The Art of Rummana Hussain

Speaker: Sasha Altaf
Discussant: Ram Rahman

May 10, 2013 | 6.30 pm
Goethe Hall, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

Rummana Hussain’s (1952 – 1999) politically aware, philosophically provocative, yet poetic and self-referential art presents to us a complex perspective of a lived experience. Since 1992, Hussain pioneered performance as a visual art form and worked progressively within a more feminist and conceptual vocabulary, creating some of the most important works in the field. Hussain has gained recognition for her category-defying work that incorporates performance, installation, sculpture, film and photography, challenging perceptions of what art can be. This presentation documents this history, representing the range of Hussain’s art that created a reflexive turn for the larger questions of identity and representation.

Sasha Altaf is an independent curator, art critic and an adjunct professor at the Department of Art and Art History, University of Miami, Florida. She has written and lectured on contemporary Indian art, especially on feminist practices, new media and its contexts. Author of “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Feminism”, 2010 she completed her BA in Art History at the Maharaj Sayajirao University in Baroda, India and MA in Advanced Studies in Feminism and Visual Art at the University of Leeds, UK and MA in Art History at the University of Miami, USA in 2006 and 1999 respectively. She is currently the Director at the Talwar Gallery in New Delhi.

Ram Rahman is a photographer, artist, curator, designer and activist and has exhibited his photographs in India and around the world. Rahman is one of the founding members of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in New Delhi, and has curated a number of exhibitions as well. He is co-curator of the Sahmat retrospective exhibition at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago in February 2013, which travels in the US for three years, and also co-edited the 300 page companion book. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.