, identity, and continuity, to economics, sustainability, and community, to sacredness and connections to our ancestors. Why Old Places Matter makes a profound case for why these places are important for people’s emotional and psychological health as well as helping cities have a strong and vibrant economy.

Tom Mayes has written and spoken widely on why old places matter to people, as well as preservation easements, shipwreck protection, historic house museums, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and preservation public policy. A lifelong preservationist, Tom has extensive knowledge of the preservation policy landscape in the United States, and also offers expertise on the topic of urban heritage. For many years, he taught historic preservation law at the University of Maryland Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. In 2013, Tom received the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and wrote a series of essays titled 'Why Old Places Matter'.

Register: education@bdlmuseum.org

The lecture focuses on the discursive space of the ‘Fine Print’ in the age of the digital and potential for rupture/ intervention that the digital ecosystem offers.

It takes cue from the recently concluded “First Print Biennale” organized by the Lalit Kala Akademi which was largely formalist in its curatorial concerns and the conceptually rich 33rd edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts 'Crack Up - Crack Down' focusing on satire, curated by the collective Slavs and Tatars that will run parallel to the Venice Biennale this year.

Dr. Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and Professor of Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has ten solo exhibitions to her credit and has written extensively on contemporary art. Her recent publications include “The Trace Beneath: The Photographic Residue in the Early Twentieth-century Paintings of the ‘Bombay School”, BioScope South Asian Screen Studies, Vol 8, Issue 1, 2017 and “Cultivating a Taste for Nature”, Economic and Political Weekly Special Issue: Tagore's Social Praxis, Vol. 52, Issue No. 19, 2017. Dr. Sawant was co-curator of the Kochi Student’s Biennale 2018-19 and has been a working group member of Khoj International Artists’ Association in the past and founder member of the Indian Printmaker's Guild. She has also functioned as chairperson of GSCASH the gender sensitization committee of the Jawaharlal Nehru University and is a current member of several related committees in other institutions.

With extensive background in working with several archival collections related to Hyderabad, Deepthi will trace the earliest photographs from the court of the Asaf Jah dynasty and provide insights into the city, palaces and lifestyle of the Nizams of Hyderabad. She will share her experiences in working on the restoration of the Chowmahalla Palace, once the seat of power of the Nizams of Hyderabad and today a popular museum. In lieu of the ongoing exhibition at the National Museum and as co-author of the Treasures of the Deccan: Jewels of the Nizams, she will also share images of the royals in their sartorial and jewelled magnificence. Through 19th century photographs drawn from archives around the world, she will present the Hyderabad of the Asaf Jahs, the Nizams of Hyderabad.

Deepthi Sasidharan is an art historian, curator and founder Director at Eka Archiving, a cultural advisory. She works on heritage and museum projects across India with government, private and corporate clients. Deepthi has led several projects in India, including setting up museums, exhibitions and the creation of archives like Kalakshetra, Chennai, City Palace, Udaipur and Tata Trusts, Mumbai. She is currently working on the Moda Goa Museum, India’s first costume museum in Goa, on the redevelopment of the Bastion Bungalow, Fort Kochi with the Government of Kerala and a heritage project for the Mumbai Police. A Fulbright and Fundação Oriente scholar, she has curated, spoken and published extensively on 19th century photography and has worked on photography collections at IGNCA and IGMT, New Delhi, and Chowmahalla Palace, Hyderabad and several private collections. Deepthi lives in Mumbai and is the co-author of Indira A Life of Courage (2017) and Treasures of the Deccan (2018).

Is this question falling into a We Too Art History model? If the West had modernism, we too had it. For Dr. Mukherji, the most recent Kochi Biennale throws open a provocation to understand absences. If Guerilla Girls stand for fierce and upfront feminism, where were they in 'our' art history? What value do the grotesqueness and anonymity have in the subcontinent with its history of colonial past and much-maligned monsters? The closest parallel to this mode of strident feminism today is found less in the Indian art world than in the women’s civil rights movement. If the Guerilla Girls demand women’s access to the hallowed modern art museums, their stridency is matched by the women activists seeking entry into an actual temple in Sabarimala. Did our secular nationalism leave behind caste in its pursuit of redressing the class inequities in postcolonial India and how did this impact feminist art history?

Dr. Parul Dave-Mukherji is a professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She holds a Ph.D. in Indology from Oxford University. Her recent publications include InFlux- Contemporary Art in Asia, (co-edited) New Delhi, Sage, 2013; Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, eds. Jill H Cassid and Aruna D’Souza, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2014. Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, (co-edited), London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Bangalore's Lalbagh became the state botanic garden from 1856 and is the nodal point of horticultural activities in the state. Widely acknowledged as one among the best gardens in Asia for its botanical research and landscaping and the diversity of plant wealth. Suresh Jayaram will unravel the history of this garden, from the Fruit orchard of Hyder Ali to the Kew of India, the story of plant introduction, landscaping and Agri-horticultural hub.

Suresh Jayram is an artist, art historian, arts administrator and curator from Bengaluru. He is the Founder and Director of Visual Art Collective, 1.Shanthi Road Studio, an international artist’s residency and alternative art space in Bangalore, India. He is currently involved in art practice, urban mapping, archiving, curation and arts education. His keen interest in environmental and urban developmental issues influences his work. He taught Art History at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat, the College of Fine Arts in Bengaluru from 1993 to 2007 and was also its Principal. He has most recently been the Curator for Colombo Art Biennale 2012, as well as the curator of Krumbiegel Project(2011), a public history/art project that included research, documentation and exhibition that looked at the life of Gustav Herman Krumbiegel, a German horticulturist and urban planner of significance in South India.

Hidden or more simply ignored, women are often perceived as the invisible half of pre-independent India. This talk shall engage with the how, why and when of photographing women across the subcontinent, when filters, formats, and agency were in and out of their hands.

Pramod Kumar KG is an independent researcher and Co-Founder of Eka Archiving Services a museum advisory.

This talk proposes everyday life as an educational model in Tagore's Santiniketan in its time, space and thinking; and through its recent curatorial take in the transnational exposure in the form of 'Bauhaus Imaginista', a global travelling exhibition on the occasion of the 100 years of Bauhaus. The exhibition was finally housed in House of World Cultures (HKW, Berlin) in March 2019.

The educational model that evolved in Santiniketan from 1919, involved an aesthetic translation by the artists of that time, archived through several objects such as postcards, travel documents, festivities, museums and new buildings and mural projects. These documents and deliberations happening in Santiniketan during the first three decades, in a comprehensive way, address the two aspects of education: building up an inventory and building up personalities – the first one is indexical and second, praxiological.

Hence, we see several exercises such as written illustrated postcards reporting important events as a sustainable mode of communication and an attempt at community building that remained of prime importance in Santiniketan.

The retake in the form of a curatorial exercise comes primarily through the ongoing exhibition, 'Bauhaus Imaginista', which tries to grapple with the different aspects of Bauhaus. The local and trans-local (then read as national) live an afterlife along with the experimentations in Japan and elsewhere.

The talk briefly examines the dynamics of interactivity which formed the institution and its afterlife in curation.

Join us for a talk by Paul Wong, an award-winning Canadian multimedia artist and curator. This talk will reflect on the his practice of delving into 'everyday life’ where he takes personal stories, intimate issues and common materials to create artworks that are then presented in the public context both in traditional and non-traditional visual media and performing venues.

Paul Wong is a media-maestro making art for site-specific spaces and screens of all sizes. He is an award-winning artist and curator known for pioneering early visual and media art in Canada, founding several artist-run groups, and organizing events, festivals, conferences and public interventions since the 1970s. Wong has produced projects throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

He officially launched his year-long residency on April 2018, 身在唐人街/Occupying Chinatown, at the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden as part of the City of Vancouver’s Artist-Initiated Commission series for public art.

In collaboration with Prameya Art Foundation

This lecture will present a wide body of new work being made by photographers and artists as they look back at modernist architecture and planning across the world. A shift from straight architectural photography, artists are engaging with more complex histories of lived modernism, many through photography.

Rahman’s own recent focus has been on the demolition of the modern architecture of Delhi, and his two recent photo installations at the Houston Fotofest and the on-going Gwangju Biennale in Korea are based on the social, historical and political aspects of architectural site, through photography. The curator Clara Kim’s exhibit ‘Imagined Nations/Modern Utopias’ now on at the Gwangju Biennale, assembled an array of artists engaging with modernist utopias in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East with widely different approaches. Rahman will present much of the work from this show - which includes photography, film, sculpture, textile and tapestry. He will also show the work of younger Indian photographers who are responding to urbanism now.

Ram Rahman is a photographer and activist. He initially studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later completed a degree in Graphic Design from Yale University School of Art in 1979. His most recent solo shows include, Bioscope: Scenes from an Eventful Life presented by Bodhi Art in 2008 and Visions of India: Photographs by Ram Rahman at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2002. Amongst the shows Rahman has curated are Heat: Moving Pictures Visions, Phantasms and Nightmares at Bose Pacia in 2003 and Noor Devyani Krishna, A Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. Rahman is one of the founding members of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in New Delhi, a leader in the resistance to communal and sectarian forces in India through its public cultural action. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

Anand Chhabra will present the research behind the Apna Heritage Archive which impacted the City of Wolverhampton and the Punjabi Community in the UK and beyond. The talk will reveal how a displaced Indian community (over 40,000 Punjabi Indians) in the City of Wolverhampton developed from their formative years of migration between 1960s-80s and what impact they have had in the Black Country region of the UK .

