Jugalbandi

Speakers: Atul Dodiya
Disussant: Ranjit Hoskote

October 30, 2014 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

Atul Dodiya and Ranjit Hoskote have enjoyed a friendship and collaboration that extends across 25 years. They have interacted in various modes: Dodiya as an artist, reader of literature, a viewer of cinema and raconteur; Hoskote as a poet, art critic, cultural theorist and curator. Over the years, Hoskote has contributed essays to the catalogues of Dodiya’s exhibitions, and curated two monographic exhibitions of his work, Bombay: Labyrinth/ Laboratory (Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo, 2001) and Experiments with Truth: Atul Dodiya, Works 1981-2013 (National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013). Dodiya and Hoskote have also collaborated on an artist book, featuring a series of watercolours by the former and a sequence of texts by the latter, Pale Ancestors (Bodhi Art, 2008). In 2014, Prestel Verlag, in collaboration with the Vadehra Art Gallery, published the 468-page monograph on Atul Dodiya, edited by Hoskote and including essays by the editor, Enrique Juncosa and Thomas McEvilley, as well as a conversation between the
artist and Nancy Adajania, along with an exhaustive record of the artist’s work over more than three decades.

To celebrate the publication of this monograph, Dodiya and Hoskote will engage in a public conversation ranging across a variety of subjects that have fascinated them both: the emergence of the literary avant-gardes in India in the 1960s and 1970s, the challenges facing artists during the 1990s, the negotiation of the globalized present, the presence of language within Dodiya’s images, and the role of the artist as collector and researcher.

The paintings by Atul Dodiya are populated by diverse traditions in painting, the written words, images from the media and of saints, legends, national history, political events, traumata and autobiographical narratives. He has had more than 28 solo shows in India and abroad, the most recent being a major survey show of his work held at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013. He has participated in several international Biennials and Triennials, and is represented in prestigious private and public collections. The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

Ranjit Hoskote is the author of more than 25 books and has curated 30 exhibitions. With Maria Hlavajova, he is editor of Future Publics: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (BAK, forthcoming 2014). Hoskote co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2008), and was the curator of India’s first stand-alone national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). With Maria Hlavajova, Boris Groys and Kathrin Rhomberg, he co-convened the Former West Congress: Documents, Constellations, Prospects (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013).