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Project Overview
One of the crucial reasons behind the glaring absence of critical curating in India is the lack of supportive institutional systems that encourage and enable the practitioners in the field to conceptualize and materialize their critical quests. Recognizing the dire need for curatorial studies, the Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy (ACUA), Vadodara, with Prof. Shivaji K Panikkar (former Head, Department of Art History and Aesthetics, MSU, Vadodara) and Mr. Santhosh Sadanandan at the helm, have conceptualized ‘Curating Indian Visual Culture: Theory and Practice’ - a traveling workshop series addressing curatorial practice in India.
The key idea behind this initiative is to conceptualize an academic curriculum for curatorial studies. Through a series of workshops and in-house discussion with academics, curators and artists from varying disciplines, the field will be mapped, problems identified, and the potential of curatorial practice in the context of Indian visual culture will be explored. This process will involve five workshops across the country that will facilitate dialogue between academics, the interested participants, and artistic communities and will conclude with a colloquium to finally create a curriculum. The distribution of these workshops across the country also aims at enabling a curriculum that specifically deals with particular regions and their specific local concerns and issues. Smaller towns and relatively ‘side-lined’ regions will be the focus areas for the reason that the big metro-centric approaches to the cultural practices of India of the last many decades have not been able to engage with many pertinent questions.
The venues for these workshops have been tentatively identified as Vadodara, Jammu, Kochi, Shillong, Goa/Hyderabad and Bangalore. The possible project collaborators would include:
- Association of Artists, Academics, and Citizens for University Autonomy (Vadodara),
- Dr. Lalit Gupta, Senior Lecturer, Jammu College of Art, Fine Art Department,
- Mr. Vedant Kalita, Lecturer, North Eastern Hill University (Shillong),
- Lalit Kala Akademi/ Zen Studio Gallery/ RLV College of Fine Arts (Kochi/Tripunithura).
- Mr. Suresh Jayaram, (Bangalore), One Shanti road (Artists in residence-cum-gallery)
It is important to understand that most art schools in India are moribund in terms of their approach to arts teaching – particularly in the areas of museology and art history - and there is little, if any, recognition of the discipline of curatorship. On engaging in an honest search for art schools across the country at which to host the workshops to achieve a more even geographical distribution, it was found that the final selected centers were the only ones best suited for the workshops. Considering this, IFA recognizes that in a country where infrastructural development is poor, it is important to work with those institutions that show a keen interest to participate.
This initiative is a completely new step towards re-conceptualizing curatorial practices - especially within a context in which no institution in India offers any specific course/study on curatorial theory and practice. Considering the multi/inter-disciplinary character of curatorial practices, the proposed initiative would envisage a curriculum which undertakes contemporary challenges in a much more holistic manner. This is one of the central reasons behind this proposal to conceptualize the curriculum through a series of workshops, which will be conducted in different parts of the country rather than following the general practices of curriculum development, which only reorganize the existing practices in a centralized way. Another aspect that distinguishes this proposal from the general practices of curriculum development is that at the outset itself, it has envisaged a critical process instead of implementing a set of pre-given ideas in the form of a course structure. This move certainly invokes a much more decentralized conceptual framework, and brings forth possibilities of addressing local, regional and community specific questions.
Apart from this general framework, these workshops will also engage with the history of international, national and regional art practices and traditions. Emphasis will be given to the regional recognition of these historical narratives, to initiate a discussion around the questions of regional modernities, or many modernisms. With regard to the specificities of each regional center, the workshops will include discussions around pertinent questions, which are central to understand/frame the cultural/political ethos of those regions. For instance, in the case of the North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, a specific chapter would be added which deals with the questions of ethnicity, the concept of nation-state and the ways/problematics in which regional/ethnic aspirations are represented in the national cultural institutions. In the case of Vadodara, a special emphasis would be given to mainstream art institutional practices, which address issues and problematics such as various genres, schools of thoughts, styles etc. However, none of these special emphases are exclusive to any one workshop, but only the quantum of discussions may vary according to the needs of the specific locations. The contents of each workshop would also vary substantially according to the interests of the participants. |
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