Anand will explore the themes of family, work and leisure sourced from their own albums. This will be valuable for any people to learn how this is important to archive and record their own family history in the City. There are over 2000 images available online ( http://www.bcva.info/about-2/) as well as hard copies of the photographs at a dedicated archive space in Wolverhampton. The talk will also feature individual stories to provide context to the archive and the resulting impact of the exhibition in the City, curated to be at the nexus of art and an archiving.

About Anand Chhabra:

Anand Chhabra is Founder and Chair of the Black Country Visual Arts (www.bcva.info). He has received a grant from the British Council to research the family album in India to present work and conduct workshops around India's cities. This is a result of the award winning resource led by BCVA and an archive called the Apna Heritage Archive. It is a photographic journey: Migration of Punjabis to Wolverhampton 1960s-1980s (England).

Anand Chhabra was also recently shortlisted for Magnum Foundation's Photography in Collaboration: Migration and Religion. He has co-curated the exhibition at NOW Gallery London of The Apna Heritage Archive and it is currently on view until 11 November 2018.

This lecture is envisaged within the context of our ongoing exhibition in collaboration with DAG, 'Navratna: India’s National Treasure Artists', from the collection of DAG.

Through an overview to the oeuvres of the three Tagores, Abanindranath, Gaganendranath and Rabindranath, the presentation will seek to articulate the speaker’s enthusiasm and excitement on the distinctively individual approaches in trajectories of the early modern in Indian art from Bengal, ranging from a negotiation with what came to stand in for ‘tradition’ to the firm conviction in the dictum of a global ‘world in a nest’. A brief ‘coda’ to this primary melody would be to take a brief look, in conclusion, at two other artists from Bengal who are also canonized under the same classification.

Dr. Sanjoy Kumar Mallik holds a PhD in Art History from the M.S. University of Baroda. He is currently Professor & Head in the Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharti, Santiniketan, and has taught a semester (January-June 2014) at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His publications include Chittaprosad (DAG, New Delhi, 2011), Gopal Ghosh (NGMA & Akar Prakar with MAPIN, 2013) & Jamini Roy (Rajya Charukala Parshad, Govt. of West Bengal, 2014). His teaching and research interests centre on the characteristics of early modern in Indian art, the pictorial language of Indian miniature paintings, and the expressive potential in terracotta temple decorations from Bengal.

Films Division India (FDI), the Indian government’s documentary production organisation, conducted some unprecedented and original experiments with the non-fiction film in the period from 1965 to 1975. This period is sometimes referred to as the 'Golden Age' or the 'experimental film period' of FDI. The films of this period mark the first expression of dissent and resistance to prescriptive ways of making documentary films as also the agendas of propaganda. This illustrated talk will feature and examine the work of one of the foremost figures of this period - S.N.S. Sastry.

Sastry joined FDI as a newsreel cameraman in 1952 and worked with the organisation until his untimely death in 1978. His films were unprecedented and remain unparalleled, even unclassifiable. They are easily slotted within the bracket of ‘experimental film' for their play with film form. However, this categorisation often precludes more complex readings of his work and its politics. His work also marks one of the first engagements with archival and found-footage practice in Indian cinema, as he cannibalised his own and his peers' work in a self-critical subversion of meaning. This talk will analyse key films by Sastry to understand the dissent embedded within them as also his engagement with diverse genres of the short non-fiction film.

Avijit Mukul Kishore is a film-maker and cinematographer. He studied cinematography at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and has a bachelors degree in history from Hindu College, Delhi. He works in different genres of film making with special interest in the documentary and inter-disciplinary moving-image practice. He is actively involved in cinema pedagogy and works as a curator of film programmes. His films as director include Squeeze Lime in Your Eye, The Garden of Forgotten Snow, Nostalgia for the Future, Electric Shadows, Vertical City, Certified Universal and Snapshots from a Family Album.

The talk will focus primarily on the history of the collective and the movement of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. While analyzing the art of prominent members like K.P Krishnakumar, Alex Mathew, among others, analogously the presentation will engage with the art of prominent contemporaries such as Dhruva Mistry, G. Ravinder Reddy, N.N. Rimzon, Pushpamala N, Vasudevan Akkitham, Rekha Rodwittya, Surendran Nair among others and broadly with the works of artists who were in the Baroda narrative figurative movement.

The talk will focus on the ideology of the Radical collective while trying to understand the overall art trends of the decade of 1980s.

Prof. Shivaji K Panikkar is an Art Historian specialized in Indian Art. Currently faculty at the School of Culture & Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), he contributed in forming the vision of the same school, where he was the Dean of the school from 2011 to 2014. He has taught for over thirty-five years, and was the Head, Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M.S. University of Baroda (2000-2007).

After its invention in 1839, photography in colonial India became popular and swept through the country. Photographs quickly became an easy keepsake, an affordable and portable way to keep memory alive. From Viceroys and Generals, to Maharajas and nobility to administrators and soldiers, these souvenirs became symbols of politics, people, places and most importantly markers of significant personal emotion.

After its invention in 1839, photography in colonial India became popular and swept through the country. Photographs quickly became an easy keepsake, an affordable and portable way to keep memory alive. From Viceroys and Generals, to Maharajas and nobility to administrators and soldiers, these souvenirs became symbols of politics, people, places and most importantly markers of significant personal emotion.

Deepthi Sasidharan is a Fulbright scholar and the Founder Director of Eka Archiving, a museum and cultural advisory involved in heritage projects across the country. She has curated, spoken and published extensively on 19th century photography and is the co-author of 'Indira: A Life of Courage' (2017) and 'Treasures of the Deccan' (2018).

We watched the opening of Louvre Abu Dhabi a few months ago, many having followed the saga surrounding the establishment of the new museum in the Gulf since its official announcement in January, 2007. In spite of the politics, money, and catalytic power of institutional branding that dominated criticism as the project was taking form, its core ambition i.e. the long-term exhibition of works of art collected and stored in one location shared with populations elsewhere, remains a high-profile addition to the cultural exchange practices of our time.

It might be useful to take this example of asset exchange in the cultural sphere to reflect on the possibilities of future models of global partnerships, ones that may not have the depth of the Louvre’s collections or the wealth of Abu Dhabi at their foundation. Could the international museum community ever consider exchange initiatives that update the utopian ideals on which museums were founded - art collections formed for public experience and education - doing so for audiences far as well as near with money being one but not the only catalyst for exchange?

There are still an extraordinary number of works in storage in museums and at archeological sites around the world. While nationalism, ethnic separatism and global skepticism are on the rise, this lecture will consider whether we can still dream a utopian dream for the 21st century, one in which “stewardship” balances “ownership” in a collective effort to share cultural patrimony. Should museums and arts organizations keep such a utopian vision alive and try, over time, to realize that vision?

Michael Conforti is Director Emeritus of the Clark Art Institute, a museum and research center in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which he led from 1994-2015. A former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (2008-10), he holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and subsequently served as a curator of sculpture and decorative arts and chief curator in San Francisco and Minneapolis respectively. He currently addresses these subjects along with issues of museum history and practice and cultural exchange while teaching in the graduate program in art history at Williams College. A Fellow, Resident and former trustee of the American Academy in Rome, CIHA (Comité international d’histoire de l’art) and ICOM-US, he is currently on the Executive Committee of The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft.Worth, and serves on the Board of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, the Menil Collection, Houston, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the (Philip) Guston Foundation. He is also a member of the International Advisory Council for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Zentral Kustodie of the University of Göttingen, and the Aspen Institute’s Artist Endowed Foundation Initiative.

This talk explores questions about the relationship between art, politics and aesthetics as well as minoritarian cultural practices and community formations. It engages with these questions through a series of theoretical explorations and provides a historical overview of such relationships in the Indian context. Sadanand will explore case studies of artists ranging from Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, and Chittaprosad to Bhupen Khakhar and Nalini Malani, to name a few.

Sadanand will take a close look at the frameworks through which contemporary cultural practices are self-fashioned and will discuss the historical underpinnings of such self-fashioning. He argues that the history of Indian modernism and modernity is constructed in and through the strategies of dislocating the subaltern communities’ constitutive role in this historical process. The talk further argues that the subalterns in India are not only integral to the unfolding of modernity (even though dominant discourses have constituted them marginally), but are in fact the paradigmatic bearers of its process. Finally, the talk proposes that we must necessarily problematise and provincialise these concepts in order to facilitate a ‘minoritarian cultural politics.’

Santhosh Sadanand is an Assistant Professor at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University, New Delhi. He has previously taught at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU, as well as at the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U, Vadodara from where he completed his post-graduation in Art Criticism. He is a regular contributor of research articles to various publications, as also catalogue essays on artists like K.P. Reji, Savi Sawarkar, T.V. Santhosh, and Zakkir Hussain, among others. He works extensively in the field of critical historiography of Indian art historical studies and cultural practices in relation to minoritarian politics. He has co-coordinated national seminars on Cultural Practice and Discourses of the ‘Minor’(2007) and The World, the Text and the Critic: Re-Membering Edward W. Said (2003) at M.S.U, Vadodara. He is also one of the Project Directors of The Curatorship Programme (2010-2013), a series of five traveling workshops and a colloquium on curation, which is an initiative of India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore, India.

This paper is concerned with understanding how to think about art in the context of community. It seeks to study in what way the articulations of questions of community and art in institutional spaces are implicated in activism. Using the Conflictorium in Ahmedabad as an example, the paper hopes to reflect upon the complex weave between community, art and activism. This paper seeks to examine the Conflictorium as an instance where ideas of community and art overlap in a way that almost makes it closely related to the structural logic of community art. By community art, in this paper, Prof. Achar does not mean art produced by communities defined through affiliation to identities given or otherwise. Instead, she draws upon Paul De Bruyne and Pascal Gielen's theorization of community art, where they argue that "community art--which, defined very broadly, thrives on the creation of affection and the nurturing of a practice of community between sponsor, artist, artwork and public--has an affiliation with the notion of the common".

