Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008 9780520387096

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INFRASTRUCTURE AND FORM

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THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE BEN AND A. JESS SHENSON ENDOWMENT FUND IN VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS, ESTABLISHED BY A MAJOR GIFT FROM FRED M. LEVIN AND NANCY LIVINGSTON, THE SHENSON FOUNDATION.

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE MILLARD MEISS PUBLICATION FUND OF CAA.

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INFRASTRUCTURE AND FORM The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008

Karin Zitzewitz

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Karin Zitzewitz Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-34492-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38709-6 (ebook) Printed in China 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction / 1 1. Feminist Networks, New Biennials, and Performance / 17 2. Painting and the Image Condition at the Millennium / 49 3. Materiality, Ephemerality, Haptics / 85 4. Language, the Documentary, and Art in a Discursive Mode / 119 5. Infrastructure, Collaboration, and the Cut / 157 Conclusion: Infrastructure Is Not (Only) a Metaphor / 189 Notes / 203 Bibliography / 231 List of Illustrations / 245 Index / 249

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

in Indian art world spaces in the summer of 1999, and over the next seven years I bounced back and forth between India—mostly Bombay, Baroda, and Delhi—and New York City, where I completed my PhD. My research at that time was on modernism, but I was also an avid watcher of the contemporary scene. The two weren’t really separate, in any case. Artists, gallerists, curators, critics, dealers, and collectors all worked together in a tight-knit community characterized by both complex, decades-long friendships, and briefer, sometimes transformative collaborations. I remain surprised at how readily people opened their doors, bookshelves, and memories to me, as well as grateful for their kindness and the culture of creativity, commensality, and common inquiry that sustains the art community. Many also traveled back and forth from India to New York, and so we ran into each other often. While this book is less overtly ethnographic than the ones that emerged first from that research, it is grounded in these decades of interactions. It is a product of the generosity and thoughtfulness of the art network that radiates outward from India and has important centers all over the world.

I BEGAN DOING RESEARCH

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The research for this project began in earnest around 2010. Since I was based in Michigan, my research took place in shorter, more targeted trips to see artists and shows in India, as well as Japan, Australia, Pakistan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and various places in the United States. Often, my daughter, my husband, and my mother traveled with me, which shaped this work in wonderful ways. In 2011, I initiated curatorial projects with Naiza Khan and Mithu Sen, which gradually transformed into collaborative friendships that have been generative to my work overall. I am grateful to other artists who have worked with me on shorter pieces for catalogs, journal articles, and the art press, many of which directly contributed to this project. I thank the following artists for speaking with me formally and informally about their work: Amar Kanwar, Anita Dube, Atul Bhalla, Atul Dodiya, Bani Abidi, Bose Krishnamachari, C.F. John, Huma Mulji, Jitish Kallat, Mahbubur Rahman, Mithu Sen, Naiza Khan, Nalini Malani, Navjot Altaf, Nilima Sheikh, Pushpamala N., Ranbir Kaleka, Raqs Media Collective (particularly Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Rashid Rana, Ravi Agarwal, Reena Kallat, Samit Das, Sheela Gowda, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, Suresh Jayaram, Tushar Joag, Tyeba Begum Lipi, and Vivan Sundaram. My conversations with Vivan, beginning way back in the summer of 2000, were particularly crucial to the development of my conceptual framework, and I want to thank him for his continued generosity. My understanding of the workings of the art market was shaped by my long-term friendships with gallerists—particularly Shireen Gandhy, Usha Mirchandani and Ranjana Steinruecke, Peter Nagy, Shumita and Arani Bose, Mort Chatterjee and Tara Lal, and Priya Jhaveri—as well as curators Arshiya Lokhandvala, Susan Bean, Nida Ghouse, Sabih Ahmed, Roobina Karode, Pooja Sood, Hammad Nasar, and especially Nada Raza. Shireen introduced me to Dipti Mathur, Mithu introduced me to Anupam Poddar and Deepanjana Klein; all three influenced my ideas about collecting. I am indebted to the writings of Geeta Kapur, as well as to questions she has raised in public presentations of my work, and to the work of Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania. I am grateful for the critical writing and continued friendship of Chaitanya Sambrani, Abhay Sardesai, and Girish Shahane, as well as Meera Menezes, Zehra Jhumabhoy, and Zeenat Nagree. Parul Dave Mukherji was a source of support and good fun first in Baroda and then at JNU, where she also introduced me to her colleagues at the incomparable School of Art and Aesthetics. Academic writing and publishing can be painstakingly slow, and I thank this group for not poking too much fun at my expense as this project took its time to materialize. The eventual existence of this book has a lot to do with the support provided by Michigan State University, where I have had the privilege of working with talented and supportive colleagues. I learned a huge amount about the interactions between infrastructure and form through my curatorial projects at the Broad Art Museum at MSU, which were greenlit by the late Michael Rush and made possible by Ali Gass, Yesomi Umolu, Brian Kirschensteiner, Brian McLean, Rachel Vargas, Stephanie Kribs, and viii

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other museum staff. My fellow travelers in the art history program put up with two consecutive years of research leave and then my disappearance into the role of chairperson, and I thank Susan Bandes, Phylis Floyd, Jon Frey, Anning Jing, Yelena Kalinsky, Candace Keller, Laura Smith, and Lily Woodruff for their consistent collegiality. My writing on institutions developed in tandem with the opportunity to found the artist/designer residency in Critical Race Studies, and I am grateful to Chris Corneal, Chris Long, and the MSUFCU for their support. All credit goes to the resident artists, as well as Jacquelynn Sullivan Gould, for proving over and over what good art can do for and in a community. As chairperson during a particularly tumultuous time, I am grateful for the hard work and good humor of my faculty colleagues, particularly Ben Van Dyke and Rebecca Tegtmeyer, as well as our amazing staff, especially Sarah Jackson. Chris Long and Sonja Fritzsche deserve special mention for their mentorship. Michigan State provided generous support for my research through a sabbatical, the HARP grant program, the Muslim Studies program, Delia Koo faculty awards through Asian Studies, and College of Arts and Letters support in excess of the Humboldt fellowship. Sumathi Ramaswamy has set an amazing example for intellectual leadership (not to mention administrative efficiency), and the projects I have worked on with her sparked long-term working relationships with a group of fantastic scholars, including Arvind Rajagopal, Rebecca Brown, and Monica Juneja. I am so grateful to Monica for serving as my host and always gentle and insightful mentor at the University of Heidelberg, as well as to Christiane Brosius and Axel Michaels, who offered us an incomparable living situation for a wonderful year. I am very grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Advanced Researchers fellowship program for its support and commitment to the continued development of international networks among scholars. My time writing the manuscript was made much more lively by my Heidelberg colleagues Franziska Koch, Cathrine Bublatsky, and Elena Bernadini, as well as the students at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. I have had the privilege of treating Kajri Jain, Susan Bean, Nora Taylor, and Manuela Ciotti as sounding boards throughout much of this project, and I remain thankful for their friendship, intellectual generosity, and willingness to think together. Two decades of friendship with Krista Hegburg, Jeff Redding, Brad Chase, and Jill Shaw, as well as with our only slightly newer, closest friends in East Lansing, Sheryl Groden and Sean Pager, Sarah and Steve Holden, and Rajiv and Jennifer Ranjan has been so important to our continued happiness. I presented portions of this manuscript at “Territories Disrupted: Asian Art after 1989,” a conference cosponsored by Tate Research Centre: Asia and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA) in Seoul, the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Central European University (with thanks to Dorith Geva), and College Art Association annual conferences. Part of chapter 3 was published as “Infrastructure as Form: Cross-Border Networks and the Materialities of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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‘South Asia’ in Contemporary Art,” in Third Text. A portion of chapter 5 was published in “When Does Infrastructure Qualify for [Artistic] Attention? The ABCs of Contemporary Art in Post-Liberalization India,” in the Journal of Material Culture. A portion of the conclusion was published as “The Archive in Real Time: Gossip and Speculation in the World of South Asian Art,” in Art Journal. Former art history acquisitions editor Nadine Little and her successor Archna Patel at the University of California Press have been wonderful partners throughout this process. I thank Summer Farah, Beth Chapple, Jessica Moll, and the design team for shepherding this volume to press. The comments by the two readers of the initial submission and final manuscript were models of insight and constructive criticism. Equal parts generosity and rigor, they articulated for me what was in the book as well as what could be teased out more fully. All authors should be so lucky. My husband, Sean Pue, was with me through most of the years discussed in this book, not to mention its writing. As I mentioned, he, our daughter, Clara, and my mother, Barbara Zitzewitz, accompanied me as I did a lot of this research. In different configurations, we went together to studio visits, teas, parties, art fairs, and a lot of exhibitions. It might not have been anyone else’s idea of a vacation, but for a number of years, my work became part of my family’s play. And the people we went to meet accepted this as completely natural, since it is how they do their work, too. It has been so precious, our ability to make this world part of our everyday lives. I am thankful to my family and to my friends for making it so, and so fun.

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INTRODUCTION

2009: IN ITS FIRST SHOWING ,

Sheela Gowda’s Behold (2009, figures 1 and 2) occupied a cavernous space in the Arsenale section of the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Nearly four kilometers of rope twisted and braided from human hair was draped across the space and drawn up to the ceiling, from which were suspended more than a dozen chrome car bumpers against the wall. The installation was exemplary of the exhibition’s curatorial frame of worldmaking in its basis in an everyday practice, common across India, of tying a piece of hair rope to the bumper of a car as a talisman to ward off danger. Behold refers to this practice but holds open the other connotations of the materials for exploration. Most important is the contrast between the sleek, machinemanufactured car part and the hand-worked rope, which is a complex congealing of the human body and its labor.1 The work elicits viewer responses through the contrast in the materiality of its elements, the counterintuitive feat of its form, and its sheer scale. A confident work, it deftly anticipates the diverse forms of viewer engagement common to massive art events like the Venice 1

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figure 1 E Sheela Gowda, Behold, 2009, hair, steel, variable dimensions. Collection Tate Modern, London. As installed at Venice Biennale (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 2 F Sheela Gowda, Behold (detail), 2009 (photo courtesy of the artist).

