South Asia as Affliation and Aspiration
Chaitanya Sambrani2023, Take on Art: special issue SOUTH ASIA issue 30
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
AI
AI
The paper explores the concept of South Asia as a category of affiliation and aspiration within art historical discourse. It discusses how the term 'South Asian' has gained prominence due to discussions around colonial history and the identity of migrant communities in Western countries. The paper also examines the relationship between South Asia and the Global South, emphasizing the limitations faced by artists addressing poverty and representation issues. Ultimately, it posits that a South Asian identity in art can transcend nationalistic boundaries and foster new artistic collaborations, while acknowledging the complex history and implications of such categorization.
Related papers
South Asian Contemporary Art in a Global Context
Paper delivered 23 July 2008, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London
Identity and Visibility: Reflections on Museum Displays of South Asian Art
New cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US, 2006
.
Artists' Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories
Nomenclatures, like skin, regulate porosity and flow; binding, giving shape, determining conditions of existence, exclusion and inclusion. This special issue of MIRAJ is bound by two layers of skin; one of region (South Asia) and the other of form or genre (artists' moving image). This double layering allows for the development of new critical frameworks, challenging settled narratives, not only in relation to artists' moving image in/from South Asia, but also, we hope, in the global framework of contemporary moving image art.
Visual Arts in South Asia
The Modernist World, Routledge, 2015
This chapter broadly and summarily maps the modern and contemporary art scene in South Asia with a focus on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It places the art of this region within its political, social and institutional context tracing its link with the colonial period on the one hand and the current globalizing times, on the other. The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada.
Modern Art Asia: Selected Research Papers, Issues 1-8
2012
The most incisive and important research papers from the first two years of Modern Art Asia, now in print for the first time. Founded to address the need within art history and art journalism for a space dedicated to the arts of Asia from the eighteenth century to the present, Modern Art Asia is the most significant and innovative inter-regional and inter-disciplinary resource for the discussion of Asian art and culture. For the rising generation of Asian art scholars, this production exists in a globalized interdisciplinary context at the intersection of scholarship, criticism, and the market. Modern Art Asia reflects this discourse through the combination of peer-reviewed research, insightful commentary, presentations by leading contemporary artists and international exhibition reviews. To celebrate the second anniversary of our foundation, Modern Art Asia makes its most incisive original contributions to the field available in print for the first time, in a volume that is a vital addition to any research collection on Asian art.
Related topics
Related papers
Reimagining South Asian Art, Culture and Archaeology
Swati Publications, 2021
This edited volume contains ten original research papers and essays on various aspects of South Asian art, culture, and archaeology. The authors address the broad issues of trans-disciplinarity and cultural complexity attested with the art and archaeological practices of South Asia. It opens with a serious discussion on fundamental issues of archaeology and suggests effective ways that would reframe the archaeological methods of the future. The focus shift from the monument-centric approach to a collaborative trans-disciplinary endeavour eventually reconceptualises archaeology as integrated into other disciplines. The voluminous rise in archaeological data generated through more sophisticated scientific equipment testifies the close collaboration of archaeology with science. The study of cultural sequence, urbanisation pattern, and contextual analysis of material objects with nearby sites emerging more as a recent trend projects a novel research trajectory of moving away from the conventional norms of disciplinary studies and thereby adopting inter-disciplinary perspective in art-cultural studies. This book includes some preliminary reports of recent explorations and excavations conducted in Vangchhia (Mizoram) and Ganaur (Haryana). The report highlights the huge distribution of menhirs, petroglyphs, potteries, burial sites, and sculptural fragments all around Mizoram, thereby outlying the distinguish presence of Vangchhia culture. The volume also builds new perspectives to study the stylistic patterns, artistic developments, architectural expansion, and cultural complexity through the site-specific study. These studies focus on site-specific empirical research and demonstrate trans-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinary orientation of research in ancient South Asian studies.
Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art
2017
Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art at Asia Society, New York, 20 October 2017 To begin with, the question of what is ‘Asian’ and how it may be approached seems to have preoccupied earlier geo-biologists, and also those seeking to disabuse Europeans of their projection that ‘Asia’ had anything like the cultural and historical integration supposed of Europe itself. The former may now defer to scientific conceptual and technological changes which have allowed genome sequencing to show the interlinkage of population genealogies and the specious validity of the concept of ‘race’. There have been several genome sequencing studies which undermine the notion of singular ‘races’ in any of the SE Asian cultures, since their populations historically speaking have been so inter-mixed. Even in advanced supposedly monolingual states like modern Thailand there is no such thing as a pure language and the resulting modern amalgam is inalienably hybridized.
On Representing Art and Southeast Asia
suedostasien.net, 2022
Lee Weng-Choy: As an art critic I've preferred to speak from but not for this corner of the world that I work within. Too often when we speak of Southeast Asia as a region, the nation remains the default discursive and curatorial framework. Artists are identified by nationality more than any other category, and cultural nationalisms frame the way histories are written-rarely about the region as such, but instead as a catalogue of separate nations. The grammar of the nation is containment, exclusion, closure as well as the definition and control of borders and identities. Patrick D Flores, a curator and art historian from the Philippines, has said the notion of a region remains productive, nonetheless, "if only because it persists in being a problem, one that is grasped in geo-poetic terms". [1]
Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art
Art & Entrepreneurship, Credit Suisse, 2008
Contemporary Asian Art. Ou Ning, “Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art”, Art & Entrepreneurship, edited by Michelle Nicol, published by Credit Suisse, Zurich, 2008.
Infrastructure as Form: Cross-Border Networks and the Materialities of ‘South Asia’ in Contemporary Art
Third Text, 2017
Unsettling the National in South Asia: 'My East is Your West,' Venice Biennale, and 'After Midnight,' Queens Museum, New York, in Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, Vol 3, 2015
Museum Worlds: Advances in Research , 2015
My East is Your West (2015) and After Midnight (2015), two recent exhibitions of modern and contemporary South Asian art in Venice and New York, present an important opportunity to reflect on the changing relationship between museological spaces, curatorial practices, and the production of nationalist historiographies in South Asia. Both exhibitions suggest a shift in alignment away from prevailing national frameworks for collecting and display in South Asia—those prominently canonized by national museums in India and Pakistan—and that historically have inscribed museological spaces in South Asia as an extension of the nation-state and its ideologies. My East is Your West and After Midnight build, more specifically, on a growing body of exhibitions of modern and contemporary South Asian art whose curatorial interventions rely on a new and rigorous engagement with partition history, which has seen the subcontinent violently divided along religious and communal lines multiple times throughout the twentieth century
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.