Deeptha Achar studied English Language and Literature at Bangalore University, Karnataka, and Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. Her recent publications include Discourse, Democracy and Difference: Perspectives on Community, Politics and Culture (2010) and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012). Her research interests include visual culture and childhood studies.

As the clock chimed the midnight hour on the 15th of August 1947, the subcontinent threw off the shackles of the British Raj: India was free. How should this new nation define itself? Bombay’s Progressive Artists’ Group, firebrands from different castes and creeds, came together in the immediate aftermath of independence to provide an answer. A modern art for a secular India, was their mission.

A version of Zehra’s Curatorial Lecture for the Asia Society museum exhibition in New York, ‘The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India’, this talk will trace the founding ideology of India’s so-called ‘quintessential Moderns’. Who were they? What did they achieve? How relevant is their message for us today? In answering these questions, the lecture will unpick the tangled web of inter-connections between the notions of the Modern, the Secular and the Progressive within the ‘idea of India’.

Zehra Jumabhoy is a UK-based writer, speaker and art historian. She was the Steven and Elena Heinz Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she completed her doctorate and is an Associate Lecturer, specializing in modern and contemporary South Asian art. In addition, she co-organizes Contemporaneity in South Asian Art, a public seminar series at the Courtauld’s Research Forum. She has been editor of the Visual Art section for Time Out Mumbai and an editor at the journal ART India. Her book, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, was published by Random House, London, in 2010. She is the Guest Curator of The Progressive Revolution: Modern art for a New India, which was partially inspired by her Phd at the Courtauld on the intersection of Indian art and nationalism.

About the artist:
Zarina Hashmi’s preoccupation with the idea of home/dwelling is expansive. Her itinerant life took her across geographies and continents, her artmaking exploring themes of home, displacement, borders and belonging that have preoccupied her since her early years. Born in 1937 in Aligarh, India, Zarina received a BS in mathematics from Aligarh Muslim University (1958) before studying printmaking, a passion awakened by her encounters with local papermakers during a visit to Rajasthan in the late 1960s. Zarina went on to study intaglio with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, Paris (1964–67), and studied woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshida Studio, Tokyo, on a Japan Foundation Fellowship (1974). Her early interest in math and architecture are revealed in her practice through her formal sensibility and emphasis on structure. Using line as her visual tool, paper as her medium, a modest sized-format and an austere palette to work with, Zarina has made drawings and prints in black and white, referencing metaphorically shadow and light, morning and night, despair and hope. Zarina lives and works in New York.

Roobina Karode:
Roobina Karode is the Director & Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India since its inception in 2010. She has post-graduate specializations in Art History and in Education. As an art educator, writer and curator, Karode has contributed to the field for over twenty years. She was involved with the teaching of Art History, both Indian and Western modern art, at various institutions mainly the School of Arts & Aesthetics in JNU, the National Museum Institute, College of Art and the Jamia Millia University in New Delhi.

Karode has curated several art exhibitions both within India and abroad. Focused on researching and engaging the oeuvre of women artists in India, Karode co-curated a travelling exhibit on seventeen contemporary women artists of India at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, USA, titled Tiger by the Tail, Women Artists of India Transforming Culture in 2008. At KNMA, she curated a three-part exhibition in 2013 titled Difficult Loves with a retrospective on Nasreen Mohamedi : a view to infinity, Amrita Sher-Gil : the self in making and Seven contemporaries (Sheela Gowda, Bharti Kher, Dayanita Singh, Anita Dube, Sheba Chacchhi, Sonia Khurana and Ranjani Shettar. She curated Nasreen Mohamedi: waiting is a part of intense living, 2015 at the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain and co-curated NASREEN MOHAMEDI at the MET Breuer, New York in 2016. She curated a retrospective on Nalini Malani’s artistic practice in 2014 and recently curated Jayashree Chakravarty at Musee Guimet in Paris. She is currently working on a retrospective that will examine Arpita Singh art practice across five decades.

Another area of her ongoing and in-depth research has been Modern abstraction, bringing to fore under-represented artists with extraordinary vision and highly individual practices, whose contribution has been crucial within the discourse of modern and contemporary Indian art, such as Himmat Shah, Jeram Patel, Ganesh Haloi, and Zarina to name a few.

Awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in 2000 and the Ford Teaching Fellowship in 2006-7, she was also awarded the India Today Best curator award in 2016.

As the director of KNMA, her broad vision for the Museum is focused on bridging the disconnect between art and the larger public through curated exhibitions, diverse educational and experiential public programs and facilitating an open dialogue and informal discussions.

The talk will focus on the 'Munshi Aziz Bhat Museum of Central Asia and Kargil Trade Artifacts' in Kargil, Ladakh. The museum, in the family home of the founders, houses a collection that consists of a miscellany of objects ranging from animal accessories, imported soaps, razors, buttons, local medicines, coins and currency, jewellery, textiles and clothing items, dye boxes, imported torches and lamps, rugs and carpets, religious manuscripts, foreign magazines, telegraphs and revenue records from the end of the 19th century. All these objects, imported from places as far flung as Japan, America,Germany, Central Asia and China, were recovered from a caravanserai that was a hub of trading activities in the region until 1947. The talk will explore how objects, particularly of everyday use, might be treated as museum-worthy? How are ideas of rarity, age and monetary value inscribed into exhibition narratives to bolster the claims that a museum makes?

The museum impulse, as recent studies have demonstrated, may have originated as a colonial idea, but developed in entirely unique ways, with several motivations and models for building and displaying collections that do not conform to a singlular global model, as also underlined by this museum. Its location in Kargil, on the border of India and Pakistan,within Buddhist dominated Ladakh, makes it a particularly important case study to understand why museums are established, the relationship of a museum with local histories and contemporary religious and cultural politics, and the role that museums could potentially play in excavating forgotten histories.

Latika Gupta has worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Modern Art and at KHOJ International Artists' Association in Delhi, besides curating independent exhibitions of South Asian contemporary art. She curated 'Homelands: A 21st century story of home, away and all the places in-between' drawn from UK's British Council Collection and Arts Council Collection, that toured Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Colombo, Lahore and Karachi; 'Folk Archive' by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane that toured Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, and most recently 'Jeevanchakra', Kolkata, 2016, as part of the Wellcome Collection's Medicine Corner project in India. She has received fellowships from the Charles Wallace India Trust and the Nehru Trust for research projects on Himalayan art and a Museum Fellowship from the India Foundation for the Arts and INLAKS to curate a permanent exhibition for a museum in Kargil, Ladakh. Recent publications include an essay in the Journal of Ritual Studies, and essays in 'Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India' (University of California Press). She is a doctoral candidate at the School of Arts and Aesthetics in JNU, working on the material culture of Tibetan Buddhist rituals. Gupta currently works as Associate Editor at MARG publications.

In March 2017, artist Vivan Sundaram presented a major installation and public art project at CSMVS (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay) of which Rajadhyaksha was the co-author. Inside a massive container simulating a naval ship was an eight-channel sound work, evoking the February 1946 naval uprising in Bombay(now Mumbai) on the very eve of Independence. Beginning in and spreading outside the naval establishments of South Bombay, it then spread into the working class neighbourhoods of Parel before extending into the deep suburbs of the city. The incident itself has been forgotten, marginal to the writing up of modern Indian history, viewed, if at all, as a failed and even misguided attempt at political revolution.

In addressing this moment in history as a work of political art, the Insurrection project would speak to a history of Sundaram's art practice: to memorialization, to forgotten history, to archival scrap and to the reparative act. While Sundaram has been influential in the defining of political art in the post-Independence period, his deployment of an artistic subjectivity - a combination of the subject of art and the subjectivity of its maker - has not been discussed enough in terms of the complex, and often tragic, history of political subjectivities. This talk will address the many aspects of the collaborative project.

“In co-authoring this project, I thus found myself entering an often confusing space: one that seemed to bring diverse subjectivities together into what might best be described as an authorial coalition. Collaborations have historically been at the heart of Sundaram's practice - and these have over the years included, variously, craftspeople, designers, actors, theatre and film directors, and of course many fellow artists. As I, a writer and cultural theorist, worked with Sundaram on this project, I found myself fusing authorship with a further inclusion of the anonymous, and often forgotten, subjects of history. I found myself testing my own understanding of authorial subjectivity: testing my own modest experiments with, for instance, anonymous production, or with open-ended signifiers that may never reach their destination - or, if they do, in co-opting its recipients into the authorial process itself. Here, I realized, the productive coalition meant exploring their dangerous underside: one that took us into precisely the forgotten and the marginal, into the archival debris.”- Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film and cultural theorist. He is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society, Bangalore. He is the co-author of the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema and author of Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. He co-curated (with Geeta Kapur) the show Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001, part of the Tate Modern’s Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis in 2001. Ashish was the curator for the West heavens Film event in Beijing, You Don’t Belong: Pasts and Futures of the Indian Cinema in November-December 2011. He has published widely on cinema and contemporary art, and presented papers on these topics in conferences across the world. He was a Jury member for National Film Awards (Feature Films), New Delhi, 1995; and a Selection Committee Member for First Festival of Short and Documentary Films, Bombay, 1990.

