Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain 1900-Now

Organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Asia Art Archive, in collaboration with Tate Modern.

This symposium proposes that exhibitions provide challenging and provocative sites through which to think about artistic exchanges and the two-way traffic between Britain and South Asia. It interrogates the lenses through which artistic production in South Asia have been framed in Britain, and argues that these frames have often been fashioned in colonial times, but continue to shape the reception of the art of South Asia in the contemporary moment. We seek to explore the legacies of such framings, but also take the exhibition to be a site of transaction and transformation, and potentially disturbance and challenge, to the colonialist narrative of and for the art of South Asia.

This is the first event of London, Asia, a collaborative project organised by the Paul Mellon Centre and Asia Art Archive. This project posits London as a key, yet under-explored, site in the construction of art historical narratives in Asia, and examines its influence through the vehicles of exhibitions, patronage, art writing and art education. London, Asia will also reflect on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with, and challenges, existing histories of British art. We are not proposing a comparative framework, but rather encouraging new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary, between London and Asia. As well as looking at examples of particular exhibitions, events, institutions, and individuals, this project will ask broader methodological questions about the ways in which the art histories of Britain and Asia have been, and are being, written, circulated, and negotiated.

PROGRAMME

Thursday 30 June

9.30-10.00
Registration & Coffee

10.00-10.30
Welcome

Panel one: Curatorial Panel

10.30-12.30
Deepak Ananth; Iwona Blazwick; David Elliott; Geeta Kapur; Sharmini Pereira
moderated by Hammad Nasar

12.30-14.00
Lunch

Panel two: Crafting Practice

14.00-14.05
Chair’s introduction (Devika Singh)

14.05-14.25
Susan Bean
Diverging Paths: Two Sculptors and their Reception at the Turn of the 20th Century

14.25-14.45
Sria Chatterjee
The politics of knowing, making and showing: the Festival of India in Britain and some afterlives

14:45-15.30
Response (Sabih Ahmed) & discussion

15:30-16.00
Tea Break

Panel three: Institutional histories

16.00-16.05
Chair’s introduction (Nima Poovaya-Smith)

16.05-16.25
Holly Shaffer
Museum Bhavan

16.25-16.45
Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason
Journeying through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Early-1950s London

16.45-17.30
Response (Sonal Khullar) & discussion

17.30-17.45
Comfort Break

Panel four: Discussion panel: Writing about exhibitions

17.45- 19.00
Emilia Terracciano, Zehra Jumabhoy and Shezad Dawood
moderated by Lucy Steeds

19.00
Drinks Reception

Friday 1 July

Panel five: Competing modernities

10.00-10.05
Chair’s introduction (Sonal Khullar)

10.05-10.25
Brinda Kumar
The Other Burlington Exhibition

10.25-10.45
Hilary Floe
Myth and Reality: Oxford and India, 1982

10.45-11.30
Response (Daniel Rycroft) & discussion

11.30-12.00
Coffee Break

Panel six: Exhibition circuits/ Networks of display between South Asian & Britain

12.00-12.05
Chair’s introduction (Sarah Turner)

12.05-12.25
Naiza Khan and Karin Zitzewitz
Nodal Connections: Triangle Network, Gasworks, and South Asian Artists in the UK

12.25-12.45
Eva Bentcheva
Priceless Encounters, Costly Legacies: Motiroti’s Priceless (2007) as Contemporary Inquiry into Colonial Displays

12.45-13.30
Response (Alnoor Mitha) & discussion

13.30-14.30
Lunch

14.30-15.45
Discussion panel: Researching the Exhibition: Experience and event
Saloni Mathur, Carmen Julia and Sarah Turner - moderated by Claire Wintle

15.45-16.15
Tea

Panel seven: Other stories

16.15-16.20
Chair’s introduction (TBC)

16.20-16.40
Alice Correia
South Asian Women Artists in Britain and the Politics of Articulation

16.40-17.00
Shanay Jhaveri
Lionel Wendt

17.00-17.45
Response (Leon Wainwright) & discussion

Panel eight: Plenary panel & drinks

17.45-18.30
Discussion with Devika Singh, Hammad Nasar, Sonal Khullar, Sarah Turner and Nada Raza