Plural Modernities? The Articulation of Cultural Difference in Modern and Contemporary Art

Speaker: Girish Shahane
Discussant: Mortimer Chatterjee

February 19, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

The way modern Indian art and Indian culture are viewed in globally important art institutions have changed. This is evident from recent displays at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Venice Biennale, London’s Tate Modern, the New York Guggenheim and Rotterdam’s Witte de With. No longer are indebtedness and belatedness the only prisms through which Indian and other non-Western forms of modernism are viewed. The examples of Nasreen Mohamedi, V.S. Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta illustrate the shift in understanding.

Will the new openness result in a more widespread revaluation of culturally inflected modernism? This talk will refer to the sentimentalism of twentieth-century Indian art, an emotiveness that departs from established norms of modernism. The artists cited are Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore, Chittaprosad, S.L. Parasher, Nasreen Mohamedi, Amar Kanwar, and A. Balasubramaniam. Further, the biennial as the primary mode of the dissemination of contemporary art will be investigated with questions of how well-equipped it is to accommodate cultural difference.

Girish Shahane has degrees in English literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University, and Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He was the editor and later consulting editor of Art India magazine. He is on the faculty of art history courses run by the Bhau Daji Lad Museum and Jnanapravaha. Shahane was Director of the Skoda Prize for Indian Contemporary Art from 2011 to 2013, and Artistic Director of Art Chennai 2014. He is currently Artistic Director of the India Art Fair, and writes a weekly column for Scroll.

Mortimer Chatterjee received his Masters in the History of Indian Art and Architecture from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He co-founded the art gallery Chatterjee & Lal, which focuses on the work of emerging artists and historical material. Chatterjee has been published widely in art publications and lectures on several platforms.