This talk will focus on Public Graphic Art in the city of Bengaluru (Bangalore) and the process and politics of representation in public space. It explores the many players who have made a mark on the city and the different dynamics of individuals, groups and the government. Suresh Jayram will discuss how the street becomes a contested space of visual representation.

Suresh Jayram is an artist, art historian, arts administrator and curator from Bengaluru. He is the Founder and Director of Visual Art Collective, 1.Shanthi Road Studio, an international artist’s residency and alternative art space in Bangalore, India. He is currently involved in art practice, urban mapping, archiving, curation and arts education. His keen interest in environmental and urban developmental issues influences his work. He taught Art History at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat, the College of Fine Arts in Bengaluru from 1993 to 2007 and was also its Principal. He has most recently been the Curator for Colombo Art Biennale 2012, as well as the curator of Krumbiegel Project(2011), a public history/art project that included research, documentation and exhibition that looked at the life of Gustav Herman Krumbiegel, a German horticulturist and urban planner of significance in South India.

Some of the best in contemporary art practice has been inspired by the finesse in Mughal Paintings and the vibrancy of colour values in Rajput and Pahari kalams. This talk focuses on five artists who explored these traditions in different ways, and their work has made a significant impact on contemporary art.

Among the pioneers to explore these relationships in the early twentieth century were the artists Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose from Bengal, who returned to use the miniature format in water colours and gouache. In a brief span from 1937 to 1941 Amrita Sher-Gil was fascinated with miniatures, using reds to express passion. Manjit Bawa was deeply inspired by spatial values in Pahari miniatures from Basohli and Mankot. He sourced Puranic myths, and his meditative icon re-invented a world in symbiotic harmony with nature.

From the 1980s Gogi Saroj Pal adopts a radical feminist approach by reclaiming the woman's body in her images of Kinnari, Kamadhenu and Hath yoginis, and by subverting conventions of goddess and women. Finally the talk focuses on the collaboration between American-born Waswo and miniaturist Rakesh Vijay, who have reinvented the narrative with wit and humour to creature miniatures in a modern context.

About the speaker:
Dr. Geeti Sen holds a M.A. degree from the University of Chicago and is a cultural historian and author of six major books on Indian Art. She was the art critic for The Times of India, Mumbai and for India Today, assistant editor at Marg, Mumbai. From 1982 to 2006 she was Chief Editor of publications at the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi. From 2009 to 2013 she was appointed by the Ministry of External Affairs as the Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal.

From the 1980s a bold representation of feminist intent has grown in India, in writings, performance and cinema as much as in contemporary art practice. Amongst women artists the focus on the body is deliberate, to express their freedom from earlier depictions of women. To quote from the writer and feminist Lucy Lippard, the personal histories of women are raised to universal experience, so that “the personal becomes political”.

The transformation in values can be traced through visual images as a signifier for change. This talk begins with the celebrated painting of 'Bharat Mata' in 1905, created by Abanindranath Tagore as a metaphor for the nation, and how the image evolved with new aspirations. Women perceived themselves differently – not as objects of beauty but as impassioned and filled with desire.Amrita Sher-Gil pioneered these concerns by focusing on the body, and her unfinished project was continued by artists. Gogi Saroj Pal, Anupam Sud, Arpita Singh, Nalani Malani, Navjot Altaf, Nilima Sheikh are some who have contributed significantly to subverting the icon.

This study concludes with the concept of Shakti: of finding the energy of the goddess within themselves which has today emboldened women.

Dr. Geeti Sen is a cultural historian and art critic trained from the universities of Chicago and Calcutta. She is author of seven major books on Indian art and was formerly the Chief Editor of the India International Centre, Delhi. In 2009 she was appointed as Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal.

From the 1980s a bold representation of feminist intent has grown in India, in writings, performance and cinema as much as in contemporary art practice. Amongst women artists the focus on the body is deliberate, to express their freedom from earlier depictions of women. To quote from the writer and feminist Lucy Lippard, the personal histories of women are raised to universal experience, so that “the personal becomes political”.

The transformation in values can be traced through visual images as a signifier for change. This talk begins with the celebrated painting of 'Bharat Mata' in 1905, created by Abanindranath Tagore as a metaphor for the nation, and how the image evolved with new aspirations. Women perceived themselves differently – not as objects of beauty but as impassioned and filled with desire.Amrita Sher-Gil pioneered these concerns by focusing on the body, and her unfinished project was continued by artists. Gogi Saroj Pal, Anupam Sud, Arpita Singh, Nalani Malani, Navjot Altaf, Nilima Sheikh are some who have contributed significantly to subverting the icon.

This study concludes with the concept of Shakti: of finding the energy of the goddess within themselves which has today emboldened women.

Dr. Geeti Sen is a cultural historian and art critic trained from the universities of Chicago and Calcutta. She is author of seven major books on Indian art and was formerly the Chief Editor of the India International Centre, Delhi. In 2009 she was appointed as Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal.

From the 1980s a bold representation of feminist intent has grown in India, in writings, performance and cinema as much as in contemporary art practice. Amongst women artists the focus on the body is deliberate, to express their freedom from earlier depictions of women. To quote from the writer and feminist Lucy Lippard, the personal histories of women are raised to universal experience, so that “the personal becomes political”.

The transformation in values can be traced through visual images as a signifier for change. This talk begins with the celebrated painting of 'Bharat Mata' in 1905, created by Abanindranath Tagore as a metaphor for the nation, and how the image evolved with new aspirations. Women perceived themselves differently – not as objects of beauty but as impassioned and filled with desire.Amrita Sher-Gil pioneered these concerns by focusing on the body, and her unfinished project was continued by artists. Gogi Saroj Pal, Anupam Sud, Arpita Singh, Nalani Malani, Navjot Altaf, Nilima Sheikh are some who have contributed significantly to subverting the icon.

This study concludes with the concept of Shakti: of finding the energy of the goddess within themselves which has today emboldened women.

Dr. Geeti Sen is a cultural historian and art critic trained from the universities of Chicago and Calcutta. She is author of seven major books on Indian art and was formerly the Chief Editor of the India International Centre, Delhi. In 2009 she was appointed as Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Aanchal Malhotra talks about her seminal research on material ethnography of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, as she attempts to understand the notion of displacement and belonging through the objects and artifacts that refugees carried across the border on either side. She approaches the event that changed the contemporary history of the subcontinent with a new lens, from a distinctive third-generation perspective and looks at new ways of excavating otherwise traumatic memory.

The memory buried within ‘things’ sometimes is greater than what we are able to recollect as the years pass. Memory dilutes, but the object remains unaltered. It allows one to study the history within it, and for generations to live off that history and perhaps understand genealogy better. What one carried across the border – how many and what kind of objects they brought, how they were able to carry them across, what was valuable and what mundane – was often determined by the kind of life one had led, and provides incredible understanding into the material culture of the time.

By unfolding the memories woven within materiality, the work unravels a deeper understanding of the personal narratives around the Partition. And though the object – a necklace, a ceremonial box from one’s trousseau, an odd utensil, a shawl, a painting, a photograph, or letters- remains at the centre, what emerges through such a storytelling is the way of life in a syncretic Undivided India.

Aanchal Malhotra is an visual artist and oral historian working with memory and material culture. She is the author of 'Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory'. Much of her work looks at how ordinary belongings found across the subcontinent can act as democratic spaces for cross-border conversations. Aanchal is also the co-founder of the 'Museum of Material Memory', a digital repository of material culture from the Indian subcontinent, tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity. She lives in New Delhi.

Defined as inquiries which critically draw upon two or more disciplines that lead to an integration of disciplinary insights, the primary focus of the presentation will be defining the interdisciplinary turn in art-making and shift-overs in art pedagogy that moved in tandem with the modern to post-modern developments.

The definition of interdisciplinarity will follow the view that the interdisciplinary approach has become an important and challenging technique in contemporary art curriculum the world over. The presentation will further focus on the historical evolution of Indian art pedagogy and their historic roles in conditioning disciplinary frameworks of medium specific, skill-based and formalist methods in the training and making of art.

Prof. Shivaji K Panikkar is an Art Historian specialized in Indian Art. Currently faculty at the School of Culture & Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), he contributed in forming the vision of the same school, where he was the Dean of the school from 2011 to 2014. He has taught for over thirty-five years, and was the Head, Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M.S. University of Baroda (2000-2007).

Dr Tristram Hunt will discuss how the V&A’s founding commitment to art, education and industry continues to define the Museum today. Tracing its genesis from its Victorian roots in the Design School Movement of the 1830s, through the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its shared history with the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, to its establishment as the Museum of Manufactures, Dr Hunt will explore the birth of the institution we now know.

This is also a story of multiculturalism. He will consider how the V&A’s British, Germanic, Indian and Oriental origins engendered a world-class collection through which to debate our cultural heritage today. In our contemporary age of Brexit, Netflix and digital technology, Dr Hunt will set out some of the challenges and opportunities that the museum world faces today.

Dr Tristram Hunt is Director of the V&A. Formerly the UK Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central, he served as the Labour Party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Education. Dr. Hunt has a PhD from the University of Cambridge on ‘Civic Thought in Britain, 1820-1860’. Between 2001-2010, he combined his post as Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, with work as a history broadcaster. He is the author of several publications, including most recently, Ten Cities That Made an Empire (2014).

Ram Rahman will present a personal reflection on how Federico Fellini used a personal narrative which threaded through decades of his cinema - a portrait of a small town boy who makes it in the big city. Ram Rahman is a photographer and activist.

A fascinating portrait of a society in transition and also a journey of an artist whose cinema evolved from its roots in neorealism to an entirely stylised and studio fabricated visual fantasy. The evening will be filled with Fellini's circus, music and the moments of transcendent magic.

