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.

Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai is a public art project conceived and curated by the Mohile Parikh Center. Spanning over a year, it critically investigated the impact of consumption on natural resources in the city, and on human bodies, our ecosystems and cultures.

Field Notes is a culminating symposium that will explore the ideas of the public sphere, our ecological footprint, and our right to the city. It will discuss the processes and challenges of making art in public spaces and bring in forms of practice-led thinking.  Each day of the symposium will conclude with film screenings that examine our consumptive geographies and its impact.

Day I:

What is the Public Sphere?
Speaker: George Jose | Discussant: Noopur Desai

Ecological Footprint: Bombay/Mumbai
Speaker: Prasad Modak | Discussant: Prasad Shetty

Art Projects:
Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Archana Hande, Navjot Altaf, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Anupam Singh, Prajakta Palav and Mansi Bhatt
Discussant: Rohan Shivkumar

Film Screening:
Wasted | Direction: Anirban Dutta

Day II:

Right to the City
Speakers: Hussain Indorewala and Shweta Wagh
Discussant: Shubhangi Singh

Art Projects:
Kush Badhwar, Parag Tandel, Sahej Rahal, Prajakta Potnis, and Justin Ponmany
Discussant: Shirish Joshi

Exercises in Imagination | Students’ Study Group
Facilitators: Amrita Gupta Singh, Shilpa Gupta, and Nikhil Purohit

Film Screening:
Watermark | Direction: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky

The film program is curated by Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar.

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.

This collaboration with the Sir J.J. School of Art within the framework of the public art project functions as a pedagogic intervention within an institutional space through an engagement with the faculty and students. This functions as a discursive program of two talks and two film screenings with accompanying panels over the course of September, culminating in the Mansi Bhatt’s public earthwork.

Art in Public Spaces
Speaker: Navjot Altaf
September 1, 2015 | 4.00 pm
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

What criteria should we use to evaluate art in public spaces that are dialogic, participatory, interventionist, collaborative and communitarian in nature? Since the 1960s, there has been much discussion among artists about ‘the public’, and varied experiments in the public domain sought to circumvent traditional art venues through direct interactions with the intended public. In this presentation, Navjot Altaf will engage with the students of the art school about such practices and its place in contemporary aesthetic discourse. Her methodology ascertains the interactive aspects of collaboration, whereby the work emerges out of extended dialogues, simultaneously altering the conventional relationship between viewers and works of art.

Navjot Altaf began her career in the early 1970s, after her graduation from the Sir J.J. School of Art. Over the last three decades, she has created an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of video, sculptures, installations and site-specific works that negotiate various disciplinary boundaries. The artist works with musicians, documentary filmmakers, activists, general public and craftspeople. Since 1997, she has been collaborating with Adivasi artists and community members in Kondagaon, Bastar – Chattisgarh in Central India. She has shown extensively in India and several other countries at museums and galleries, including Fukuoka, Sydney, London, Liverpool, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Lisbon, Lille, New York, and other places.

Art and Performance
Speaker: Mansi Bhatt
September 28, 2015 | 4.00pm
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

In Performance Art, the medium is the artist’s body and connotes live actions that usually consist of time, space, the body, and a relationship between the performer and spectators. As a term, it is both confusing and fascinating, and falls outside the conventional forms of theatre and other performative practices. It implies a sense of the artist’s autonomy in composition, the work’s social critique, the element of endurance, and the difficulty to repeat the action. In this presentation, Mansi Bhatt will share her journey into the world of performance, which has its roots in the experimental practices she explored as a student in the Sir J.J. School of Arts, amidst her academic training.

Mansi Bhatt’s work locates itself within the world of performance and photography. The characters that she inhabits in her work are drawn from a combination of reality and fiction. Uncertainty of objects and characters and her constant inquiry toward ‘belonging’ are important elements to Bhatt’s work, as is the idea of ‘travel’. Her intensive performances employ her own body to convey multiple meanings, and the staging of the photographs are usually in extraordinarily elaborate tableaux, using prosthetics and makeup, through which she critiques societal norms, and claims new identities.

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).

June 11, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

The history of museums is tied to the developments of international fairs and exhibitions in the 19th century and rose as nationalistic temples of culture and symbols of European power. Influencing the formation of national identity, citizenship, social values and cultural perspectives, museums and politics have been perennial bedfellows, shaping our views of both ourselves and of the world.

Museums have transformed themselves from cabinets of curiosity to centers of civic pride and prestige, representing our shared heritage. But lingering questions remain about politically charged relationships between aesthetics, contexts, and implied assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed, interpreted and understood. While museums retain their influence on cultural production, they need to adapt to meet the demands of a rapidly changing global world order.

By examining the cultural, historical and political atmosphere of the societies in which museums were born and continue to operate, this discussion will attempt to further our understanding of the public museum, and its place at the centre of modern relations between culture and government.

Cho Rao is an arts and museum consultant, based in San Francisco. She has worked with several institutions such as the Asian Art Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her research interests include art and globalization, the history of exhibition making, post-colonial studies, and contemporary curatorial practice.

Sabyasachi Mukherjee is the Director General of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), and also heads its postgraduate program in museology and conservation. He has initiated several innovative projects including the CSMVS Museum Modernization Plan, and also edits and publishes books and journals on Indian art and culture.

Arshiya Lokhandwala is the founder/curator of Lakeeren Gallery in Mumbai that has presented over 100 curated exhibitions and critical interventions. She writes and curates on biennales, large-scale exhibitions, feminism, performance and new media arts and is the curator of After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997 at the Queens Museum, New York.

Shilpa Gupta is an artist based in Mumbai.  Her practice involves the use of found objects, interactive video, websites, photographs, sound and public performances to probe themes of consumer culture, security, militarism and human rights. She has exhibited at numerous biennales, triennales, galleries, museums, cultural centres and foundations in India and across the world