The objective of the series is to present an overview of the painter’s background, personality, work, the sources of their inspiration, and his or her technique to help the viewer get some insight into the painter’s work. This series has been produced by M/s. Cine Arts India and directed by the well-known film director and television producer, K. Bikram Singh. This screening will present three parts of the series, each of 23 minutes duration, featuring Manjit Bawa, Krishen Khanna and A. Ramachandran.

Speakers: Sugata Ray and Atreyee Gupta
Discussant: Abhay Sardesai

January 14, 2016 | 6.30 pm
G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Mumbai

Lecture I:
Along with droughts and famines of unprecedented intensity that ensued with the formation of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), the seventeenth century saw the emergence of new forms of riparian architecture in Mathura, the primary pilgrimage center in north India where the divine Krishna is believed to have spent his youth. Emerging from the interstices of material practices, theological economies, and cataclysmic environmental transformation, the hydroaesthetics of riparian architecture in Mathura, then, presents us with an exemplary site that produces an alternative ideation of an ecological art history that brings together the natural and the architectural. In such an ideation, the act of beholding flowing water becomes the crucial link that connects localized aesthetic practices with an expanded nonhuman transterritorial arena of water scarcity and droughts that emerged across the world in the geological epoch of the Little Ice Age.

Lecture II:
With the formalization of the Damodar Valley Corporation in 1948, a multipurpose hydro-engineering project on the Damodar river was set in motion. This was the first of several river valley projects that would be initiated in Nehruvian India to achieve rapid industrial, technological, agricultural, and scientific progress. This talk examines the ocular processes internal to this reconfiguration of India’s waterscape and horizon line, one that transpired in the early post-colonial years. This narrative unfolds through three interlinked vignettes. We begin with models, posters, and woodcut diagrams of the Damodar project that were circulated in the early 1940s by Meghnad Saha, the Bengali atomic scientist and hydro-engineering enthusiast. We then turn to Sunil Janah, whose camera most pithily capturedthe developmental ocularity that this talk seeks to describe. The last vignette focuses on Le Corbusier, whose mandate from Nehru included the aestheticization of the Bhakra dam through architectonic interjections. At face value, it may appear that we cannot escape the centrality of the ocular in the making of the postcolonial development-scape. But, as we will see, neither can the technocratic evade the disruptive potential of the aesthetic.

Sugata Ray is assistant professor of South Asian art and architecture in the History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley. Ray’s current research focuses on the intersections between early modern painting practices, architectural cultures, transterritorial ecologies, and climate histories leading to his current monograph Sensorium and Sacrament in a Hindu Pilgrimage Town: Theological Aesthetics, Ecology, and the Islamicate, 1550–1850. Recent publications include essays in journals such as The Art Bulletin and Art History, chapters in books on critical eco-art histories, and a forthcoming co-edited volume titled Liquescent Materiality: Water in Global South Asia. His other research interest focuses on colonial art history and museum practices and leads to a new book project Arranging Hindostan: The Contingency of Knowledge at the Margins of the Early Modern. A recent essay from this project was awarded the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s 2015 Margaret Ševčenko Prize.

Dr. Atreyee Gupta’s interest in modernism’s global aesthetic flows arises from her academic experiences in India (Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda), the US (University of Minnesota), and Europe (Haus der Kunst, Munich and Forum TransregionaleStudien, Berlin), shaping her current book projectThe Promise of the Modern: Anti-illusionism, Abstraction, and Inter-cultural Modernism (India, ca. 1937-1968). Excerpts from this project have appeared in Partha Mitter et al. eds. Twentieth-Century Indian Art (2016), Art Journal (2014), and Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (2015), among others. Analogous coedited volumes include Postwar – Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (with OkwuiEnwezor and Ulrich Wilmes). Her ongoing curatorial projects include Converging Cultures: Asian Diasporas and Latin American and Caribbean Art from 1940 to the Present (Art Museum of the Americas). Presently, Atreyee is a Fellow affiliated with Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Program, Forum TransregionaleStudien, Berlin.