Fields of Legibility

Convener: Sabih Ahmed
Discussants: Raman Sivakumar, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Shivaji Panikker, Annapurna Garimella, Santhosh S., Vidya Shivadas, Sneha Ragavan, Sabih Ahmed, Jane Devoise, Nancy Adajania, Ranjit Hoskote, Manmohan Saral, Satish Naik, Gieve Patel, Manisha Patil, Abhijeet Tamhane, Abhay Sardesai, Rucha Kulkarni, and Sandhini Poddar

In collaboration with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong

July 15, 2013 | 11.00 am to 5.00 pm
StudioX, Mumbai

The closed-door event will be the second in a sequence of such workshops that will inform Asia Art Archive’s research towards a series of anthology publications dedicated to the history of writing on 20th century visual art in India. The first of these workshops was held in February this year in Kochi, in partnership with Kochi-Muziris Biennale. It was inaugurated with a public conference titled ‘Fields of Legibility: disciplines and practices of art writing in India’ to set off the initiative by discussing how writing over the last decades has attempted to make legible the changing field of art, its regional specificities, and in what possible ways we may read those texts today and position them for the future.

The second workshop in July, in partnership with the Mohile Parikh Center, hopes to serve as a platform for testing further the structures and parameters for the planned anthology with a different set of scholars. Perspectives over regional language discourses vis-à-vis the nation, and how artistic, curatorial and pedagogic practices inflect art history will be a key concern that the workshop will highlight.

From the discussions in Kochi, this workshop will carry forward some compelling questions that were addressed pertaining to historiography in South Asia:

  • About identifiable approaches, intellectual trends, and critical positions that have taken shape over the last century in the region.
  • The ways in which the tropes of regional and vernacular have been addressed vis-à-vis nation and modernity. What forms of dialogue are available to us across the vernacular and English language discourses in art writing?
  • In what different ways were ideas of “art” and “history” received and articulated in various languages?
  • What has been the relation between art criticism and pedagogy? Did art criticism have specific pedagogic intents? And how might we be able to locate shifts (if at all) in addressing readership/publics over the decades?
  • How have recent developments shaped art history and art pedagogy within the broader frames of the humanities/liberal arts, cultural studies, area/regional/interdisciplinary studies, and so on.

The daylong workshop will be lead via a presentation by Sabih Ahmed and Sneha Raghavan, and discussions moderated by AAA’s Chair of the Board of Directors, Jane Debevoise with 14 art writers/critics/art historians/art magazine editors/visual arts faculty from India.