Gender, Art, City

Conveners: Gita Chadha, Mitra Mukherjee Parikh, and Amrita Gupta Singh
Discussants: Annapurna Garimella, Deeptha Achar, Kanchana Mahadevan, Shilpa Phadke, Anjana Mehra, Bharati Kapadia, Hema Upadhyay, Mansi Bhatt, Shilpa Gupta, Sharmila Samant, and Vidya Kamat

October 20, 2012 | 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
StudioX, Mumbai

Contemporary art practice and criticism  in the last fifty years has undergone decisive changes which has  threatened to overturn some of  the very basics of art practice, interpretation and theory. Simultaneously the proliferation of critical stances has made possible to look at art from a variety of disciplinary locations and multiple subject positions. One such ground-breaking position has been that of gender and its critical interface with class, caste, race, locations and nationality. This project – Gender, Art, City – in the form of study-groups, roundtable conversations, public events and a publication is conceived through a multi-disciplinary lens that will explore gender positions in contemporary art, using the disciplinary locations of art history, social sciences and literature.

From the 1960’s onwards the art world has been radicalized by the presence of a number of women artists both in India and abroad. Making their presence felt in art galleries, art markets, critical journals as well as professional spaces, women artists   have broken away from the conventional roles assigned to them as objects of representations or at best inspiring muse in the art world to play a more dynamic and innovative  part  as individuals in charge of their creative destinies. It is necessary to inquire if such a situation has helped in making art a more gender plural space .The key question here is how this impacts the lives, identities and practice of women artists. In what manner has it, if at all, influenced and changed aesthetic theories and art criticism .The consultation is also inspired by the need to look at how gender identity appears in or shapes the works of men artists. One could look to see how they reproduce patriarchal notions of masculinity or how they resist them and if there is resistance, what form or shape does it take and is this resistance available for a feminist interpretation.