Ram Rahman is a photographer and activist. He initially studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later completed a degree in Graphic Design from Yale University School of Art in 1979. His most recent solo shows include,Bioscope: Scenes from an Eventful Life presented by Bodhi Art in 2008 and Visions of India: Photographs by Ram Rahman at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2002. Amongst the shows Rahman has curated are 'Silver Magic: Vintage photographs of the Golden age of Hindi Cinema – Portraits by J.H. Thakker' presented by the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in 2015, 'Heat: Moving Pictures Visions', 'Phantasms and Nightmares' at Bose Pacia in 2003 and 'Noor Devyani Krishna', A Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. Rahman is one of the founding members of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in New Delhi, a leader in the resistance to communal and sectarian forces in India through its public cultural action. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

Indian Design is broadly considered as a phenomena of post-independent India. Over the last seven decades, the country's major pedagogical approaches have been West-centric, and their intrinsic vocabularies based in European modernism from the early 20th Century. This has created a scenario, where Design is seen as distinct from the Visual Arts and Handcraft, a post-war obsession which also emerges in a North-American and European context. In this illustrated lecture, Delhi-based designer and curator Mayank Mansingh Kaul reflects on how the contemporary articulation of Indian Design has rejected unique philosophies of creative production in the Indian subcontinent. In doing so, it has negated - he argues - the original precincts of local models of art education and handcraft manufacture which can inform specific notions of Design and its role in South Asia. He suggests that the idea of plural definitions must constitute, then, as a fundamental aspect of design practice as well as its historicities.

​​Mayank Mansingh Kaul is a Delhi-based textile designer working with contemporary craft. A graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, his work addresses design-related concerns from the perspectives of product-development, brand-building and strategy, government policy and history. As a curator, he has curated shows and exhibitions with organisations such as The Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon (2015) and Khoj International Artists Residency in Delhi (2011). In areas of cultural policy he has been involved in initiatives of organisations such as the (former) Planning Commission of India, The British Council and Goethe Institute. His work and writings have been published in The Financial Times, The National, Domus International and Vogue India. He was the Guest Editor for Take on Art Design (2012) and Cloth and India, 1947-2015 (MARG Publications, 2016).

Jatin Das will discuss his journey from Mayurbhanj, Orissa to JJ School of Art, Mumbai and finally back to Orissa to set up an important arts centre. Reminiscing about the Bombay (Mumbai) of the 1960s, he will speak about its leadership in the cultural milieu and the synergy of the creative community of the time. He will discuss the role of the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute and outline the establishment and thinking of creative communities in different cities as encountered by him

Das will also speak about setting up his own art institute, the JD Centre of Art in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa and about the artist as a collector, with specific reference to his pankha collection which is housed at the Centre. Located opposite the second century Khandagiri Jain caves in Bhubaneshwar, The JD Centre of Art was established in 1997 by Jatin Das, as a non-commercial private institute. The JDCA's aim is to further the cause of the traditional and contemporary visual arts by bringing together tribal, folk, classical and the contemporary under one roof.

A contemporary artist with a deep interest in traditional art froms, Jatin Das has a collection of over 8000 traditional hand fans or pankha. His collection has been shown in different cultural institutions of the world. Das will highlight parts of this collection talking about traditional crafts and the practice of collecting.

Jatin Das is an artist born in 1941 Mayurbhanj, Odisha. He studied in Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay, and his works are in public and private collections in India and abroad. He has been conferred the Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian awards by the President of India. He has participated in several international shows, including Konstforum-Norrköping Sweden 2012, 2nd Biennale Cuba 1985, Tokyo Biennale 1984, Venice Biennale 1978 among others. He is also Professor of Art at Jamia Milia University and has lectured at several art and architectural colleges and museums including NID Ahmedabad, Victoria and Albert Museum London, Cambridge University UK, Harvard University USA, Van Gogh Museum, Reitberg Museum, Germany.

An exhibition of Jatin Das's works will be on view at the Jehangir Art Gallery from 3rd October - 16th October 2017.

The talk is free and open to public, only Museum entry charges apply.

The talk focuses on the two major art manifestations of 2017 the Documenta in Kassel, Germany and the Venice Biennale. While critical reception of the curatorial strategies of both has been mixed, what has not been discussed at length is the artwork on view and the circumstances under which some significant mid-century artists came to be given a prominent position within the exhibition narratives. This view of the recent past and its place within the art historical discourse of our times will be discussed through extensive documentation of the exhibitions and an analysis of the global networks that informed art practice of the time.

Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and currently Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

How to see Biennales through the prism of 'global south' to explore their curatorial strategies? Many books and articles have traced the emerging cultural politics of the global south, from the Havana Biennale to the Kochi Biennale, though its counterparts in the northern hemisphere have remained largely unmarked.

Rather than simply focusing on India's missing pavilion part II in Venice the idea is to see this Biennale 2017 in relation to the previous one curated by Okwui Enwezor. What happens to the political? Is there a return to the artist? Is there a shift from Das Capital to Art? The talk will touch upon some current trends of contemporary art in the light of current Documenta 14 and Venice Biennale 2017 as well as biennales in Istanbul, Havana etc.

Dr. Parul Dave-Mukherji is professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

Free and open for all

Seating will be on a first come first serve basis

RSVP: ccardoza@bdlmuseum.org

The popular is a site that has been endorsed in the recent past as a field fit for art activity; since then the popular has taken many shapes, has performed many functions within the province of art. One of the key functions of the popular in art has been to set up alliances between art and what might be broadly designated as the arena of activism.

However, the conceptual fit between art and activism, globally as well as nationally, has a short history. Art making practices that carried a self-conscious and evident ideological positioning in the first half of the twentieth century were derisively dismissed as propaganda. Posters and films which rendered the political aesthetic during the World Wars played a significant role in such characterizations. It is only when the identitarian movements of the 1960s and 70s took shape that the ideological weight of art production, even in the domain of "high" art, came to be acknowledged without embarrassment. The new forms of collective action devised by the these movements and also the loose alliances they forged between the popular and elite helped construct art that was self-consciously political and that was recognized as being a part of concerted ideological action. Side by side, new readings of the popular in art have emerged alongside activist moves within the domain of art. These developments have clearly been enabled by a shift in frameworks of viewing art in the academy and in the public domain as well. It has led to the relocation of what was hitherto positioned quite unproblematically as “high” art into the domain of activism. What I propose to do in this paper is to track the relationship between activism and art, partly through a reading of the SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust), an institution that has consistently straddled the domain of art and activism since the late 1980s.

Deeptha Achar is Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, MS University, Vadodara.

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Join us for a series of panel discussions on:
1. Bombay and the Progressives
Ranjit Hoskote and Zehra Jumabhoy, moderated by Nishad Avari
2. Modernist Art and Architecture
Abhay Sardesai and Sen Kapadia, moderated by Kaiwan Mehta
3. Building Institutions and Corporate Collections
Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and Oindrilla Raychaudhuri, moderated by Mortimer Chatterjee
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Open to all, Museum entry charges apply.

If there is an Indian artist who possesses the free-spiritedness of the bohemian and has embraced the emancipatory disposition of art, it has to be Himmat Shah ( b. 1933). He dropped out of every kind of formal training in art that seemed too rigid and fixed for an ingenious mind. Himmat’s artistic life can be mapped by a prolonged nomadic existence, his evolution as an enigmatic persona and an art philosophy that places premium on the prowess of an idiosyncratic individual vision marked by personal distinct experiences and emotions. Over the years, his oeuvre expanded to encompass drawings, burnt paper collages, painted reliefs and sculptures in terracotta as well as bronze. Amongst his most significant achievements, Himmat worked towards infusing a new life and a modern sensibility into terracotta, an ancient medium and a traditional craft. The talk will cover more than six decades of Himmat Shah’s creative practice.

Roobina Karode is the Director & Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India.

In early 2015, a video was released onto the internet depicting the destruction of ancient sculptures in the Mosul Museum, claiming that these sculptures were idols that needed to be destroyed, while international organisations responded that they belonged to Iraqi and world heritage and needed to be preserved. The talk will explore how religion, politics and art intersect and raise questions about the politics of culture and images in the age of the selfie.

Professor Tugendhaft is a Harper fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at the New York University in 2012 and also holds degrees in Art History and Social Thought from the University of Chicago. Professor Tugendhaft is the editor, with Josh Ellenbogen, of 'Idol Anxiety' (Stanford 2011) and recipient of the American Oriental Society's Jonas Greenfield Prize for Younger Semitists. He is currently working on a book about the Islamic State video of antiquities destruction in the Mosul Museum.

The presentation will explore the different approaches to landscape painting in Mysore in the first half of the twentieth century through the works of Venkatappa, Keshavaya, Subramanya Raju and Hanumiah amongst others. It is a time when the physical landscape of the princely state was being transformed extensively through new waterworks, architectural and industrial enterprise, the introduction of electricity and horticultural interventions, as well as the creation of special enclaves of leisure - the racially segregated “hill stations”.

Directed towards tourism and documented extensively by the camera, the transformation of the landscape became an important thematic for artists of the region.The lecture will explore the tensions between the documentary mode of representation enforced on the palace artists tied to commissioned representations of the landscape and the romantic engagement with the genre by Venkatappa who chose instead to step outside the constraints of palace patronage.

Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and currently Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Sawant works with photography, installation, and printmaking and her theoretical interests extend to writing on contemporary art. She has lectured extensively in various institutions and has been actively associated with artists’ initiatives. Her research interests include Contemporary Art and Art in Colonial India. She has been a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of London and studied at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts Paris. She recently contributed articles on Sultan Ali, Sanat Kar, Chittoprasad, among others, to the Delhi Art Gallery catalogue Manifestations (2004). She has participated in artist residencies at Braziers College, Oxford U.K. (Triangle Arts Trust) Khoj Workshop, Modinagar, Began Grond Residency, Utrecht and has had solo exhibitions in London (Harriet Green Gallery), Amsterdam (FIA), Mumbai (Lakereen) and Delhi (Art Inc.).

The talk will outline the journey of India’s foremost non-objective painter V.S. Gaitonde as he moved from figuration to a non-narrative mode of painting. It will trace his artistic trajectory, dwelling on the different phases of his work and the reasons for these painterly shifts.

The lecture is about artists response to the city of Bangalore, and have looked at the city as a text,site,an archive of myth and history,exploration of material culture and it's nature for inspiration.From early colonial landscapes and photographs of Bangalore to conceptual works artist have been looking at change and conflict of a city that has also become an adjective- Bangalored!

The lecture will throw light on the working methods of academic painters working in western India in the early twentieth century. It will draw upon autobiographies, early art histories and criticism that appeared in Marathi periodicals of the time, to examine the interface between painting, photography and “ life-study” as a studio practice.
Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and currently an Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests include Contemporary Art and Art in Colonial India.

Unbaked clay or mud is a familiar material for building houses in rural Bengal. While it promises financial affordability and an initial low-budget investment during construction, clay structures inevitably necessitate regular cycles of maintenance, especially in the face of heavy rainfall. Opting for clay or mud houses in a university campus therefore merits a closer look.

In the mid-1930s, a couple of significant mud houses came up in Rabindranath Tagore’s university campus Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, among which one of the more famed example was the Shyamali used by the poet as his residence. While the philosophic resonance of a dwelling close to the earth can be comprehended for a poet’s residence, the contemporary endeavour to construct a mud-building as a hostel for boys enrolled in Kala-Bhavana, the institute of fine arts of the university, is a project of more majestic proportion and responsibility. Adorned on the exterior with tar-coated clay-reliefs ranging from copies of famed examples of sculptures across world art to purely innovative and original compositions executed by the students of the institute themselves, the Kalo Bari or Black House is something like a sketch-book in three-dimensions where students live through their daily moments in a harmonious balance between art-historical references and the sheer delight in creative practice.

The talk intends to meditate upon this unique architectural experiment, analytically appreciating the program of its sculptural reliefs in the context of overall pedagogic foundations of Kala-Bhavana, in an attempt to relate the harmony between sculptural and architectural innovations to the period of the rhythm of the early modern in Indian visual art.

Dr. Sanjoy Kumar Mallik is currently Professor and Head, Department of History of Art, Kala-Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan (West Bengal).

A conversation between artist Dayanita Singh and Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photography at the MoMA Moderated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta

Themed around the ongoing exhibition 'Suitcase Museum' by Dayanita Singh curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta

The Indian Sculptural language in its nascent stage, during the Indus valley civilization appears to be cryptic and opaque. Since we are totally ignorant about its contents, it may not be appropriate to derive any categorical conclusions about its nature. The sculptural manifestations of Mourya period seen after a hiatus of several centuries are iconic and hieratic and fail to leave behind its legacy in the later period. It seems that the challenge of translating the complex narratology of Indian myths and fables in visual terms was accepted and successfully met with in the Sunga Satavahana era of Indian History. The sculptors of this era successfully evaded the elite idiom of the Mouryan court sculpture and strategically formulated a sculptural language coining visual metaphors and allegories to communicate the message to common viewers. The Indian sculptural language retained this potential till the medieval period; rather it became the characteristic feature of Indian sculpture. The lecture attempts to trace the semiotic features of the Sunga Satavahana sculpture and its bearing on the Indian sculptural tradition.
Dr. Deepak Kannal is a practicing sculptor and an Art Historian. He taught in the Department of Art History and Aesthetics and also was the Head of the Department and the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara.

Indian textiles since independence have mirrored dynamic social, economic and political changes. An understanding of the evolution of their making and materials are an intrinsic part of broader cultural art discourses, that provide crucial information about creative production of the decades since 1947. In this illustrated lecture, Mayank Mansingh Kaul, Delhi-based designer, writer and curator presents pivotal markers on this modern and contemporary period from the point of view of hand-made textiles in India.

Photographer Ram Rahman will present a less known aspect of his work as a designer and curator of books, posters, exhibitions and museums over the last 30 years.

Many of these projects have involved historical figures, events and cultural and political histories. Rahman designed book covers for the independent Tulika publishers for many years which has specialised in books by senior historians and social scientists. Amongst the projects he will present are the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum at her former residence in Delhi, 'Kham' - the groundbreaking innaugural exhibition of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts which looked at concepts of space in world architecture.

He will also present his work as a cultural activist designing and conceptualising exhibitions for Sahmat including 'Hum Sab Ayodhya' which is still showing as a travelling exhibit 23 years after it was made. More recent exhibition projects have presented modern architecture and photography in a historical context.

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The lecture will throw light on the decade following independence when Mumbai was enriched by a number of initiatives taken by figures such as Ebrahim Alkazi, V.R Amberkar and Baburao Sadwelkar in the field of visual arts, to engage with a wider public through publications, exhibition making and art criticism. Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and currently an Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

RSVP by email to ccardoza@bdlmuseum.org

In the critical lexicon of Western reception of Non-Western modern and contemporary art practice, terms such as “diversity” and “region” are fraught and deeply imbricated in the politics of representation of globalization. Often, their usage is double-edged in the way they are employed to valourize or dismiss artworks that are culturally different. Dr. Parul Dave Mukherjee, draws upon Homi Bhabha’s distinction of cultural diversity and cultural difference, to problematize an exhibition which took place in 2011 in Karlsruhe in Germany titled 'The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989' at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art. As its curators, Andrea Buddenseig and Peter Weibel claimed, this exhibition had inaugurated a moment in the history of contemporary art in which artworks and artists from the non-West were offered visibility in the West. Here non-West referred to a wide range of countries like Malaysia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, among others.

By focusing on contemporary Chinese and Indian artists who took part in this exhibition, Dr. Parul will compare their artworks under the rubric of ‘diversity’; how this much used and abused term is explored by the artists and the curators in their practice and curatorial intervention. Dr. Parul will also relate this moment with the 2014 Kochi Muziris Biennale in Kerala, and foreground the question of the region in the cultural politics of globalization. The larger issue raised will be how “diversity” is perceived in terms of the “region” and how the modern retake is on the verge of producing a new global apartheid between the global north and global south.

Dr. Parul Dave-Mukherji is professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She holds a PhD in Indology from Oxford University. Her publications include Towards A New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (co-edited), New Delhi, 2003 and guest edited special issue on Visual Culture of the Journal of Contemporary Thought , 17 (Summer 2003); Rethinking Modernity, (co-edited) New Delhi, 2005. Her recent publications include InFlux- Contemporary Art in Asia, (co-edited) New Delhi, Sage, 2013 and forthcoming 20th Century Indian Art, Skira (co-edited with Partha Mitter and Rakhee Balaram). Her research interests include global art history, contemporary Asian art and comparative aesthetics.

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Dr. Manisha Patil focuses on two contemporaries, Mahadev Vishwanath Dhurandhar and Antonio Xavier Trindade, who studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1880s and shaped their careers in the city of Bombay in the late 19th and early decades of the 20th century. Dr Patil discusses how these two gifted artists essayed stellar roles in the Bombay art scene and Sir J. J. School of Art in particular, including the pedagogical shifts within the art school in the closing years of the 19th century and the first four decades of the 20th. It further aims to cover the careers of the next generation of artists in their families who strived to preserve their fathers’ memories.

Dr. Manisha Patil is a curator, art historian, teacher and practicing artist. She teaches Art History at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai.

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Dilnavaz Mehta's illustrated talk will explore the narrative of the artistic, cultural and historical vignettes of a few significant prints and an overview of the factors which led to the production of these early prints of India.She will be focusing on the period starting from the seventeenth century till the nineteenth century, when India was largely visually documented through illustrations in the form of etchings, engravings, lithographs and aquatints.

Dilnavaz Mehta is a Mumbai- based art historian and collector.

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Professor Parimoo will be focusing on the parallels the Pahari School Ramayana Drawings of Ayodhya Kanda have with the language of cinema and how the artist creatively uses the well-known device of 'continuous narration’ to take the viewer through a yatra, pilgrimage, and simultaneously allowing the drawings to turn into a visual travelogue.

Professor Ratan Parimoo is a noted art teacher, painter, historian and critic who has specialized in traditional and contemporary arts of India.He is currently the Director of the L. D. Museum and N. C. Mehta Gallery, Ahmedabad.

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Presented as part of the outreach for the ongoing exhibition, ‘Silver Magic: Vintage Photographs of the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema, Portraits by J. H. Thakker’. Ram Rahman will lecture on J. H. Thakker's studio process. Focusing on the elaborate lighting and time consuming procedure of making these remarkable portraits, he will explore how the lighting was a crucial factor in creating the emotional power of this work. He will also discuss how studio lighting has entered into the street photography of Philip DiCorcia, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson in the US and in the work of Max Pinckers in India, all of whom create fictional worlds in the street with a complex relationship to documentary reality.

Ram Rahman is a photographer, artist, curator, designer and activist and a founding member of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in New Delhi. A leader in the resistance to communal and sectarian forces in India through its public cultural action, he lives and works in New Delhi.

