South Asia

Film curator La Frances Hui attended the International Film Festival of Kerala and follows up with this discussion of the award-winning Malayalam feature Sexy Durga by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan.

Art historian Emilia Terracciano examines the possibility of developing and de-colonizing narrative tools for the writing of (Indian) art history.

Art historian and curator Atreyee Gupta discusses the particularity and situatedness of perspectives, and presents the national and the regional as possibly conflicting categories, challenging us to unlearn both Western and Indian art history.

After following the work of Gauri Gill for many years and meeting with her in New Delhi, curator Sarah Suzuki acquired two works from Gill’s Fields of Sight series (in collaboration with Rajesh Vangad) for The Museum of Modern Art’s collection.

Film historian and curator Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses the need for a canon, the year 1971, cracks in the bastion of the nation(al), the belated effects of censorship, and the pluralization of globalities

Karin Zitzewitz discusses significant impulses and influences on art production in South Asia, between the artists’ immediate context and practices or discourses of feminism and globalization, which have dominated since the 1980s.

Film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses major moments in the study of early Indian cinema, a history that is punctuated by fires both on the screen and off the screen.

Rashid Rana discusses curatorial plans for the inaugural Lahore Biennale with Glenn D. Lowry, Director of MoMA.

Last year in the exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the
Collection, we had the opportunity to show a selection of works from The Black Star
(2007), a portfolio of twelve digital prints by Seher Shah (Pakistani, born 1975).
Though acquired in 2008, the work was exhibited for the first time in this exhibition,
in a gallery devoted to the suggestion of using the past as a means of interrogating
the present.

In late January 2016, a team of seven from The Museum of Modern Art’s C-MAP Asia Group traveled to India and Bangladesh. The itinerary began in New Delhi, where the India Art Fair was underway, continuing on to Goa and Bangalore (with side-trips to Baroda and Bombay by individual group members), and concluding in Dhaka…

Diana Campbell Betancourt shares her thoughts on Bangladesh’s art history being written out of the dominant narratives of South Asia on account of its once being East Pakistani.

Sabih Ahmad shares his thoughts on considering practices from the ground up and looking to lateral associations.