Taking Place: Acts of Survival for a Time to Come

Speaker: Charles Merewether
In association with Biennale Society, New Delhi

November 24, 2006 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Charles Merewether is the Artistic Director and Curator of the Biennale of Sydney, 2006. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University. An art historian, he was Collections Curator at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, from 1994 – 2004.

Dr. Merewether has taught at the University of Sydney, Australia, Universidad Autonoma, Barcelona, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and the University of Southern California. He received Research Fellowships from the Yale University, Australian National University and the Japan Foundation. He has published widely on the subject of modernism and its formation outside the centre as well as issues on the archival, monuments and notions of the document and trace. He is the author of the book, Conditions of Uncertainty and is currently writing a book on the cultural history of looting, preparing a publication and exhibition on post-war Japanese art (1951-1970) for the Getty Center in Los Angeles and a manuscript on recent art in China.

The Biennale of Sydney 2006, aspires to be about the ‘now’ of the contemporary, bearing the disjuncture and discontinuities as much as correspondences and traversal movements of encounter and exchange. To do so is to think of the present as successive points of intersection and zones of contact, as we inhabit it. Always in motion, the contemporary constitutes a plural history that is fragmentary, inconclusive, without totality. Art speaks from within, and of the co-existence of heterodox and divergent contemporary cultures in which we have played a part. These are our histories imbricated as we are in the tragic events of violence and destruction as much as the dreams and realization of peaceful cohabitation and conviviality.

The work resolutely seeks to expose the fault-lines of the present in which the past persists and the future is uncertain. It is an event of which the present is constitutive and therefore never complete, but always taking place. Dr. Merewether will talk about the contemporary art shown in the Biennale of Sydney 2006 and about its concept, ‘zones of contact ’.