RSVP by email to ccardoza@bdlmuseum.org

Dr. Garimella’s lecture will consider the many histories of miniature painting, its abiding significance, and the emergence in the last two decades of gallery-based artists who use miniature painting as a medium of their artistic expression.

Dr. Annapurna Garimella is a Delhi-based designer and an art historian. Her research focuses on late medieval Indic architecture and the history and practices of vernacular art forms in post-independent India. Her most recent curatorial projects include Vernacular, in the Contemporary (Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi), Faith: Manu Parekh in Benaras, 1980-2012 (Art Alive, New Delhi) and Drawing 2014 (Gallery Espace, New Delhi).

Girish Shahane will discuss how Vivekananda made the contrast between material progress and spiritual tradition the basis of an equal exchange between nations considered at opposite ends of the developmental spectrum, and examine how this notion played out in the century after Vivekananda's visit.

Attempting to move away from the conventional engagement with Dalit art that focuses on a particular artist or work, Prof. Deeptha Achar’s lecture examines the possibilities through which one could converse with the category of ‘Dalit Art’ in the interest of an emancipatory politics.

Dr. Finkel describes some of the most ancient board games, and its resonance in games that we play in the present. He will also share insights from his work recording traditional games in rural India.

In this talk, Maggie Baxter will look at Indian designers’ continuing passion for handloom fabric as well as their close collaboration with traditional weavers. Focussing on a small number of designers and fashion labels, Baxter will reflect on how age-old skills and specialist production have developed not only as a prized commodity but also as a genuine alternative to the mass of mechanical output.

Matt Packer presents two of his current projects: as the current Director at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry and as Curator of Disappearing Acts (Lofoten International Art Festival, 2015). He introduces the contexts of Northern Ireland and Northern Norway, and discusses some curatorial approaches and artistic practices that have applied themselves to these contexts.

B.V. Suresh presents his work from the last 15 years, and discusses the developments in his oeuvre: across painting, video and installation. Through this interactive session, the renowned artist guides you through other dimensions that emerge through his multi-media approach. B.V. Suresh’s corpus of different technical explorations and digital sensualities, draws on his interventions as well as the viewers.

In this lecture Shukla Sawant examines the relationship of landownership and landscape representation in the works of the founder of Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore and his pedagogical partner Nandalal Bose. Taking a hermeneutic view of Tagore’s writings and his relationship with the environment, Sawant’s lecture will throw light in particular, on the mural Halakarshan by Nandalal Bose.

Bengaluru has a reputation for being a city with a vibrant contemporary art scene, with independent art spaces that nurture artists and support artist led projects beyond galleries. Jayaram’s presentation looks at what makes it work; the people who make it happen and the factors that support it.

In this lecture, art historian Professor Parul Dave-Mukherji debates the future of nationalist art histories in the face of an ever shrinking world. She especially questions the evolution of a narrative for Indian art, when the logic of the uni-linear narrative itself is at stake. Looking at the change in the thrust of art historiography from “when” to “where” in contemporary debates around globalization, Prof. Mukherji studies the consequent shift in art practice and the writing of art history in India. She further discusses the influence of time and space on contemporary artists, and what they in turn have to offer art critics and historians.

Dr. Jain aims to put forth a comparative analysis of the Goddess myth, in the Sanskrit Devi Mahatmya and in the regional versions of the story and their subsequent visual representation in art and ritual. Through varied visual sources, this lecture deals with one of the most intriguing iconographic motifs in Indian art: the Goddess killing the buffalo and the goddess Kali, or Durga, trampling upon the body of her consort Shiva. Dr. Jain points out that while these motifs are amply represented in the scriptural Hindu sculptures, in later painting, as well as in the vernacular living traditions, they are nearly absent in the living Brahmanic ritual practices.

Dr. Jyotindra Jain is an art and cultural historian and museologist. He studied Cultural Anthropology, Indian Studies and Ancient Indian History in Mumbai/ Bombay and Vienna, where he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1972. Dr. Jain was Director of the Crafts Museum, Delhi, Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and is now at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi. Dr. Jain has been an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow, a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study for World Religions, Harvard University, USA. His teaching and research encompass the entire breadth of folk and tribal art, Indian popular visual culture, ritual dynamics and cultural institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. He has published a number of books on Indian folk art, including Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression in Mithila Painting, Other Master: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India and Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World.

The lecture will be held on Saturday, 18th April 2015, in the Education Centre, at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum. Do join us for tea in the Plaza at 6:30 pm, followed by the lecture at 6:30 pm. Since the seating is limited, we request you to please RSVP with us by email (ccardoza@bdlmuseum.org). We look forward to seeing you at the lecture.

Internationally renowned architect Steven Holl will discuss the winning proposal for the new Mumbai Modern wing. Widely recognised for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity and to utilize the unique qualities of each project to create a concept-driven design, Steven seamlessly integrates new projects into contexts with particular cultural and historic importance. This lecture aims to bring the design of the new building into focus and to introduce the city of Mumbai to Steven’s ongoing and past projects.

Considered to be one of America's most important architects, Steven Holl has been recognized with architecture's most prestigious awards and prizes. In 2002 the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institute, awarded him their prestigious National Design Award in Architecture. In 2001 France bestowed the Grande Médaille d'Or upon him, for Best Architect of the Academy of Architecture. Steven Holl is a tenured Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. He has lectured and exhibited widely and has published numerous texts, including most recently, Urban Hopes (2013). The office has recently won a number of international design competitions including the new design for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and the new Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa, among others.

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938), was a multifarious genius whose contribution to the modern art movement in Bengal has been greatly overlooked, in favour of his brother, Abanindranath. His works, from 1907 to 1930 – most comprehensively preserved at the Rabindra Bharati Society – are an exciting record of Gaganendranath’s artistic journey. Dr. Parimoo attempts to trace Gaganendranath’s oeuvre through four distinct phases: from his sketches and illustrations for Rabindranath’s plays (1907-10), to his ‘nocturnes’ and experiments in black ink with the Japanese technique ‘sumi-e’ (1911-15), and then on to his satirical drawings and Himalayan scenes (1915-21). Gaganendranath emerged as a rebel in his final years, gradually moving away from traditional and naturalistic language, towards cubism and abstraction. From 1921 until his death, he also employed mysterious effects to depict fairy tales and personal dreams: streaks of light and mysterious shadows. Dr. Parimoo’s presentation attempts to draw on the shared creative spirit between Gaganendranath and his uncle, and study the influence of Rabindranath’s theatre and poetry.

Prof. Ratan Parimoo is a noted art teacher, painter, historian and critic who has specialised in traditional and contemporary arts of India. He was Head of the Department of Art History and Aesthetics from 1966 to 1991 at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, and was instrumental in setting up the Department’s Archive. As a Commonwealth scholar, Prof. Parimoo studied History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (1960-63). He received the Rockfeller Grant to study in the USA in 1974. He was invited to participate in the twenty-third World Congress of the International Society of Education through Art held in Australia in 1968. He is the editor of the encyclopaedic critical anthology, Creative Arts in Modern India. In 2010 he edited Historical Development of Contemporary Indian Art 1880-1947. His publications include Paintings of the Three Tagores: Abanindranath, Gaganendranath and Rabindranath; Studies in Modern Indian Art; Sculptures of Sheshasayi Vishnu; and Essays on New Art History: Studies in Indian Sculpture. He is currently the Director of the L.D. Museum, and N. C. Mehta Gallery, Ahmedabad.

As a well-known curator of African contemporary art curator with a focus on environment, Meskerem Assegued, will discuss her work in anthropology, as well as the major exhibitions she has curated in Ethiopia and in the other parts of Africa and the world. In this lecture presentation, Ms Assegued discusses her ongoing projects, including the founding of the Zoma Contemporary Art Center (ZCAC) and its artistically sculpted center at Harla, Ethiopia. She makes a case for sharing knowledge through artistic endeavours and open discussion as necessary tools to mitigate the adverse human impact on the environment. Ms Assegued’s practice reiterates the importance of understanding history and the ability of art to bring the past into the present so that it can help the future. Further, she delves into the history of ancient sculpture and architecture of India and draws parallels to her work.

Meskerem Assegued is an anthropologist, curator, and writer. In 2002, she founded ZCAC (Zoma Contemporary Art Center), an artist residency located in Addis Ababa and Harla, a small village south of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Over the last 16 years, Meskerem has curated numerous exhibitions both in Ethiopia and abroad. These include Giziawi #1, an art happening in Addis Ababa (2002); Devine Light by David Hammons at ZCAC (2003); Green Flame with Elias Sime, Ernesto Novelo, and Julie Mehretu; and the co-curated Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart by Elias Sime with Peter Sellars (2009). She was a member of the selection committee for the 2004 Dak’Art Biennale and the 2007 Venice Biennale African Pavilion, and is currently doing research for an upcoming exhibition at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany.

Maharana Amar Singh II of Mewar State (1698-1710) is credited with introducing a number of reforms that established law and order in the state. He determined the status of 16 Umravs, and 32 Sardars as 1st and 2nd grade nobles and fixed their territories as Thikanas or Jagirs. Among these, a few like Devgarh and Badnore are noteworthy. Miniature painting flourished in these feudatories, governed and influenced by the grandeur of Mewar and its art of miniature painting. The style that developed in their ateliers of painting was within the tradition and style of the parent kingdom, and is today classified as a sub-style of the main stream. According to Prof. Andhare, style is the index of identification of any painting which can determine its age, school, subject matter, etc. Each work is an amalgamation of elements floating around at that point in time, and by studying the evolution of the composition of such elements into well-formed patterns scholars are able to recognise each specific school or a gharana, as in Indian classical music. In this illustrated presentation, Prof. Andhare discusses a sub-sect that developed in one such thikana of Deogarh.