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Biennale. It uses materials and forms that resonate powerfully, but differently, with viewers with various levels of knowledge of the artist’s context. 1993: Vivan Sundaram’s Memorial (1993, figures 3 and 4) commemorated the anniversary of the December 6, 1992, demolition of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalist activists, a cataclysmic act of iconoclasm that spurred waves of civil violence in cities across India. Viewers entered the installation through the kind of steel fencing used to control access to official sites, before navigating paths made from the red sandstone used in the Mughal and Indo-Saracenic official architecture of North India. Two memorial structures, a tin-trunk arch Gateway and an inlaid marble Mausoleum, honor an unknown victim of communal violence, whom neon text calls a “fallen mortal.” Inside the mausoleum lies a plaster sculpture of a man’s body, imitating a photograph by journalist Hoshi Jal of a body lying crumpled next to a dumpster on a riot-torn Bombay street.2 The photograph recurs throughout the installation in vitrines and frames, each individually titled and reminiscent of a different form of commemoration of the dead. Sundaram’s installation is a sharp critique of the state’s utter failure to protect its citizens, and an immediate recognition of the violence in and after Ayodhya as a watershed in contemporary Indian history. Addressed to viewers who are also imagined to be fellow citizens, the work asks people to mourn, and then to act. A PERIOD OF RAPID CHANGE

Between the years in which these two works of art premiered, the forms of practice commonly undertaken by Indian artists changed radically, and the infrastructure for Indian art’s production and circulation expanded and grew in complexity. Sundaram’s work introduces, through its formal language, a number of gestures that became central to Indian contemporary art in this period: a renewed focus on questions of medium, acknowledgment of the ubiquity of photo reproduction technology, and recontextualization of infrastructural materials and architectural forms common to everyday life. Conceived by Sundaram as a final break with his past practice of painting, Memorial is accepted as one of the first important works of installation by an Indian artist. It is also broadly representative of wider efforts to explore new mediums by Sundaram’s contemporaries and the generation who had followed, all of whom had developed sophisticated practices of painting or, less often, sculpture. Sundaram’s Memorial resonates with the other artists’ experimentation with form, such as Nalini Malani’s 1991 painting-based installation Alleyway of Lohar Chawl (figure 5), and experiments with Xerox reproduction in a series of artist books, Rummana Hussain’s post-Ayodyha assemblages that used everyday materials, like terracotta pots, to refer to iconoclasm (1993, figure 6), and Sheela Gowda’s 1993 turn to the ubiquitous and densely significant material of cow dung in a series of paintings, which were closely followed by dung-based earthworks and installations (see chapter 3). Sundaram’s Memorial contains within it the seeds of the formal experimentation that flourished in India in the two decades surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century. INTRODUCTION

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figure 3 E Vivan Sundaram, Memorial, 1993, steel, metal trunks, sandstone tiles, marble, glass, wood, concrete, ceramic, plaster, iron nails, neon, photograph, gelatin silver print and photographs, inkjet print on paper, dimensions variable. Collection Tate Modern, London (photo courtesy of the artist, facilitated by Asia Art Archive). figure 4 G Vivan Sundaram, Iron Pyre, from Fallen Mortal series, shown as part of Memorial, 1993, black-and-white photograph (by Hoshi Jal, Times of India, Bombay, February 23, 1993) with nails in vitrine, 29 × 40 × 15 in. (73.7 × 101.6 × 38.1 cm). Collection Tate Modern, London (photo courtesy of the artist, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

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figure 5 Nalini Malani, Alleyway of Lohar Chawl, 1991, installation of five reverse paintings on Mylar, stones (photo courtesy of the artist).

And yet, Memorial’s direct address to the state, as well as its installation in the AllIndia Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS) gallery—a space closely associated with the modernist movement in Delhi—connects the work to an art infrastructure that was already being displaced by new networks and new institutional forms. Sundaram, together with his partner, the art historian Geeta Kapur, had himself spearheaded many of the most transformative art initiatives. Those included the Kasauli Art Centre, which hosted a series of critical workshops beginning in 1976, and SAHMAT, an arts-based political advocacy organization they helped to found in 1989. After the 1991 liberalization of India’s economy eased the flow of money into the country, commercial institutions took on a much more important role in India’s art infrastructure. International auction houses began to stage modern and contemporary sales in INTRODUCTION

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figure 6 Rummana Hussain, Dissected Projection, 1993, wood, mirror, terracotta, acrylic, and earth, 18 × 18 in. (45.7 × 45.7 cm) wallmounted pot, 60 × 36 × 24 in. (152.4 × 91.4 × 61 cm) wooden box, 36 × 12 × 12 in. (91.4 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm) acrylic box (© Estate of Rummana Hussain, courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi).

India in 1992, the first New York sale followed in 1995, and India-based auction houses were established beginning in 1997.3 The number and size of commercial galleries in Mumbai and Delhi, as well as in smaller cities like Bengaluru, grew steadily across the 1990s and into the next decade. The rise in purchase prices and other forms of patronage had enormous implications for artists, both in their everyday lives and in their ability to invest money in the production of their work. Supports like larger studios and regular studio assistance became common for a larger number of artists. This kind of backing was crucial, because the rate at which artists were expected to show work increased to a huge

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degree, with the most productive artists holding solo exhibitions once or even twice a year at the height of the boom. The most influential group of artists in this period was diverse in important ways, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties and including nearly equal numbers of women and men. But relatively few artists emerged from minority religious communities, nondominant caste communities, or poor communities in this period. Social markers, like the ability to speak fluent English, remained extremely important, for they eased artists’ mobility across and outside of India. Led first by initiatives that connected sites in Asia, Australia, and Africa, and then by those in Europe and the United States, national and international art networks changed in character and geographic reach, with nonprofit institutions and foundation-funded projects acting as powerful forces. Through the patronage of institutions like the Ford Foundation, the Goethe-Institut, and others, opportunities emerged for much more frequent artist travel abroad, as well as the circulation of Indian art both physically and as images transmitted electronically. Such mobility forged significant networks across arts communities. India was just one site in an unprecedented global expansion of art infrastructure at the time, which was integrated in a broader set of global processes by which strong local civil society organizations with transnational connections became much more closely linked with one another. Indeed, nonprofit arts institutions closely resembled nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their structure and financing. And yet, while contemporary criticism emphasized the difference in the sort of work that for- and nonprofit art institutions tended to support, the institutions were in fact very closely interconnected and interdependent. They also tended to shape the careers of the same groups of artists. Gowda’s work, as commissioned for the 2009 Venice Biennale, is an extraordinary demonstration of the transformations of infrastructure and form traced by this book. The scale of the installation and its legibility to a wide audience, though especially elegant and accomplished, was exemplary of work made in the latter part of that decade. Gowda’s Behold combines a disciplined approach to form with the use of significant materials to explore changes in everyday life, employing an influential strategy in Indian contemporary art practice. This particular work uses the exponential growth in car ownership as an metonym for a much broader set of social changes that accompany rapid urbanization and investment in automobility and that have affected habits, meanings, and the most concrete and fundamental technologies of everyday life.4 In a signature gesture of this period, then, Gowda’s work refers to the role that changes in infrastructure have played in India, even as it capitalizes upon those changes as they had reconfigured the art world. The last chapter of this volume further explores this turn toward infrastructural systems such as roads, water systems, and waste disposal through the work of several artists. That includes Sundaram’s work with trash, an image of which appears on this volume’s cover.

INTRODUCTION

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ART AND ITS INFRASTRUCTURES

Infrastructure, as anthropologist Brian Larkin defines it, is an “architecture for circulation,” a “built network” that facilitates “the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow[s] for their exchange over space.”5 Anthropologists of infrastructure like Larkin emphasize the “politics and poetics” of what seem to be largely matters of engineering. The new anthropology of electrical, water, and road systems pinpoints the role of meaning in the operation of infrastructure, although it tends to place ultimate value on questions of citizenship and belonging.6 An examination of art infrastructure requires the opposite operation: an integration of the materiality of artistic networks into a discourse preoccupied with meaning, in which value is found primarily in art’s aesthetic and political significance. As Larkin argues, the combination of material structures and frameworks of meaning together “shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown.”7 This account adopts the deliberate holism found in the anthropology of infrastructure in order to articulate the relationship between the conditions that make art possible and the form of art itself. A principal argument of this text is that attention to the relationship between art’s infrastructure and its form is particularly important in studies of art and globalization.8 While art had long claimed to be grounded in everyday life, the artists considered here attended closely to the manner in which everyday life was being rapidly transformed by the technological innovations and forms of standardization associated with globalization, including communications technologies, the container ship, software code and data, and the financial instrument. Each of those larger technologies of globalization had a specific effect within the art world, as work could be more easily shipped, information and images could be more easily circulated, and art could be more easily funded. Whether or not works of art were specifically about globalization, their form—their scale, use of materials, or geographical reach—was strongly affected by that complex set of social processes.9 As Pamela Lee put it, “the work of art’s world [is] an intercessory or medium through which globalization takes place.”10 For, despite the art world’s investments in immaterial practices and frameworks of thought, the production and circulation of contemporary art is still largely a matter of moving people and things. And its workings are not always smooth. As with all infrastructure, art’s participation in broader networks of circulation is made readily apparent in moments of their recalcitrance or failure, such as the workarounds needed to move funding across the world, the holds placed on shipments of work by customs officers, or the visas denied to artists by embassies.11 But art infrastructure not only depends upon broader infrastructural systems, it joins them together into its own networks. Art networks are, to borrow a key insight of actor-network theory, assemblages of human and nonhuman entities, in which people and things, practices and discourses share agency.12 8

