Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism in India

Speakers: Deeptha Achar, Shivaji Panikkar, Nalini Malani and Tushar Joag
Discussant: Sudhanva Deshpande

February 22, 2013 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

The disciplinary understandings of contemporary Indian art are being challenged in our time by experiences, narratives and strategies designated as activism. The book, Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (Ed: Deeptha Achar & Shivaji Panikkar, New Delhi: Tulika, 2012) explores this space between art and activism without letting the discourse being reduced either to a simple formulation about art in activism or activism in art. The focus, instead, is on interrogating the politics of aesthetics as well as the connections between the visual and other disciplines. Deriving its insights from methodological moves made in the fields of art history/criticism, culture studies and visual culture, the book foregrounds the links between the practice of art and the urgencies of the public world trying to bridge, in the process, the space that reaches across the academy and all that is known as activism in our time. The different sections in the book explore the complex relationship between art-producing practices and frameworks of viewing that seek alignment with the various struggles around caste, community, gender and sexuality.

Keeping the context of the book in mind, the panel discussion will examine the role of the artist-citizen in articulating a language of protest and dissent, lending a critical charge to political and cultural questions. The book is a timely introduction in the field, given the paucity of scholarly materials, and the discussion proposes to draw on the terrain of art and activism, seen together.

Deeptha Achar teaches at the Department of English, M.S. University of Baroda (MSU) Vadodara.

Shivaji Panikkar teaches at the School of Culture & Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), New Delhi.

Nalini Malini is an artist, based in Mumbai.

Tushar Joag is an artist, based in Mumbai.

Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch and editor at LeftWord Books, New Delhi