InterAsian Movements Of Art Across Global Cities: The Mumbai Pavilion At The 9th Shanghai Biennale

Speaker: Manuela Ciotti

August 13, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

The lecture investigates central aspects of the globalization of the art world: the circulation of the biennale cultural form, its appropriation in many geographical locations, and the contents and questions generated through these processes. It examines the 9th Shanghai Biennale entitled ‘Reactivation’ (2012), and within this large exhibition, focuses on the Mumbai pavilion as one of latest chapters in the brief history of the contemporary art traffic between India and China.‘Reactivation’ was held at the Power Station of Art, formerly the Pavilion of Future at the Shanghai World Expo 2010.

The speaker analyzes the representation of Mumbai in Shanghai by deploying a multi-scalar framework encompassing the Shanghai Biennale’s ‘macro-biography’, and the circuits of people, objects, and imaginations inaugurated by the making of the pavilion. To understand the connections between the artworks and the Biennale, the speaker draws on encounters with the pavilion artists that occurred in Mumbai, New Delhi, and virtually. The lecture aims to rethink questions of knowledge, intimacy, and place vis-à-vis accounts of the circulation of the biennale form within Asia and beyond.

Manuela Ciotti received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE). She is currently Associate Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, and ‘Framing the Global’ Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has an extensive fieldwork experience and has written on the topics of modernity, subaltern communities, gender and politics, and more recently, on art and society. Under the ‘Framing the Global’ initiative, she is carrying out a multi-sited ethnography focusing on exhibitions of modern and contemporary art from India held in Asia, Europe and the USA. Ciotti has published several essays in journals such as Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Modern Asian Studies, Feminist Review, The Journal of Asian Studies, and Third World Quarterly among others, and is the author of the book entitled Retro-Modern India: Forging the Low-Caste Self (2010).