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While networks emphasize mobility, assemblages indicate the agglomeration of unlike things, often of radically dissimilar materialities and senses of time and space, which change as they move, adding and subtracting as they de- and reterritorialize.13 While quite different, both network theory and the idea of assemblages usefully dismiss the idea of “context,” and therefore the manner by which we differentiate events from the structures that produce them. They provide us necessary resources to resist the art historical discipline’s reflexive isolation of works of art: its insistence on artworks’ autonomy that grants to them a unique power that is reinforced as they are drawn out analytically from a largely passive infrastructure.14 Art in the 1990s quite famously engaged the artwork’s implication in the structures that produce it through relational aesthetics, as coined by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. As he wrote in 1998, “the ‘Art’ network is porous, and it is the relations of this network with all the areas of production that determines its development.”15 Drawing together works of art that prioritize the creation of new social relations, Bourriaud carefully grounded relational aesthetics in the work of artists from inside and outside of Europe, and therefore in the productive convergences made possible by global flows. As David Teh argues, however, the global “currency” acquired by Thai proponents of relational aesthetics, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, involved acts of what he calls “arbitrage,” in which the disjunctures between systems of value were exploited for gain.16 By exploring the manner in which Thai systems of power structured even the most “international” of artists’ works, Teh articulates distinctions in apparently smooth transnational art networks. Many authors join Teh in his desire to complicate the celebratory flattening of distinctions between works of art, people, institutions, materials, discourses, and events in the name of globalism. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern wrote as early as 1996 about the need to identify “cuts in the network,” for those interruptions or slowdowns in circulation provide opportunities for interpretation.17 This account adopts the understanding of art as a network assemblage in order to emphasize the productivities of the impulse to understand such dissimilar things as elements of interconnected systems.18 It therefore provides a different sort of counterweight to the period’s excessive confidence in the frictionless mobility of particular artists and curatorial frameworks. Looking more closely at the conditions of possibility for art overcomes the art historical discipline’s polite silence about the shaping roles played by materials, the market, and infrastructures of circulation in contemporary art. Rather than just displacing human agency, as is common to network-based thinking, this account answers political theorist Jane Bennett’s call to “rais[e] the volume on the vitality of other materialities.”19 This choice makes it possible to reconsider the role of scholarship and debate, as well. Because the period in question also saw a significant increase in exposure to writing concerned with South Asia, Infrastructure and Form considers key intellectual currents as causal agents in the forging of new networks and prompting of new experimental forms. Some of these texts have been considered a more transcendent form of INTRODUCTION

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“theory,” but this book foregrounds the operation of ideas within practice. Influential ideas within Indian debates, such as postcolonial feminism’s collective reconsideration of the ideological function of femininity-as-tradition in Indian nationalism and Arjun Appadurai’s use of Mumbai as the key case for his conceptualization of globalization as de- and reterritorialization, function in this text as historically situated interventions in practice. Ideas that are more removed from either a South Asian or an art historical context, such as Amelia Jones’s understanding of performance, Bill Brown’s thing theory, Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, or Deleuze and Guattari’s original formulations of de- and re-territorialization and assemblage, are also considered, as much as possible, for their connections to networks of practice.20 A central contention of this volume is that frameworks of thought should be considered key elements in art’s infrastructure, granted even status with other actants in an art network, even as they maintain different proximities to and levels of entanglement with art and artists living in India. In each chapter, ideas have a shaping effect on the form of art that make them part of its conditions of possibility, rather than providing an interpretive context that lies outside of the phenomenon of art itself. HISTORIES OF THE GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY

Critical curatorial discourse at once problematized and facilitated the global circulation of contemporary art. Geeta Kapur played a singular role in shaping Indian art’s production and its reception through her work as a historian, curator, and critic, as has been recently argued by Saloni Mathur.21 Having established her critical voice in the late 1960s, in this period Kapur wrote in dialogue with a group of key writers from the Global South. Most had established a curatorial or critical platform from which to speak, such as Gerardo Mosquera’s work with the Havana Biennial, Kuroda Raiji’s transformation of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Rashid Araeen’s establishment of Third Text, or Okwui Enwezor’s influential set of biennial exhibitions. Although active in a number of projects, Kapur had a relative lack of institutional obligations. She emerged as a strong partisan of the engaged and situated work of art, with a conception of artist citizenship that was profoundly opposed to multiculturalism, which she associated with unbridled capital. Within India, she advocated for the formal experimentation that is cataloged in this account and for the articulation of a place for Indian artists in various international art networks. Even as she curated a number of key exhibitions in the 1990s and the following decade, Kapur influenced a generation of curators working across the world in her role as a consultant and powerful gatekeeper. By the end of the 1990s, Mumbai-based curators and critics Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania and Canberra-based art historian and curator Chaitanya Sambrani had emerged as foundational curatorial voices with individual sensibilities. Each understood contemporary art in relationship to aligned practices of poetry, media, and craft, respectively. They worked alongside an influential group of journalists who estab10

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lished a regional art press in India and across Asia and Australia.22 Indeed, much of what has been written on Indian contemporary art to date was part of an effort to build infrastructural support through the development of curatorial or critical frameworks. My own research for this book began as a series of small contributions to this overall project, through which I learned the processes of the art world and was able to advocate for artistic work that I believed in.23 Since 2011 I have done more conventional art historical research and conducted periodic conversations with nearly all of the living artists, as well as many of the gallerists, curators, and critics whose work I discuss. This account is cheerfully entangled in the art infrastructure it describes. While the art discussed here is relatively recent, a central contention of this book is that the period between liberalization and the Great Recession of 2008 should be considered historically distinct. This is beginning to be acknowledged, and the work discussed here is being read retrospectively. This account historicizes the global contemporary of the post-1991 period as particular past “now,” contingent and discrete, while acknowledging the period’s role in solidifying a canon of Indian contemporary art and artists. While this basic periodization resonates in many global sites, the linking of this art history to political economy requires attention to national or regional histories.24 The bookends of liberalization and the Great Recession have very different status as events because the first affected the entirety of the Indian economy, by ushering in a series of discontinuous but profound changes, while the second was felt primarily as a disturbance in the flow of capital. The Great Recession was extremely important for the art market, but in India its other effects were much shallower. The consequences of liberalization are also clarified by considering how arts infrastructure was configured before India opened its economy. Rebecca M. Brown’s study of the mid 1980s Festival of India is an invaluable account of a massive display of statedriven arts patronage justified by ideas of soft power. Particularly crucial is her articulation of the “distant contemporary” in festival presentations of recent art, which she describes as a weak recognition of simultaneity overwhelmed by the art’s “location in both a faraway place and a conceptually distinct time.”25 Brown grapples in her book with the temporal fragmentation associated with postmodernism as it is mapped onto long-standing assumptions of (post)colonial difference. For American visitors to the Festival of India, the sense of a distant contemporary facilitated a “frisson of encounter”—the experience of difference as temporal disjuncture—that was systematically undermined by and through the art infrastructure that developed in the period discussed in this book.26 An important line of cross-disciplinary scholarship prioritizes study of the growth of biennial-style international exhibitions of art, and particularly the increasing number of exhibitions sited outside of the West.27 These events are quite important to this account as well, yet they are not treated in isolation but instead considered as one of many pulls on artistic practices. Among studies of large-scale exhibitions, Caroline Jones’s A Global Work of Art stands out for its emphasis on the relationship between INTRODUCTION

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exhibition form and the emergence of art that prioritizes the “aesthetics of experience.” Jones explicates the “artistic tactics” that allow works of art to be understood as global, while narrating “the globality consolidated by biennials of contemporary art.”28 Following exhibition histories from Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Kassel, Jones describes as global those artists who have rejected nationalism. That gesture sits uneasily within an archive from the postcolonial world, where national sovereignty retains its hard-won power, and artists are often keen to address their work to local and national as well as international audiences. Against Jones’s otherwise valuable analysis, then, it is essential to consider alternative accounts of global art processes, such as Joanna Grabski’s study of Dak’Art, the biennial exhibition sited in Dakar, Senegal, which emphasizes the exhibition’s entanglement with the city.29 In describing an art network that radiates out from India, Infrastructure and Form resists the common impulse to describe global contemporary art from an omniscient point of view. While it explores the implications of international exhibitions of Indian art, Western institutions play a peripheral role within an art infrastructure that I situate much more powerfully in India. It tracks, therefore, the evolution of the situation of globalization that Gerardo Mosquera described in 1994, in which the index of disempowerment comes in the distinction between curating and curated cultures, in which the former “select, legitimate, promote, and purchase,” and therefore “provok[e] the art of the curated cultures to adapt in order to satisfy the preferences of the curating cultures.”30 Without underestimating the asymmetries within the art network, this account traces the growth and change of the art network from the time of Mosquera’s text forward. It emphasizes and articulates the workings of the networks that channel, quicken, and block such acts of consecration, rather than focusing on the moments of legitimation alone. CHAPTER SUMMARIES

The chapters in this book look closely at the work of eighteen artists, two collectives, and one transnational art project, as well as mentioning individual works by several other artists. Each chapter prioritizes the dynamics of formal and infrastructural change over tight analyses of particular works of art. In some cases, the concluding sections of chapters extend the argument to include one or two more works, showing what became of a particular formal shift. Even with these techniques for broadening my account, there are a dozen or more other artists whose work could have served as examples of the same impulses or of other experiments in form. This book tiptoes right up to the line of what curator Hammad Nasar called, in an interview with me, “art histories of excess,” or the kind of account that deliberately overwhelms the bandwidths of the art (historical) infrastructure.31 But it does not cross it. This account identifies signal works by truly crucial artists, while purposely presenting just a little bit more than any reader unfamiliar with the scene could possibly absorb. This is partly an effort to do justice to the extraordinary creativity of 12

