Collecting South Asia | Archiving South Asia
International conference, The Museum Theater, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley

Focusing on assemblages of capital, connoisseurship, and collecting practices, the one-day international conference, Collecting South Asia | Archiving South Asia, is an attempt to rethink object histories, visual culture studies, and histories of the museum and the archive from the nineteenth century to the present. For details, please visit the conference website: <http://southasia.berkeley.edu/collecting-south-asia>

Spearheaded by UC Berkeley art historian Sugata Ray, the conference is organized by the Center for South Asia Studies in collaboration with the History of Art Department, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley.

Program

9:00 Introduction to the Conference: Methodological Predicaments
Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
Debra Diamond, Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

9:50 Coffee Break

10:00 (Un)Making the Episteme: The Nineteenth Century
Chair: Alexander von Rospatt, University of California, Berkeley

Janice Leoshko (University of Texas at Austin), The Unforseen: Some Consequences from Developing Collections of Indian Art

Sugata Ray (University of California, Berkeley), The Buddha in the Colonial Archive: Art History and the Making of the “Effeminate” Male Body

Anjali Arondekar (University of California, Santa Cruz), Sexuality. Exemplarity. Archives.

12:00 Lunch Break

13:00 Dismantled Norms: The Modern and the Contemporary
Chair: Anuradha Vikram, Residency Programs, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica

Dina Bangdel (Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar), Contested Spaces of Local Consumption: When is Traditional Painting Too “Modern”?

Karin Zitzewitz (Michigan State University), An Archive of Quotations: Critical Art Histories in the Work of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Atreyee Gupta (Haus der Kunst, Munich), Contemporary art at its limits, or, Can all contemporary art be collected?

14:50 Coffee Break

15:00 Conversations: Collecting South Asia by the Bay
Chair: Sanchita Saxena, University of California, Berkeley

Julia White, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Forrest McGill, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Wendi Norris, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

16:30 The Materiality of the Archive: Viewing the Berkeley Art Museum South Asia collection
Padma Maitland, University of California, Berkeley
Cristin McKnight Sethi, University of California, Berkeley