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.

October 27, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

Ecological time is mysterious. How does ecology act in a dialectical Darwinian way, over many lifetimes, before it adapts, or has that changed with the advent of man? We are said to be in the age of the sixth extinction which is caused by humans. As a collective force, we have now acquired the power to change the natural order of forces. The Anthropocene says that by the power of capital and technology, we could be riding the back of the tiger, with an illusion that we are steering it.

Our ideas of ecology are based on our histories, and how it makes us now. Nature has turned into a generic category and is ‘acted’ upon. It has to be seen, appreciated, exploited, explored, imagined or ignored, but not necessarily lived. Akin to what patriarchy does to the figure of a woman, Nature is often put on a pedestal and admired from afar. Possibly, we could be caught up in the web of language itself, and what is signified as Nature. It needs to be seen as a set of relationships rather than a boundary, and re-imagining the idea of Nature could be the key to future sustainability.

In this discussion, Ravi Agarwal and Ranjit Hoskote will converse on ideas of art, ecology and sustainability, linking them to the Agarwal’s art practice and environmental activism. The program is organized in conjunction with the artist’s ongoing exhibition, Else all will be still, at The Guild, Alibaug.

Ravi Agarwal is a photographer artist, writer, curator and environmental activist. He explores issues of urban space, ecology and capital in interrelated ways, and works with photographs, video, performance, on-site installations, and public art. Agarwal has participated in several shows in international galleries, museums and biennales, and writes extensively on ecological issues. He is the founder of the leading Indian environmental NGO, Toxics Link.

Ranjit Hoskote is a cultural theorist, curator and poet. He is the author of more than 25 books and has curated over 30 exhibitions since 1994. He served on the Jury of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). With Maria Hlavajova, he is editor of Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (2015). Hoskote has collaborated with Ravi Agarwal on several occasions, including three curated exhibitions.

September 24, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

This paper examines the role of artistic intervention in contemporary museums in the UK. It revisits and undertakes a critical review of an interactive exhibition designed and curated by Megha Rajguru From Shrine to Plinth, held at the Croydon Clocktower in Croydon, London in 2008. A series of artworks displayed in the museum space interrupted the museum’s institutional curatorial methods and explored the dichotomies of the worshipped and collected object.

This paper addresses the classification of religious artefacts as art and curatorial mechanisms in the museum that generate the secular act of close viewing and observation. It compares this with the temple ritual of viewing the deity. Emerging from two separate viewing traditions, the post-enlightenment inquisitive gaze in the former, and the transcendental viewing or darshan in the latter, this paper addresses the role of art in exploring intangible meanings of objects. It reflects upon visitors’ ritualistic behaviours in exhibition From Shrine to Plinth and argues that meanings of artefacts are revealed through human interactions with them. This is where the function of artistic intervention in the museum becomes most poignant, as it offers the opportunity to address untold stories and histories.

This paper makes a contribution to the study of curating objects of worship, which is an ongoing debate in museum studies, and offers alternative modes of curatorial thinking that are closely aligned to art practice.

Dr. Megha Rajguru is a Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her current research is a study of South Asian modernismin design and visual culture. She is also a practicing artist and has exhibited works in site-specific situations in New York and Brighton since 2012. She has been part of an art collective Remaking Picasso’s Guernica that recreated Guernica as a textile protest banner between 2012-2014. The banner was exhibited at Pallant House Gallery in the UK in the exhibition Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War.

September 5, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

The painter Mahadev Vishwanath Dhurandhar (1867–1944) was associated with the J. J. School of Art Bombay for over forty years; first as a student and then as an art educator and colonial functionary. A prolific painter who expanded his activities to writing on his contemporaries and also penned his autobiography in Marathi, Dhurandhar was a part of an intricate web of interactions that shaped the early 20th century art-world in India. Viewed often as a member of the comprador bourgeoisie, his legacy is however much more complex. The presentation will throw light on the strategies adopted by him to breech structures of colonial authority, through subtle contestations and participation in parallel publics that developed on the fringes of officially mandated art societies and institutions.

Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and currently Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests include modernism and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia; art in colonial India; print cultures and photography; postcolonial criticism and historiography. She has ten solo shows to her credit and is a founder member of the Indian Printmaker’s Guild. She was a working group member of Khoj International Artists’ Association for seven years and taught at the Fine Arts department of Jamia Millia Islamia (1989-2001) before joining JNU in 2001.

August 13, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

The lecture investigates central aspects of the globalization of the art world: the circulation of the biennale cultural form, its appropriation in many geographical locations, and the contents and questions generated through these processes. It examines the 9th Shanghai Biennale entitled ‘Reactivation’ (2012), and within this large exhibition, focuses on the Mumbai pavilion as one of latest chapters in the brief history of the contemporary art traffic between India and China.‘Reactivation’ was held at the Power Station of Art, formerly the Pavilion of Future at the Shanghai World Expo 2010.

The speaker analyzes the representation of Mumbai in Shanghai by deploying a multi-scalar framework encompassing the Shanghai Biennale’s ‘macro-biography’, and the circuits of people, objects, and imaginations inaugurated by the making of the pavilion. To understand the connections between the artworks and the Biennale, the speaker draws on encounters with the pavilion artists that occurred in Mumbai, New Delhi, and virtually. The lecture aims to rethink questions of knowledge, intimacy, and place vis-à-vis accounts of the circulation of the biennale form within Asia and beyond.

Manuela Ciotti received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE). She is currently Associate Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, and ‘Framing the Global’ Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has an extensive fieldwork experience and has written on the topics of modernity, subaltern communities, gender and politics, and more recently, on art and society. Under the ‘Framing the Global’ initiative, she is carrying out a multi-sited ethnography focusing on exhibitions of modern and contemporary art from India held in Asia, Europe and the USA. Ciotti has published several essays in journals such as Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Modern Asian Studies, Feminist Review, The Journal of Asian Studies, and Third World Quarterly among others, and is the author of the book entitled Retro-Modern India: Forging the Low-Caste Self (2010).

May 29, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

Yashwant Deshmukh, now in his early fifties, looks back at and beyond the evolution of his practice that spans over 25 years. Deshmukh’s canvases reverberate what his innumerable drawings silently observe.  A brief interaction with his work exhibited so far might lead to traces of ‘style’ – muted colours that subdue layers of texture and almost geometric shapes marked with bold outlines. These impressions do last, as Deshmukh maintains a steady pace. During the two and half decades, a gradual process of arriving at an accomplishment in form and style, sensing a comfort zone and then a departure, can be sensed in his oeuvre.

The first departure the artist made was from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, where he was trained. He took to drawing with a resolve to unlearn. The solitude ended after many months, and so did the artist’s search for subject. His drawings and the imminent paintings had revealed to him that the subject is within. He became a narrator of his own visual experiences. His technique facilitated aggregation of the personal. The artist took geometry to a literally impossible task- to evoke feelings. The presentation and conversation is aimed at mapping the points of departure in Deshmukh’s work. It is a journey to the expanses of Vidarbha region, to a distant village in Vasai, to Mumbai where he lives and works and to the cities and countries he visited while his work grew beyond cultural codes.

Yashwant Deshmukh is a painter based in Mumbai, and the basic element of his work is the interrelationship of form and space. He graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1988, and received the prestigious Bendre- Husain Scholarship in 1993. Deshmukh’s work has been a part of several group shows in leading art galleries in India and abroad, including the 3^rd Biennial Bose Pacia Modern Prize, New York, 2001. His seminal solo exhibitions at Jehangir Art Gallery and Bombay Art Gallery in 2008 received wide critical acclaim, and his latest participation includes group shows at Gallery Espace, New Delhi and Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai in 2012.