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the period. But it also imitates the overwhelming pace of change in order to borrow some of that energy. The first chapter argues that a decisive shift in artistic medium—a break with painting in favor of installation and performance art—was encouraged by a combination of an expanded infrastructure for art’s circulation throughout the Global South through biennial exhibitions and the explosion of feminist discourse in writing, theater, and film studies. This contrasts with the claims of critics at the time, who framed explorations of installation art as a rejection of painting as insufficient to address the shock of Hindu nationalist violence.32 My account of the experiments with painting and installation by Nalini Malani (b. 1946) and Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945) and with performance art by Pushpamala N. (b. 1956) and Rummana Hussain (1952–99) takes into account opportunities for exhibition and collaborations in embraced diverse media across the 1990s. Those included significant collaborations in feminist and activist theater in Delhi and Bombay, as well as artist participation in the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, the 1990s Asia-Pacific Triennials, and in an important group show in London in 1997. This chapter introduces the book’s method of combining analysis of expanding art institutions with that of discourse, as well as its goal of accounting for the production of key works of art from the period. Along with debates about the insufficiencies of their medium, Indian painters working in the mid 1990s also had to deal with the avalanche of new image forms that became available in cities, from the proliferation of visually innovative television channels, including MTV and Channel [V], to a quieter new ubiquity of duplication technologies like photocopiers and fax, to the windows of personal computing and the hypertext links of the internet. Instead of ushering in painting’s demise, as critics often framed it in the moment, these new media shaped painting practice without displacing it in the Indian art scene. Introducing the concept of the image condition, the second chapter describes how technologies of image making and circulation entered into the painting of Atul Dodiya (b. 1964) and Jitish Kallat (b. 1974), and explores how their work was shown in Century City, the opening show of Tate Modern that argued for Mumbai’s status as a paradigmatic global city. The chapter goes on to describe the emergence of an internet-facilitated boom auction market in painting that promoted the renderings of mediatic images called photorealism in the moment and produced by a group of artists nicknamed the “Bombay Boys,” including T. V. Santhosh (b. 1968). It ends by contemplating the interventions made by Pakistani artist Rashid Rana (b. 1968), whose photo-based work riffs on painting and its histories, and Ranbir Kaleka (b. 1953), whose work involves the projection of video over painting. The third chapter moves away from direct discussion of the art market to explore how Indian artists’ strategy of repurposing everyday things as artistic media emerged in two very different art-world contexts: a network of deliberately improvisational, non-profit international workshops represented by the Delhi-based Khoj and Mumbaibased Open Circle, and the international exhibition, which often responded to INTRODUCTION

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audiences’ demand that art be culturally representative and immediately legible. Artists who succeeded in both spaces include Subodh Gupta (b. 1964) and Sheela Gowda (b. 1957), whose work shares a disciplined engagement with materiality, beginning with their near simultaneous experiments with cow dung. Incorporating new materialism and thing theory, this chapter establishes how their work prompts the dual dialectics explored in this chapter, namely the relationships of materiality with ephemerality and of the symbolic with the haptic, or what artist Anita Dube (b. 1958) evocatively described as the “optical caress.” It places the work of Gupta, Gowda, and Dube, as well as other participants in international workshops, within broader, crossdisciplinary debates about the relationship between materiality and mediation. The fourth chapter extends discussion of materiality and mediation by focusing on the role played by language in the work of Amar Kanwar (b. 1964), Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, b. 1965; Monica Narula, b. 1969; and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, b. 1968), and Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976). Despite consistent collaborations with theater and literature, very little contemporary art in India had worked directly with language as a medium. Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective were embedded in the conventions of documentary film, with its careful balance of word and image. Raqs also borrowed terminology from the emergent fields of digital media studies and urban studies, as well as new ideas about institutions, which they put into practice with their nonprofit para-academic center, Sarai. Shilpa Gupta’s use of language adopted methods associated with conceptual art, building upon her early work experiences with graphic design, both of which she explored first with the Open Circle collective, discussed in chapter 3. Chapter 4 details how language-based artistic practice was gradually accommodated within Indian contemporary art, first through the intervention of Okwui Enwezor’s documenta XI (2002), then through work with nonprofit arts organizations, and, finally, in more market-driven contexts, including a privately funded pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. The fifth chapter looks across the entire period at work that engages with infrastructural forms. It adopts Strathern’s focus on various “cuts,” or interruptions in the networks through which art circulates across contested geographies, whether urban, national, or international. The chapter takes as its frame a multi-medium body of work by Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943), Trash (1997–2008), which examined changes in the everyday life of cities through the system by which discarded objects are collected, sorted, and repurposed. I pair sections of Sundaram’s project with other artistic engagements with infrastructural forms, including the cross-border exchange between Indian and Pakistani artists called Aar-Paar (2000–2004), ongoing work undertaken by Navjot Altaf (b. 1949) and a collective rural artists on issues of drinking water (1997– ), and engagements by Ravi Agarwal (b. 1958) and Atul Bhalla (b. 1964) with the Yamuna River (2004– ). These projects invert the period’s underlying emphasis on art’s infrastructure—its networks, debates, institutions, and markets—by tracking art’s engagements with the larger infrastructures of everyday life. Exploiting the growing presence 14

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of NGOs in the art sector, discussed in chapters 3 and 4, these artists either established or adapted existing organizations to produce collaborative, community-based work that collapses the distinction between the art object and the infrastructure that makes it possible. The book comes to a close with a brief essay looking at the collapse of the boom market that sustained Indian contemporary art between the late 1990s and 2008. It looks closely at the practice of Mithu Sen (b. 1971), who has examined the relationship between the artist and her audiences through a series of projects, including critical apprehensions of the logics of the art market. In order to capture the seismic effects of the recession within the international network for Indian art, the conclusion focuses on the currents of talk—of gossip—that bind together the art community. It finds in these informal discussions a valuable archival resource, as well as a sense of the social dynamics that underlie the art world. The conclusion then traces out the major institutional changes that followed the collapse of the market, before summarizing briefly the major arguments of the book.

INTRODUCTION

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1 FEMINIST NETWORKS, NEW BIENNIALS, AND PERFORMANCE

A

Johannesburg Biennale, Nalini Malani’s Medeamaterial combined a series of narrative paintings, a neon sculpture, video, and large robelike works of painted Mylar suspended in the middle of the exhibition space.1 Malani’s works told the story of Medea, and had emerged from a 1993–94 performance collaboration with the actress Alaknanda Samarth, based on East German playwright Heiner Müller’s reworking of Euripides’ tragedy (figure 7). In the Biennale, her work was shown alongside Nilima Sheikh’s Songspace, a series of large, double-sided paintings on cloth, hung so that viewers walked among them. Sheikh’s paintings refer to the songs written by early modern saints, many of which feature allegorical landscapes that enact viraha, the longing for an endlessly deferred divine love that is a major theme in devotional poetry. While made for the exhibition, Sheikh traces her work with such texts and forms to her experience designing sets with Vivadi, a feminist experimental theater group. S PRESENTED IN THE 1995

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figure 7 Nalini Malani, Medeamaterial, 1993, as staged in Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist).

Long friends, Malani and Sheikh worked together with Arpita Singh and Madhvi Parekh to exhibit, expressly as women artists, in a show that traveled to four venues in India between 1987 and 1989. Although their practices were grounded in similar politics and concerns, the form of their work had always been quite different. Malani’s and Sheikh’s showing at the Johannesburg Biennale highlighted how, in this moment, both artists’ experimentation with forms of performance had occasioned a new intersection in their practices. Performance projects offered these artists opportunities to extend their practices of painting into space while engaging with narrative in new ways. These two projects—Medeamaterial and Songspace—are evidence of how formal transformation can occur through acts of cross-disciplinary borrowing and exchange. In a complex set of changes in practice, both Malani and Sheikh began to work at a much larger scale and in media heretofore largely unused in India. Their work came off the wall or off the pedestal to fill large rooms, was often made from unconventional materials, and involved moves across artistic disciplines in a rejection of the primacy of medium. Such work required different kinds of art infrastructure—spaces of exhibition, modes of patronage—than the practices these artists had pursued in the period just before.2 Malani’s and Sheikh’s showing in Johannesburg argued for the 18

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importance of these practices and pointed forward to the circulation of Indian art and artists through new networks forged by large, biennial-style exhibitions, as well as smaller-scale projects. The development of such networks depended upon the development of curatorial and critical expertise able to assess the significance of these formal changes. These shifts in medium and form were just as dependent upon the immaterial aspects of art infrastructure. Networks of friendship, collaboration, and exchange developed alongside and through the emergent frameworks of understanding— sometimes particular to this group of Indian artists and sometimes broader in their circulation—that allowed these artistic practices to achieve significance. The material changes in practice, particularly the extension of painting or sculpture into installation or performance, were supported by a transnational feminist theory engaged with issues of signification and embodiment, as well as by a curatorial discourse that changed in this period in the wake of artistic practice. Feminists began in the 1980s to build for themselves institutional formations in politics, publishing, and across the arts, making networks that extended across and beyond India. The group of artists who were animated by these shifts found opportunities to show their work in new ways and in new venues, under new formal and curatorial imperatives. Alongside this sense of possibility was a deep unease about the dissolution of many of the certainties that had driven artistic production and intellectual life. For several Indian artists, the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was an impetus for formal change in their work. An enduring symbol of the collapse in India’s fragile secularist consensus, the events in Ayodhya overlaid caste, sectarian, and separatist conflicts that had emerged or had been renewed across the previous decade. All of these crises intersected powerfully with issues of gender inequality and women’s vulnerability to violence. These events signal a more general, profound loss of confidence among many artists and intellectuals in the cultural definition of the nation. An emergent alternative imagination championed the fragment and employed methods aimed at the recuperation of lost or silenced voices that were shared across humanistic and arts disciplines. As we shall see, that impulse was fed, in part, by transnational feminist discourse across communities in the Global South, as well as in diasporic communities in the West. Institutional sites for circulating these ideas had been established in mid 1980s Delhi, exemplified by the Journal of Arts and Ideas, which was founded in 1983 to join studies of theater, literature, art, and film, and the small press Kali for Women. The press, founded by Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon in 1985, published a series of collected writings by women, as well as a 1989 landmark collection of feminist history (figure 8).3 Included in that volume was a crucial essay by Partha Chatterjee on the nationalist “women’s question,” which tied the decreasing support for political rights for women during the Indian nationalist movement to the anticolonial designation of women as guardians of an inner and domestic sphere of Indian tradition unsullied by FEMINIST NETWORKS