Dr. Shridhar Andhare is a former curator of paintings at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangralaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), Mumbai; former director of Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum, Ahmedabad; and honorary director of NC Mehta Gallery, Ahmedabad. He specializes in the history of Indian miniature painting, museum installation, and restoration of paintings. He is the author of The Chronology of Mewar Paintings (1987), Deogarh Painting (1977), Bundi Painting (1971), A Catalogue of Miniature Paintings of Sanjay Sharma Museum, Jaipur (also in press) and Jain Monumental Painting (in Press- March 2015). In addition to this, a number of his articles on Jain Art have been published in Indian and international books.

In his lecture presentation, Mr. Dungarpur will highlight the contradictory reality between cinema’s huge popularity in India and the simultaneous, colossal loss of India’s moving image legacy. Mr. Dungarpur proposes that the lack of awareness about the need to preserve and restore our cinematic heritage has already led much of it to be lost forever. His research and understanding of this urgent need led him to establish the Film Heritage Foundation, with its mission to save India’s cinematic heritage, and promote its preservation through local and international collaboration.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder of Film Heritage Foundation, is a filmmaker, archivist and restorer who passionately believes in the cause of film preservation and restoration. He is the director of the award-winning documentary, Celluloid Man, which pays tribute to India’s legendary archivist P.K. Nair while celebrating the history of Indian cinema and its much needed preservation and restoration. Shivendra collaborated with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation to restore Uday Shankar’s Kalpana and Dr. Lester James Peries’ Nidhanaya, and with the British Film Institute (BFI) on the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger. Shivendra was invited to give the 11th Dadasaheb Phalke Lecture at the Nehru Centre in London. He has participated in several panel discussions and master-classes with archivists and restorers from around the world. With the Film Preservation & Restoration School India, due to take place early next year in Mumbai, Shivendra hopes to build an indigenous resource of film archivists and restorers.

Rahman places the work of the famed late photographer Raghubir Singh in the context of Indian and international photography. Too long out of sight since his premature death, Rahman discusses his work and his artistic development through a personal prism, sharing many personal insights through his long and close association with Raghubir.

Ram Rahman is a photographer and activist. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later completed a degree in Graphic Design from Yale University School of Art in 1979. His most recent solo shows include, Bioscope: Scenes from an Eventful Life presented by Bodhi Art in 2008 and Visions of India: Photographs by Ram Rahman at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2002. Amongst the shows Rahman has curated are Heat: Moving Pictures Visions, Phantasms and Nightmares at Bose Pacia in 2003 and Noor Devyani Krishna, A Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. Rahman is one of the founding members of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in New Delhi, a leader in the resistance to communal and sectarian forces in India through its public cultural action. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

A surgeon by training, Dr. George Birdwood was a visionary and able administrator who contributed significantly to the growth of 19th century Bombay. He was an ardent supporter of the arts, history and culture, whose efforts were responsible for Indian art gaining recognition in the West. Dr. Gupchup will discuss Dr.Birdwood’s vision for the arts and his prominent role in the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the city’s oldest, now the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum. She will highlight the complexities and vicissitudes that the Museum planners faced and Dr. Birdwood’s effort in steering the Museum project through troubled times, whilst carrying forward his vision of making the Museum a true 'college of Inquiry' with the support of his friend and the Joint Secretary of the Museum, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad.

A relationship between the creation of art and the creation of memory is a commonly observed feature in societies around the world. Indeed artists themselves in many places work as much from recollection as directly from a model in front of them. In this lecture, Professor Mack explores the theme of art and memory across a number of cultures, ancient and modern, and in the work of individual artists from well-known ones such as Giacometti to largely unidentified indigenous sculptors working outside the western canon. It discusses different kinds of memory objects and practices including traditions of portraiture and of memorials of various types. For this presentation, Professor Mack draws on his experience of curating an exhibition which celebrated the British Museum’s 250th anniversary, to reflect on the double perspective of museums as sites of history and as sites of memory.

Since his death in 1967, Indo-Portuguese painter Angelo da Fonseca has been dismissed by most art historians as a provincial figure of interest only to practicing Christians. During his life, by contrast, Fonseca’s application of Hindu and Buddhist conventions to ostensibly Christian scenes was considered so controversial that he was driven out of Goa amid charges of heresy, and his work continued throughout his career to emphasise the connections, not the divisions, between all religious traditions. For the first time, Fonseca will appear in a major survey of modern Indian art this year. Dr. Arrowsmith will introduce some of Fonseca’s more experimental works, many of which have never been exhibited, and will explain why the artist is worthy not just of national, but of global recognition.

Begun in 2010, the Sethusamudram Project was a 3 year collaborative art project initiated by Theertha International Artists Collective, Colombo, Sri Lanka, and 1.Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery, Bengaluru. The Project collectively developed and envisioned programs to engage with and address the highly complex and variegated history and emotions surrounding the relations between India and Sri Lanka. It drew on the links, similarities, and shared anxieties, emotions and histories between the two geographical areas, and covered a wide area of study that included society, politics, history, religion, mythology. Through this illustrated talk, Suresh conveys how the Project showed that it is only “through regional interaction and dialogue that we hope to redeem their trauma. Art connects, heals, and can often be a catharsis for both the artist and the viewer”.

The recent publication of InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia, provides a point of departure to raise questions about the current state of contemporary art in Asia. Parul aims to examine the shift in its critical reception, from the time of its emergence in the 1990s to the present, through a global recession and the challenge posed by post-nationalist geography. She questions the extent to which the aspiration to move beyond a Eurocentric definition of Asia to an inter-regional understanding has been fulfilled in its art practice and critical reception. She will focus on the recent works by N Pushpamala and the Raqs Media Collective in the way their practice has engaged with the category of “Asia” though travel and discourse.

The practice of erecting wayside shrines which dates back to ancient India still proliferates in contemporary times, and in metropolitan cities such as Mumbai. Not only do these ubiquitous sanctums persist in the midst of drastic modern changes that often seem to be at odds with traditional locations, aesthetics and purposes; some of them even surpass established temples, churches and mosques in their popularity. Their persistence could be attributed to the fact that these shrines allow a culturally diversified, socially and linguistically multi-tiered, and fluctuating migrant population to engage with the city. Vidya’s extensive study, conducted over a period of two years, delves into some of the issues related to the making of roadside shrines: their ownership, aesthetic deliberations, spatiality, as well as their economic and political ramifications. Through this study of roadside shrines, she attempts to document the conditions of modern city life and the shifting social, religious, and emotional boundary lines that define this city.

For the recently concluded 24th Europalia biennial celebrating India, Gayatri Sinha curated Water as an art walk in Liège, Belgium. The festival which ties up with the Government of the featured country collaborated here with the ICCR and the Indian Ministry of Culture to showcase a multidisciplinary programme. Water was primarily staged in sites surrounding Liège’s water bodies: a 17th century museum and an 18th century banker’s house located on the banks of river Meuse formed an integral part of the exhibition. Gayatri drew on the century-old pan-Indian discussion on water, re-imagining it through video works, photographs and sculptural installations. The exhibition was a conflation of histories: sea trade with Europe, migration, the poetics of water in the Indian tradition as well as its deeply problematic social reading in contemporary India. Through her lecture, Gayatri will also examine the issue of the state as sponsor, and issues of meaning and aesthetics in a transcultural context.

Girish Shahane was the artistic director of the third edition of Art Chennai, a visual arts festival founded and run by Sanjay Tulsyan. Art Chennai 2014 consisted of exhibitions spread across two dozen locations, including public spaces, malls, educational institutions and art galleries. Shahane will speak about the challenges and rewards of curating shows for this festival.

N.S. Bendre (1910 - 1992), who trained in Indore and was considered a master of many pictorial media, achieved tremendous fame in India during the 1930s. A trip to the US and Europe in 1947/48 gave him first-hand experience of the European art movements. With such accomplishments, in 1950 he became the first Head of the Painting Department at the newly established Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Bendre emerged as their most influential teacher and inspired many young artists during his 16 years there, before settling in Mumbai in 1966. Slightly older than the generation of Progressive Artists Group, Bendre completely changed art education and became one of the pioneers of modern Indian art. In this lecture, Prof. Parimoo, one of Bendre’s first students, focuses on the latter’s work and teaching in Baroda.

Peter Fischli will talk about his journey as an artist which has been greatly influenced by Robert Venturi’s book Learning from Las Vegas, in which the Learning stands for modernism/ Bauhaus and Las Vegas stands for post modernism. He will speak about growing up in a house shaped by the Bauhaus that his father built in 1930 and how he escaped from it with the help of Venturi’s book. He sees both modernism and post modernism as a big influence in his work. By showing specific works, he will show Fischli/Weiss is a larger frame of time. In association with Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

Georges Rousse began making installations in the types of abandoned or derelict buildings that have long held an attraction for him creating ephemeral, one-of-a-kind artworks by transforming these sites into pictorial spaces that are visible only in his photographs. It was his discovery of Land Art and Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground that set him on his current trajectory that explores the relationship of painting to space. Georges’ presentation will discuss his works, which call upon painting, design, sculpture and architectural construction to effect a transformation in the building. It will trace his process, from an empty space and drawings to a photographic work, which will be the lasting impression of the place and a document to its poetic metamorphosis. Georges is in India for a project with an NGO that aims to transform a space in the Shivaji Nagar slum with his signature artwork.