Exhibition as Texts: Archiving the Studio

Speaker: Akansha Rastogi
Discussants: Zasha Colah and Ashok Sukumaran

June 14, 2012 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

Archiving the Studio is an ongoing curatorial experiment that explores archiving as a form of writing, by attempting to archive spaces of artistic production. As recipient of the IFA-Khoj Curatorial Grant 2011, Akansha Rastogi curated an exhibition ‘Parenthetic Exercises: Archiving Ranbir Kaleka’s studio’ as the first edition of Archiving the Studio project at Khoj International Artists Association. This exhibition was conceptualized as a text in parenthesis while circumventing the main text. The curator inhabited and archived the artist Ranbir Kaleka’s studio during the two-month residency-period. In the process she created five Documents/Exhibits for the culminating exhibition. Each exhibit was an appendix to the artist’s practice, studio space, his body of work and sites of artistic production. Positioning the curator as an artist, researcher, archivist and parasite, the exhibition played on the idea of archival exhaustion, with artist as material.

In her presentation, Rastogi will re-look at her curatorial proposition and discuss the challenges undertaken and yet to be addressed. She will expand on the performative relationship between the Documents/Exhibits presented in the exhibition space and the main text/Ranbir Kaleka’s oeuvre. She will also attempt to locate her project and methodology within the larger field of possibilities it offers in terms of the multiplicity of art historical readings and exhibition making.

Akansha Rastogi is a researcher working on Indian modern and contemporary art. She is currently an Associate Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. She has previously worked as a researcher and assistant curator with Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art, and Delhi Art Gallery on the publication and exhibition of the artist Chittaprosad. She is also part of a collective ‘WALA’, recipient of FICA Public Art Grant 2011.

Zasha Colah is interested in cultural sovereignty and projects that encourage collaborative art practice. She co-founded blackrice in 2008 in Nagaland, and the Clark House Initiative in Bombay in 2010, after studying art history at Oxford university and curatorial studies at the RCA, London. She was the curator of modern Indian art at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation at the CSMVS museum and was head of Public Programs at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.

Ashok Sukumaran is a media artist and architect. He studied at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and has a masters in media art from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work, which explores the interaction of digital technologies and physical spaces, often imagines a “what could have been” between the disciplines of interactive art, cinema, and architecture