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figure 8 Sheba Chhachhi, Urvashi—Staged Portrait, 1990, Gulmohar Park, Delhi, from the Seven Lives and a Dream series of photographs (© Sheba Chhachhi).

colonial contamination.4 That essay became the core of his The Nation and Its Fragments, published in 1994, which examined the anticolonial movement from the perspective of a series of subaltern—meaning roughly “dispossessed”—populations. Chatterjee’s influential essay implicitly answers Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s challenge levied to the then exclusively male Subaltern Studies collective to consider women as subaltern actors in her landmark essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In the matter of a few years, Left debate about the nature of national culture and political life had become a site for the articulation of feminism. This chapter attends to this double movement: the manner in which a growing sense of fragmentation and crisis also led to the piecing together of coherent positions and expansive networks. Artists’ work and exhibition projects were built upon the contradictory agency found in disempowerment or the possibilities of renewal found in cultural fragmentation. The artists’ championing of the significant part over the synthetic whole places their work in line with currents of postcolonial humanistic and historical thought, which had belatedly come to embrace feminism’s consistent championing of the marginal voice.5 Their work circulated across emergent art world infrastructures, including exhibitions that capitalized upon feminist networks and others that sought to develop an alternative geographical reach. These developments diverged from the centers of Indian feminist and historical thought. And yet artists and curators 20

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forced a temporary, ad hoc intersection of these infrastructural networks at this time, in the service of developing new approaches to form. DISPOSSESSION AT THE FIRST JOHANNESBURG BIENNALE

Malani’s Medeamaterial and Sheikh’s Songspace were shown with equally full exhibitions of work by Sheela Gowda and Pushpamala N. in Dispossession, the India pavilion in the first Johannesburg Biennale. The exhibition brought together significant moments of transition for all four artists, who were in differing stages of rethinking their practices and the role that medium would play in their work. Kapur’s curatorial text is similarly exploratory, hinging upon a transnational feminism: a sense that women artists from India and South Africa shared the ability to access a vulnerable subjectivity and to project it, theatrically, into space.6 This impulse is a product of their double disenfranchisement, she writes, of the inability of women artists— particularly those from postcolonial countries—to claim their experience as universal or to speak for (or with) the whole. With dispossession as a key word, Kapur highlights the theme of exile in the work by Malani and by Sheikh. The Medea myth is structured by her voluntary and involuntary expulsions from Colchis and Corinth. Müller’s retelling focuses on her abandonment by Jason, and Malani’s works, especially the paintings that presented in Medeamaterial, harness the mental anguish that accompanies that experience. The tradition of devotional poetry that Sheikh focuses on dwells upon the longing caused by separation from the beloved. One of Sheikh’s Songspace paintings, Meghdoot (Cloud Messenger) (1995), captures an episode from Kalidasa’s classic text in which a yaksha (nature spirit), exiled in Central India, convinces a cloud to carry a message to his wife in their homeland in the Himalayas (figure 9). On one of its sides, the painting places a kneeling figure—either the message or the messenger—atop a cloudlike, birdlike shape, floating high above a cityscape to bring news to a female figure. Using economical language, Sheikh’s telling inverts the typical perspective, focusing on the recipient of the message—the one left behind—rather than the exile. Both artists chose to frame their narratives around the woman’s experience. Kapur’s text also connects dispossession to form, emphasizing the use of metonymic signs in which parts gesture toward the whole. She finds this semiotic approach to dispossession in the work by Sheela Gowda and Pushpamala N., whose choices of materials or process refer indirectly to women’s labor. Gowda showed a series of paintings in cow dung (figure 10), a material that women use in domestic life, which the artist dried and sifted in order to create pigment. Though smart and discerning, these works are tentative when compared with Gowda’s experiments with cow dung later that year, used in installation works that seeded the investment in the signifying power of everyday materials for which she is best known. Pushpamala showed a body of work, “Excavations,” that used the technique of casting to transform everyday things—cane trays used to sift rice or small tin trunks used to hold valuables—into FEMINIST NETWORKS

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figure 9 Nilima Sheikh, Meghdoot/Savan 2, side 1, from the Songspace series, 1995, scroll painted on both sides, casein tempera on canvas, 120 × 60 in. (305 × 152.5 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

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figure 10 Sheela Gowda, Untitled (Triptych), 1992–93, cow dung on paper/jute/board, 47 ⁵/₈ × 71 ⁵/₈ in. (121 × 182 cm) each (photo courtesy of the artist).

more monumental forms. Pushpamala made these works in reaction to the violence at Ayodhya, in order to explore the status of evidence (figure 11).7 But she later abandoned this form of practice in favor of the performance photography explored later in this chapter. With both artists moving quickly on to other modes of practice, their participation in Dispossession is important primarily as a link to other exhibitions of feminist art in this period. The format of Dispossession, which at once championed the fragment and provided extensive presentations by each of the artists, closely parallels the structure of the first Johannesburg Biennale itself. The Biennale’s organizers encouraged a narrative of historical shift, release, and rupture: the exhibition was meant to capture an unprecedented moment in world history, as the most unapologetically racist outpost of the European colonial project fell in the name of multicultural, multiracial democracy. The curatorial team for the first edition of the Biennale, drawn primarily from the White arts and culture establishment, attempted to address a lack of Black representation by adopting a decentralized organizational structure that privileged a multiplicity of curatorial visions over a strong central exhibition.8 The organizers’ goal of reintegrating South Africa in the international community following decades of cultural boycott motivated their inclusion of national pavilions, favoring autonomously curated shows that avoided diplomatic channels. Following the lead of the Venice and Sao Paolo biennials, the pavilions were public-private hybrids, in which individual curators FEMINIST NETWORKS

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figure 11 Pushpamala N., Excavations (detail), 1994, installation with twenty black tissue paper books stained by rusting, stitched and tied with string and hung on wall, each book 12 × 8 in. (30.5 × 20.3 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

like Geeta Kapur, and/or arts professionals like Shireen Gandhy, were empowered to represent countries. As an exhibition of feminist art reacting to a crisis in India’s national culture, Dispossession gains significance from its placement in the first Johannesburg Biennale. The Johannesburg Biennale was directly implicated in curatorial and critical debates about postcoloniality and national culture, which brought an intense focus on the exhibition’s institutional structure after its opening. That also led to its reinvention for the second edition, curated by Okwui Enwezor. It was also one of the first instances in which Kapur facilitated the expanded geographical reach of biennial exhibitions by

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providing a layer of curatorial authority, shaping the selection and interpretation of artists’ work as it was shown abroad. With self-conscious attention to the emergent role of curatorial discourse, a network of circulation developed between cultural centers outside of the West, through which artistic strategies were exchanged and connections made. As this chapter explores, feminism often provided a crucial connective tissue, providing a counterpoint to national-cultural frames and an alternative genealogy of formal experimentation. SHEIKH, THEATER, AND THE EXTENSION OF PAINTING INTO SPACE

When Geeta Kapur uses the term theatricality to describe the work of Malani and Sheikh in Dispossession, she is both riffing on a classic criticism of contemporary art by Michael Fried and using the term literally.9 For these artists, work with theater and/or performance was an impetus for new ideas of scale and of modes of engagement with viewers.10 Adopting practices of set design allowed Sheikh to extend painting into space, where it functioned in ways similar to installation while retaining its capacity for narrative. Nilima Sheikh’s work with theater began at the Kasauli Art Centre, a retreat for artists held in Vivan Sundaram’s family home in the mountains north of Delhi. In June 1989, the feminist theater troupe Vivadi held a two-week seminar to discuss the representation of women in literature and drama. Vivadi was led by Anuradha Kapur, Geeta Kapur’s sister, and participants included Sheikh, Sheba Chhachhi, and Urvashi Butalia, among others. Looking at texts of all sorts—from devotional poetry from bhakti and sufi traditions through modernist literature—the group sought resources to develop critical approaches to the constitution of religious and gender identity in light of a present reshaped by Hindu nationalist agitation.11 Sheikh worked on a series of images connected to the Kannada devotional poet Mahadevi Akka, who also appears later in her Songspace series.12 Sheikh also worked with Sashidharan to make the sets for a production of Ghar aur Bahar (originally the Bengali Ghare Bhaire, translated as “The Home and the World”), a Hindi-language production of a classic novel by Rabindranath Tagore that outlines the political stakes of womanhood in the nationalist movement.13 This relatively informal Kasauli production began a series of collaborations between the artists closely associated with the art center and Vivadi. In 1991, Vivan Sundaram designed the sets for Gora, a play based on an earlier novel by Tagore that explores the complexities of religious identity in the midst of the swadeshi movement in Bengal. Like Ghare Bhaire, Tagore’s Gora tracks the reverberations of larger political movements in the domestic sphere. Sundaram’s minimalist set design featured a blue backdrop on which light was projected to represent day and night and an N. N. Rimzon sculpture of a golden thali (plate) that represented the sun but also served in a pivotal scene in which characters negotiate rules about purity, pollution, and caste.14 Vivadi’s production of Gora came in the midst of growing tension and the mass demonstrations that led to the FEMINIST NETWORKS