Abhijeet Tamhane is a journalist whose writings present keen observations of the socio-political undercurrents in visual arts. He writes for Art India, Art &Deal and Varta and has interviewed various artists including Yashwant Deshmukh for a Thailand based magazine in 2007. He introduces firsthand experiences on the Venice Biennial and Documenta through writings for Marathi readers. Kalaa Bhaan (making sense of art) is a column he has widely contributed to, and currently he is the editor of two opinion pages of the Loksatta, Mumbai.

Mahendra Damle is a painter, writer and educationist. He has consistently developed pedagogical tools in visual arts for over twenty years and has taught art, architecture, fashion, furniture design and animation. ‘Art Thinking’ is a programme designed by him for schools to create integrated learning through art. Currently, he heads the department of Fine Arts at Rachana Sansad, Mumbai and contributes as a columnist in Loksatta titled ‘Kalnyache Drushya Valane,’ that explores the nuances of visual perception.

March 27, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Studio X, Mumbai

Parvathi Nayar’s uniquely hybrid work examines the narratives of spatial relationships: both the internal spaces within our bodies, and the external in which we live, and often through the prism of science and technology. By treating her artworks as sites of dialogue where different elements – the scientific and the intuitive, the historical and the contemporary – meet and converse, she encourages viewers to re-experience once-familiar perspectives.

Prajakta Potnis’s work dwells between the intimate world of an individual and the world outside, which is separated sometimes only by a wall. She refers to the wall as a witness to history that has traces of inhabitance embedded within. She tries to contextualize the wall as a membrane through which imperceptible elements pass and affect the psyche of individuals, addressing private and social anxieties.

In Fluid Conversations, the artists will present selected works to introduce their practice and specifically focus on their exciting site-specific installations at the Kochi Biennale 2014-15. Exploring the linkages between inner and outer spaces, the conversation will trace multiple trajectories in their practice that find a resonance in their projects at the Biennale.

Based in Chennai, Parvathi Nayar brings together elements of draughtsmanship, video, photography, sculpture, and painting in her art practice. She received her MFA from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design (UK) on a Chevening scholarship and has exhibited widely. Her latest work, ‘The Fluidity of Horizons’ is an installation of drawings and sound at the Kochi Biennale 2014-15.

Prajakta Potnis is based in Mumbai and her practice encompasses painting, site-specific sculptural installations, and public art interventions. Her work has shown across a range of platforms, and her latest solo show, ‘The Kitchen Debate’ (2014) was held at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. This sculptural installation travelled to the Kochi Biennale 2014-15, embedding itself in the local context of Kerala.

Admission free and open to all.

March 21, 2015 | 4.30 pm
The Hive, Mumbai

March 20, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai

CAMP talks about the mutual development of ideas, collaborations and “encounter strategies” in As If (I- IV), their series of ongoing exhibitions across Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai. As If is expanded upon as the title and framing device of these series of shows. In conjunction with their exhibition, As If – IV Night for Day, at Chemould Prescott Road, the Mohile Parikh Center presents a talk, followed by a walkthrough by CAMP.

In early film craft, Day for Night was when night scenes were shot in the day – a trick of necessity. Night for Day propagates this idea in the reverse direction. Screens fill the space with electric, sonic, filmic and other uncategorisable works from 2003 to 2015 that took place in the nighttime worlds of Bombay, Delhi, Kabul, Dakar, London, and other non-places exploring time, energy and imagination on the other side of the ‘every day’. CAMP brings into the gallery their version of what was once called the ‘virtual’, which not so long ago broke the horizon of what is (or what could have been) possible to see, hear or sense.

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Bombay in 2007. It has been producing fundamental new work in video and film, electronic media, and public art forms. CAMP’s work has shown in prestigious galleries, biennales, seminars, and film festivals across the world, and also in streets, markets, and their own rooftop cinema. From their base in Chuim village, they co-host the online archives http://pad.ma and http://indiancine.ma, among other long-duree activities.

March 14, 2015 | 4.30 pm
Bombay Electric, Mumbai