Organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Asia Art Archive, in collaboration with Tate Modern.
This symposium proposes that exhibitions provide challenging and provocative sites through which to think about artistic exchanges and the two-way traffic between Britain and South Asia. It interrogates the lenses through which artistic production in South Asia have been framed in Britain, and argues that these frames have often been fashioned in colonial times, but continue to shape the reception of the art of South Asia in the contemporary moment. We seek to explore the legacies of such framings, but also take the exhibition to be a site of transaction and transformation, and potentially disturbance and challenge, to the colonialist narrative of and for the art of South Asia.
This is the first event of London, Asia, a collaborative project organised by the Paul Mellon Centre and Asia Art Archive. This project posits London as a key, yet under-explored, site in the construction of art historical narratives in Asia, and examines its influence through the vehicles of exhibitions, patronage, art writing and art education. London, Asia will also reflect on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with, and challenges, existing histories of British art. We are not proposing a comparative framework, but rather encouraging new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary, between London and Asia. As well as looking at examples of particular exhibitions, events, institutions, and individuals, this project will ask broader methodological questions about the ways in which the art histories of Britain and Asia have been, and are being, written, circulated, and negotiated.
Thursday 30 June
10.00-10.30: Welcome
Panel one: Curatorial Panel
10.30-12.30: Deepak Ananth; Iwona Blazwick; David Elliott; Geeta Kapur; Sharmini Pereira; moderated by Hammad Nasar
Panel two: Crafting Practice
14.00-14.05: Chair’s introduction (Devika Singh)
14.05-14.25: Susan Bean, Diverging Paths: Two Sculptors and their Reception at the Turn of the 20th Century
14.25-14.45: Sria Chatterjee, The politics of knowing, making and showing: the Festival of India in Britain and some afterlives
14:45-15.30: Response (Sabih Ahmed) & discussion
Panel three: Institutional histories
16.00-16.05: Chair’s introduction (Nima Poovaya-Smith)
16.05-16.25: Holly Shaffer, Museum Bhavan
16.25-16.45: Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason, Journeying through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Early-1950s London
16.45-17.30: Response (Sonal Khullar) & discussion
Panel four: Discussion panel: Writing about exhibitions
17.45- 19.00: Emilia Terracciano, Zehra Jumabhoy and Shezad Dawood, moderated by Lucy Steeds
Friday 1 July
Panel five: Competing modernities
10.00-10.05: Chair’s introduction (Sonal Khullar)
10.05-10.25: Brinda Kumar, The Other Burlington Exhibition
10.25-10.45 : Hilary Floe, Myth and Reality: Oxford and India, 1982
10.45-11.30: Response (Daniel Rycroft) & discussion
Panel six: Exhibition circuits/ Networks of display between South Asian & Britain
12.00-12.05: Chair’s introduction (Sarah Turner)
12.05-12.25: Naiza Khan and Karin Zitzewitz, Nodal Connections: Triangle Network, Gasworks, and South Asian Artists in the UK
12.25-12.45: Eva Bentcheva, Priceless Encounters, Costly Legacies: Motiroti’s Priceless (2007) as Contemporary Inquiry into Colonial Displays
12.45-13.30: Response (Alnoor Mitha) & discussion
14.30-15.45 Discussion panel: Researching the Exhibition: Experience and event, Saloni Mathur, Carmen Julia and Sarah Turner - moderated by Claire Wintle
Panel seven: Other stories
16.15-16.20: Chair’s introduction (TBC)
16.20-16.40: Alice Correia, South Asian Women Artists in Britain and the Politics of Articulation
16.40-17.00: Shanay Jhaveri, Lionel Wendt
17.00-17.45: Response (Leon Wainwright) & discussion
Panel eight: Plenary panel & drinks
17.45-18.30: Discussion with Devika Singh, Hammad Nasar, Sonal Khullar, Sarah Turner and Nada Raza