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demolition of the Babri Masjid in the following year. This context was crucial to the final scene of the play, in which the characters debate what it might mean to declare oneself a Hindu. Nilima Sheikh created sets for Umrao (1993), a Vivadi production that extended the Kasauli seminar’s concern with the recovery of women’s self-representation in narrative. The play retold Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s 1899 novel about a courtesan-performer in Lucknow, in which a young girl loses her innocence and then, after a brilliant career, grows to regret her life of sin. Geetanjali Shree’s feminist script disrupts the narrative’s chronology, showing through dialogue how the characters’ self-images, including the titular Umrao Jaan, are mutually constituted. With S. Badrinarayan, Nilima Sheikh designed large paintings on rotating panels that, when placed in sequence, created architectural and landscape forms reminiscent of miniature painting (figures 12 and 13). As director Anuradha Kapur describes, Sheikh’s sets “create these real and imaginary spaces . . . of dream, reverie and desire.” Alongside Vidya Rao’s deliberately nostalgic sound design, Sheikh explores “the memory of an oriental aesthetic where everything appears to unfold pictorially as if on a splendid screen.”15 In part because of Vivadi’s emphasis on collaboration, the artists’ work in the productions was distinct from their typical artistic practice. Sundaram’s work on Gora was formally distant from his artistic practice, including the series of works on paper in engine oil and charcoal he produced in the same year. The sets Sheikh produced for Umrao had a much more direct impact on her work, however. The Songspace series retained the narrative flexibility of the Umrao sets, as well as the use of both sides of the surface. But the scale of the series, at ten feet by five feet (3 × 1.5 m), was much larger than even the Umrao sets, and they were much more finely tuned in their execution. The works also adopted an internal frame, a key approach to pictorial space used in the painting traditions associated with devotional texts.16 There is an interesting play on performance, then: even as the Songspace series highlights historical forms of performance and the conventions of their representation, the paintings also apply the artist’s experiences with contemporary proscenium theater to shape the movement of viewers in the exhibition. In this way, Sheikh’s interaction with theater is similar to that of Bhupen Khakhar.17 Also an accomplished writer, Khakhar had long been associated with the Vadodarabased literary circle around Gujarati writer-critic Suresh Joshi, which included the Mumbai-based theater director and producer Naushil Mehta. Mehta produced Khakhar’s play Mojila Manilal in 1989, with performances in Vadodara, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai. An extension of Khakhar’s comic short stories, the play imagined how two middle-class Gujarati Hindu couples react when the wives become besotted with an interloper named Manilal. Midway through the play, Khakhar’s mild satire of middleclass life gives way to a kind of magical realism, as Vishnu intervenes to resolve the plot by taking Manilal away. Largely white with painted details, Khakhar’s sets capture the elements of the home in which the play’s action takes place in the same satirical 26

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figure 12 E Nilima Sheikh with S. Badrinarayan, performance still of Vivadi production of Umrao, 1993, set design (photo courtesy of the artist and Anuradha Kapur, facilitated by Asia Art Archive). figure 13 H Nilima Sheikh with S. Badrinarayan, drawing, structural manual for set design of Umrao, 1993 (photo courtesy of the artist, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

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figure 14 Bhupen Khakhar, Paan Beedi Shop, 1992, installation from documenta IX, Kassel, Germany (photo courtesy of Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai).

detail as the script. The play extends Khakhar’s approach to desire, as well as the eroticism associated with religious devotion.18 Khakhar’s work was not engaged with feminism, but it does explore a space of subversive religiosity inhabited much less flamboyantly by Nilima Sheikh. It also stands in subtle critique of the more squarely political, self-serious experimental theater scene in Delhi, of which Vivadi was a vital part. Despite these differences, the formal effects that experiments with theater had on Khakhar’s practice were similar to those Nilima Sheikh experienced. Khakhar’s work on sets allowed for a shift in scale, while coinciding with two other formal experiments within his painting practice: one, a looser style of figuration related to his compromised eyesight, and two, sparsely colored paintings that emphasize negative space.19 One crucial example of the influence of theater on Khakhar’s practice came in his exhibition at documenta IX (1992), in which he accompanied a suite of paintings with an installation of a paan shop (figure 14). The installation used the same approach to painting seen in his Mojila Manilal sets: a simply constructed wood kiosk painted with images of small town landscapes and figures including a holy man, and slogans in English and Gujarati cheekily advertising the Western brands of cigarettes that were displayed for sale. The installation was not received terribly well. Indeed, curator Jan Hoet’s writing on the work is somewhat defensive, taking pains to describe its rela28

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tionship to the painter’s earlier work before justifying the installation as “an opportunity to experience another world and, in doing so, to reflect on one’s own.”20 It’s worth noting that Khakhar did not continue his work in theater long after this, nor did he develop a consistent practice of installation. These works stand out in the artist’s body of work. PERFORMANCE AND THE BODY IN MALANI’S WORK

Nalini Malani’s work in performance was connected to the time she spent at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute in Bombay in the 1960s, where first she met actress and director Alaknanda Samarth. Malani and Samarth’s 1993 collaborative performance project, Despoiled Shore: Medeamaterial: Landscape with Argonauts, was staged in Bombay’s Max Mueller Bhavan, the galleries associated with the German cultural mission. The performance fully transformed the space, beginning with a neon sculpture that Malani mounted just inside the glass-fronted gallery (figure 15). Visible from the outside, the sculpture showed a face and head, in red, with two blue hands reaching through the eyes to grasp at the brain within. Samarth could also be seen by the audience as they entered. When the audience was fully gathered, she began to perform the first part of the play, Despoiled Shore, in front of thirteen large paintings. Samarth then drew the crowd into the auditorium, which Ashish Rajadhyaksha describes as “a networked space, as though cracking with static—two televisions on the floor, one large crescent shaped light chain, the glitch on the wall projected to giant proportions and becoming a spotlight for the actress” (figure 16).21 In Rajadhyaksha’s account, the video projection drew parallels between Müller’s 1982 play, set in then East Germany, and a contemporary political context that included the Bombay riots and the Gulf War, as projected throughout the world by CNN. Video was all there was of Medea’s foil, Jason, who appeared in a recorded performance by actor Rajat Kapoor. Not just the video, Rajadhyaksha argues, but “the entire paraphernalia associated with electronic image distribution, [was presented] as though it were a performer.”22 When presented as an exhibition, Medeamaterial drew attention to the paintings and their continued importance within Malani’s larger multimedium practice.23 Forming what Chaitanya Sambrani describes as an “enlarged accordion book,” the foyer paintings build upon Malani’s practice of wall drawing. In thirteen panels, often connected by drawings placed in between, the artist traces the Medea story from Jason’s landing with Colchis transposed to a riot-filled Bombay, to her physical subjugation to him, to Jason’s abandonment of her for the King of Corinth’s daughter. The last four paintings lay out the murderous conclusion of the narrative in looser, more dreamlike compositions.24 Suspended in the middle of the room over piles of stones, the robes painted in acrylic on Mylar are intended to represent three roles Medea plays in the story: the alchemist princess of Colchis; Jason’s bride and accomplice in stealing the golden fleece; and the jealous, spurned wife who presents Jason’s new lover with a poisoned bridal gown.25 FEMINIST NETWORKS

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figure 15 E Nalini Malani, Medeamaterial, 1993, as staged in Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 16 G Nalini Malani, Medeamaterial, 1993, as staged in Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist).

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Malani was aligned with Müller’s post-Brechtian approach, in which fragments of the myth are fused with images of war and trauma. As Peter Campbell put it, “By fragmenting the Greek narrative and subverting the usual communicative dialogue and unified character and plot of most adaptations and, in fact, most western drama, Müller’s remaking expresses in its structure and language the violent and fragmented contemporary culture in which it was created.”26 In Malani and Samarth’s treatment of Müller’s play, the tale of a resurgent Medea is strongly coded by a postcolonial critique that allegorizes gender, allowing the feminine figure to stand in for the colonized other. As Rajadhyaksha describes, the production was also characterized by a general disillusionment with the contemporary moment. In her 1996 exhibition of the project, Malani displayed Müller’s words: “I want to break mankind apart in two/and live within the empty middle/no man and no woman. . . .”27 Malani followed this work with a collaboration with director Anuradha Kapur on a 1997 production of Brecht’s short story The Job or by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou fail to earn thy bread. The play tells the story of a woman who takes on her husband’s identity and job as a night watchman after she is widowed, as well as beginning to live with a woman who acts as her wife, caring for her two children. The production translated The Job into an Indian context, but in a deliberately denaturalizing way. Malani created a series of installations that Ritu Talwar, the performer, invited the audience to interact with before the story began. Malani’s works included hanging bell jars and gloves filled with food, a projection of her stop-motion animation Memory: Record/Erase (1996), as well as works on Mylar. Some of the Mylar paintings were similar in style to Medeamaterial, except that they were handled by the performer. Five paintings on transparent Mylar rotating cylinders were movable through a system of pulleys, providing different scenery for the actress. In the documentation of the performance, Talwar stands inside the Mylar cylinder, her body encircled with painted images of seated women (figure 17). Malani’s experiments with shadow play extended her painting practice significantly. In a 2010 interview, the artist pointed to Medeamaterial and The Job as transformational, noting that the “video plays and video/shadow plays” that followed those performance-based works “gave me, much more than ever, the chance to speak to a larger audience in an engaging way.”28 Her first installation using shadow play, The Sacred and the Profane (1998), consists of four motorized, rotating, cylinder-shaped paintings on transparent Mylar (figure 18). To viewers standing next to the work, the paintings are intermittently visible on their transparent supports, while lights mounted at a height of four feet (1.2 m) cast shadows on the wall. The images, including amorous couples, a portion of foliage, and a recognizably “Kalighat-style” cat, are smoothly gestural, bold line drawings in acrylic color that are at once visible as themselves and as cast shadows. Likening the structures to Tibetan prayer wheels, Malani emphasizes how “the painted images on the drums had stories retold from the Bhagavata Purana, which have erotic tales about demons, gods, and their consorts.”29 As in Müller’s FEMINIST NETWORKS

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figure 17 Nalini Malani, performance of The Job or by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou fail to earn thy bread, by Bertolt Brecht. Presented at the Experimental Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, and the National School of Drama, New Delhi, 1997 (photo courtesy of the artist).

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figure 18 Nalini Malani, The Sacred and the Profane, 1998, synthetic polymer paint on Mylar, steel, nylon cord, electric motors, lights and hardware, overall installation 118 ¹/₈ × 196 ⁷/₈ × 433 ¹/₁₆ in. (300 × 500 × 1100 cm). State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, purchased 2001 (photo courtesy of the artist).

Medeamaterial, the stories are presented only in fragments, with no narrative order or semantic links. The paintings are legible as overlapping signs. The installation as a whole reaches out to viewers by appropriating aspects of experimental theater and performance, particularly its investment in multisensory and anti-naturalistic forms of narration. Even so, as, Malani recently says, “In retrospect, my approach was anti-Brechtian in one sense: to use the device of seduction, not alienation.”30 Indeed, Malani’s engagement with performance allowed her work to exist at a human scale: initially built around the body of the performer, her installations began to support interaction with the viewer. In Sheikh’s work, simply to move paintings into the middle of the exhibition space caused an effective shift in modes of looking, in which paintings became objects to interact with as well as images to decode. But Malani’s experimentation with the medium of painting as installation went considerably further, to include experimentation with types of support, with drawing, with lighting, and with the tension between temporary and enduring works. Her engagement with performance highlights the importance of collaborative work in this period, which was acknowledged by critics to intersect productively with FEMINIST NETWORKS

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contemporary feminist debates about narrative and spectatorship. As the next section explores, feminist critique had an extended life in curatorial discourse that connected Indian writers to people across the Global South who were attempting to construct new networks and forms of exhibition. INDIAN ART AND INSTALLATION AT THE ASIA-PACIFIC TRIENNIAL

By working with conventions associated with theater and performance, this group of artists extended the practice of painting to approximate the spatial presence and, at times, the immersive aesthetic associated with installation.31 In so doing, they departed sharply from the terms in which installation had been typically defined, which trace the development of an expanded field of sculpture through a US-based genealogy grounded in the work of Allan Kaprow and Richard Serra.32 Much of the installation work that emerged in the 1990s challenged this genealogy, however, and critics and curators developed alternative frameworks for understanding this far more diffuse and multicentered form of practice, which was often aligned with intersectional feminisms. Among these writers was Julie Ewington, an Australian curator who worked on the second edition of the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT2, 1996), where Sheikh, Malani, Rimzon, and Sundaram showed their work alongside Mrinalini Mukherjee.33 Writing on feminist installation in Australia, Ewington’s framework resonated with Geeta Kapur’s writing on similar practices in India. Examination of this intersection, however brief, shows how feminist thought offered crucial methodological leverage in this period. Ewington’s 1994 essay begins, as did Kapur’s text for Dispossession, by positing that women tend, by their relationship to gender and femininity, to be situated in social, political, or artistic contexts that, when juxtaposed, can be productive of particular positions. More specifically, she argues that in 1990s Australia, women artists stood at the intersection of the medium of installation, a philosophical distinction between nature and culture, and a political context of the environmental movement. In other words, Ewington’s framework for understanding the work of artists Joan Grounds, Simone Mangos, and Anne Ferran depends less on their connection to a canonical history of installation than on the confluence of discursive and institutional forces that make their work legible at a particular moment. She describes how the realization of these artists’ common purpose came upon her slowly, noting that these “strongly individual” works “contribute to the articulation of worldviews sympathetic to wholistic and non-hierarchical views of the natural world, and are responsive to the critiques of the ecological movement, one of the strongest currents in contemporary Australia.”34 Ewington then goes on to describe in detail how it is that an installation practice invested in the materiality of things, when used as artistic media, in ephemerality, and in the subversion of modernist aesthetic criteria, has taken on a particular significance 34

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for these artists in that moment. She attributes this mostly to the “appeal of the immediacy, indeed the inescapability, of a one-to-one relationship between the work and the body of the viewer” that installation encourages.35 Ewington asserts that when exhibited in the visual art space, installation demands “traditional levels of commitment from the viewer,” while the works of art themselves are a manifestation of “a global culture increasingly composed of diverse icons and affinities, open to multiple plays and interpretations.”36 Ewington’s methodology is attractive for its openness to differences in spatial and temporal contexts. Her working definition of installation art is uncannily appropriate to the work by Indian artists that was shown at APT2. The works of Mrinalini Mukherjee are most definitely sculpture, but they explore the capacities of the natural material of jute. Knotted into massive but flowing sheets of macramé, Mukherjee pulls from the organic shapes of flowers, whether the entire bloom, or, as in Van Shringar (forest ornament) (1992), just the flower’s reproductive organs. Their materiality and inescapable erotic charge sets up just the kind of relationship to the viewer that Ewington describes. Also experimenting with the phenomenology of installation is Vivan Sundaram’s Carrier (1996), which consists of a large, inverted wooden boat propped up at the bow by two oars and carved with a relief-sculpture frieze. Underneath are four chairs set in front of a television partially obscured by white curtains. One in a series of boat-based installations Sundaram made in this period, he likens this vessel to a “mysterious mammal (with a voice)”—one belonging to fellow secularist arts activist Shubha Mudgal, shown in the video singing songs from Hindu and Muslim devotional traditions. The work, Sundaram hopes, creates a “liminal space” that is ephemeral, resisting anything more than temporary possession by viewers.37 An extension of her Songspace project, Nilima Sheikh’s Shamiana (Tent, 1996) was also engaged in the idiom of devotional poetry/song. But her installation borrowed from the Mughal architecture of the tent to provide an intimate, enclosed space for viewing (figures 19 and 20). While Nalini Malani showed documentation of Medeamaterial in the video program, her main body of work at APT2 was Body as Site, a series of paintings and site-specific wall drawings that explored the environmental risk posed by nuclear testing and the Chernobyl disaster. The 1994 Mutants series engages with the delayed effects of nuclear testing—horrific events like the “jellyfish babies” born with transparent skin and no bones to Micronesian mothers in the 1980s. As Malani describes, the wall drawings were lit with UV lights, which gave the work a “chemical feeling, as if something was not all right.”38 This was also among Malani’s first erasure performances, in which the temporary wall drawing was obliterated by two female dancers at the close of the exhibition. They used milk to wash away the drawing, referring to the contamination of milk across Russia for years after the Chernobyl disaster. Taking stock of the Australian site of the exhibition, Malani’s work directly confronted the suffering borne by the colonized is a direct result of the West’s single-minded pursuit of power. FEMINIST NETWORKS

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figure 19 E Nilima Sheikh, Shamiana, 1996, installation of a canopy (chandni), acrylic on canvas, 239 ¾ × 215 ¹⁵/₁₆ in. (609 × 548.5 cm), and six scrolls (kanats) painted on both sides, casein tempera on canvas, each 103 ¹/₈ × 72 in. (262 × 183 cm). Installation photographs from Second Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (photo courtesy of the artist, facilitated by Asia Art Archive). figure 20 G Nilima Sheikh, Shamiana (close-up), 1996. Installation photographs from Second Asia-Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery (photo courtesy of the artist, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

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For Mukherjee, the erotics of natural material; for Sundaram, an ephemeral phenomenological encounter with the viewer; for Sheikh, a plumbing of femininity and intimacy; for Malani, the woman’s body as denatured by civilization: each artist’s work manifests a portion of the conceptual material and areas of practice Ewington observes adhering to installation in the 1990s. Only the work by N. N. Rimzon, particularly his fiberglass sculpture House of Heavens (1995), escapes Ewington’s framework. The sculpture consists of a white fiberglass house balanced against a larger-scale egg, with a metal sword partially concealed beneath. Each of these basic forms is weighted with symbolic meaning: the implement of violence unsettles the easy confluence of symbols of dwelling and fertility. Others of Rimzon’s works might fit more easily into Ewington’s relatively capacious definition of installation, but this contribution to APT2 usefully marks the boundary of her framework. Rimzon’s work emerges from a different lineage of sculpture, one focused on the power of archetypal forms.39 Though Ewington was involved in APT2, the Indian presentation was a product of a curatorial partnership between Victoria Lynn, curator of contemporary art at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Kamala Kapoor, a Mumbai-based curator and critic known for her work with feminist art, with assistance from Australian curator Rhana Devenport. Lynn had curated a complex exhibition of urban and rural art, India Songs, a few years before.40 The choices Lynn and Kapoor made for APT2 were sharply different from that show, emphasizing an experimental approach to form and following the artists’ statements to attribute the rapid shift in Indian work to the Ayodhya crisis. Lynn’s catalog text is somewhat uneasy, making it clear that the selection is not representative of the overall artistic scene and therefore departs from the APT’s emphasis on cultural representation.41 Even though APT2 avoided the national pavilion model, triennial curator Caroline Turner depended overwhelmingly on a geographical imaginary to elucidate the exhibition.42 Writing later, she recalls that this approach was a product of the limited circulation of information at the time. Very few curators, she notes, could have selected artists from multiple countries. Further, she asserts, “in attempting to dispel the notion in Australia of a monolithic place called ‘Asia’ (or for that matter ‘the Pacific’) it was necessary to seek to present different histories and different contemporary contexts. Context was vital.”43 That context was imagined as cultural, however. The art historical or political or transcultural contexts described by Ewington and Kapur for feminist installation were not emphasized. In selecting art on the basis of its formal experimentation, Lynn and Kapoor departed from APT2’s overall culture-centered framework, representing another position in what was then a critical debate over the relative importance of formal innovation in these exhibitions. As described in the introduction, Geeta Kapur articulated a strong form-centered position in her critique of multiculturalism. That position gained support from Kuroda Raiji of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, who FEMINIST NETWORKS

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addressed the shortcomings of a cultural-geographical model by using the frameworks of “communication, community, and collaboration” to highlight new media art at the first Fukuoka Triennial in 1999.44 Similarly, in the fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial in 2002, curator Suhanya Raffel focused on formal influence and canon formation by highlighting Australian museum acquisitions. Much smaller, her show was also less concerned with bringing attention to new artists and new works, which is typically central to biennial-style exhibitions.45 While curatorial debates were very active in this period, artist networks also developed from these events.46 Vietnam and Singapore expert Nora Taylor describes how after meeting at APT2, Vu~ Dân Tân, the convener of Salon Natasha in Hanoi, worked with Sundaram on projects in Hong Kong, Taipei, Kassel, and New Delhi in the two years following the exhibition in Brisbane.47 This is also true of the Fukuoka exhibitions, which built productive friendships among artists from the region. These events expanded the discursive ground and mutual understanding of contemporary art across Asia, even as they lay outside of the biennial infrastructure. Such effects are often left untouched in debates regarding the biennial form, but they are central to the development of new forms of art in this period and are explored across this volume. FEMINIST NETWORKS AND PERFORMANCE

Feminist scholarship in this period engaged in critique of what Partha Chatterjee called “the nationalist resolution of the women’s question,” through which a normative ideal of high-caste, Hindu womanhood came to be seen as the site for the preservation of Indian tradition and identity.48 Malani and Sheikh mined historical texts to subvert this repressive ideal, while Rummana Hussain and Pushpamala N. exploited the performance medium’s capacity to collapse the distinction between subjectivity and objecthood. Beginning in 1995–96, and working independently of one another, Rummana and Pushpamala developed performance-based practices that also involved the making of artifacts. Their modes of performance were distinct, with Rummana engaging more with performative agency and Pushpamala with impersonation. But each tended to produce works that were loose rather than tight, valuing openness to interpretation. Despite that, and even as their works staked out positions that resonated with the artists’ immediate political and intellectual context, their performance works circulated along feminist networks that connected the United Kingdom and Australia with India.49 Visitors to the 1995–96 touring exhibition, Inside Out: Contemporary Women Artists of India, would have experienced Rummana Hussain’s Living on the Margins (1995, figure 21) performance first through video. A recording was presented on a monitor alongside a series of mixed-media works (figure 22). In each of those, a text associated with women’s political action was printed on Perspex acrylic sheeting and suspended in clear sleeves along with photographs and small objects.50 The image, text, and object were all loosely connected, with links ranging from the metaphorical to 38

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figure 21 E Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (performance still), 1995, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai (© Estate of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi). figure 22 H Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (detail), 1996, Perspex, metal key, and phototransfer, 14 × 9 in. (35.6 × 22.9 cm). Displayed as part of Living on the Margins in Inside Out: Contemporary Women Artists of India, curated by Alison Lloyd with texts by Geeta Kapur, Kamala Kapoor, and Sutapa Biswas, Middlesbrough Art Gallery Touring Exhibition, 1995–96 (© Estate of Rummana Hussain, courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi).

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the easily classifiable. Rummana’s performance, which was recorded on the grounds of the National Centre for Performing Arts in Mumbai for the British exhibition, was framed, therefore, by a historical record of women’s agency.51 For the performance, the artist held a halved papaya in her hands and walked silently around a square courtyard, with ghungroos (bells worn by dancers) tied around her ankles. She periodically held her mouth open in a shape that echoed the shape of the sliced fruit, at once a repeated form and an estranging gesture, a silent scream. She punctuated her walk with deliberate gestures, lighting diyas (small oil lamps)—more open oval shapes—that had been arranged in a larger oval around the papaya and a vacuum cleaner attachment. During the performance, she scattered indigo powder and gheru in her path, using symbolically rich media and the open vessels that the artist often used as stand-ins for the body. Enriched by feminist principles, the title of the work flags Rummana’s understanding of her doubly marginal subject-position as an Indian woman, excluded from the position of transcendent subjectivity afforded the White male subject. The performance highlights the artist’s agency-in-the-present; she borrows from the grammar of dance to focus attention on each step. As Kamala Kapoor describes, “Solo, austere, almost ritualistic, her performance is anchored to the image of a woman’s life through colour, motif, material, object and touch. This inner world, with its feminine energy, has its parallel in the outer world, with its more masculine components, which remain implicit.”52 It is worth noting that the work does not refer to the artist’s Muslim background but instead enacts a normative Indian subjectivity through symbols of proper womanhood and practices associated with Hindu ritual. Rummana’s Living on the Margins is legible as part of the global impact of feminist theories of performance and subjectivity, developed through the reception of the work of Judith Butler. Butler’s focus on the performative function of speech, of doing-bysaying, facilitates the understanding of how gendered subjectivity was constituted through and with language. In her 1998 book Body Art/Performing the Subject, art historian Amelia Jones very skillfully articulates the broadly emergent understanding of performativity to argue that performance art fundamentally troubles the distinction between subject and object. Focusing particularly on the work of Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke, she builds a model in which feminist performance has the most to gain, analytically, from exploiting the medium’s possibilities. For, as Jones argues, “feminist body art crosses over subjects and objects of cultural production in a chiasmic interweaving of self and other that highlights the circuits of desire at play among them (and refuses the notion of an ‘objective’ aesthetic judgment).”53 The feministartist-subject is also the woman-art-object, at once actor and acted upon. As Jones observes, in feminist body art, the artist’s subject-position is both made manifest and subverted—rendered false—through the act of articulation.54 Through the set of props or actions used in the performance, Rummana’s Living on the Margins dwells upon the things women do that are valued. That includes the very 40

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mundane vacuum cleaner brush. But most of what the performance enacts are everyday ritual practices that point to the role women have in maintaining the ritual status of domestic space. Dance, made present in her performance through her ghungroos, once a sign of immorality, had become associated with the proper, middle-class Hindu feminine subjectivity that stands in for a national womanhood.55 Lighting the diya and marking space with pigment are similarly common tools for marking the borders of the domestic space and maintaining its auspiciousness. By invoking these religiously coded practices of proper femininity, Rummana’s performance draws attention to the agency afforded to women through ritual, and then recontextualizes those acts through their performance in/as art. The performance gains power by juxtaposing these immediately legible, quasiritualistic acts with the more ambiguous and erotic signs of the cut papaya and open mouth. Both—fruit and lips—are volatile references to the objectification of women, to the fragmentation of their bodies through acts of sexual violence. Living on the Margins embraces the grounding assumptions of the artistic medium, in which the artist’s body simultaneously makes and makes up the work of art. Returning to Amelia Jones’s description of the capacities of performance as a medium, it is possible to see how Rummana’s careful combination of acts and objects exploits the manner in which feminist body art fluidly interweaves subjectivity and objecthood. The materials and acts that make up this performance are separable into those associated with acting and being acted upon, but the artist, herself, participates in each role. In contrast to this work by Rummana, Pushpamala’s initial foray into performance photography, Phantom Lady, or Kismet (1996–98), projects objecthood, with little of the internal life or agency associated with subjectivity. Initially a one-off project in response to a curatorial prompt to consider cinema, Pushpamala took advantage of a second exhibition opportunity for Phantom Lady to create a rich and layered narrative in which she played stock film personas in city locations evocative of film noir.56 The artist places her performance in a dense referential network: as she writes, “Phantom Lady takes from pulp fiction, folklore, cheap stunt films, cinematic formulae, detective thrillers, comedy, slapstick, popular archetypes and clichés and complicates them to make a grand narrative of the city.”57 These gestures interrupt the performance medium’s typical consolidation around the body of the artist, allowing for contributions from other performers, such as the actor Rajat Kapoor and several artist friends, as well as highly skilled collaborators. The series of twenty-five photographs traces a loose narrative about twin sisters, separated in childhood and reunited in the city. The title character, dressed in hot pants, mask, and feathered hat and holding a whip, searches for her sister, eventually finding her dressed in a glamorous gown, holding an ostrich fan and performing for suited and booted guests in a mansion (figure 23). In the vocabulary of Hindi cinema, both sisters are stereotypical bad girls, a staple of Hindi cinema up through at least the 1970s.58 Shot by film production designer and art director Meenal Agarwal, the FEMINIST NETWORKS

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photographs take place in spaces thought of as being unique to Bombay and expressive of the city’s cosmopolitanism.59 Locations include Ballard Pier, Bandra railway station, an Irani cafe, colonnaded passageways (figure 24), and the house belonging to the artist’s gallerist, Shireen Gandhy, which is a material record of her Parsi family’s extraordinary history.60 In an approach that resonates with Sheba Chhachhi’s staged portraits of feminists, there is at least as much importance placed on the things in the photos—the architecture, material culture, costumes, food—as on the bodies of the performers. In Phantom Lady, things are evocative of complex histories, rather than serving as archetypal images, as in Rummana’s performance. The photographs therefore prompt their viewers to decode, and catch the references to a pluralistic urban imaginary or to Hindi cinema. They intersect with a then-ascendant understanding of the city as an archive to be explored, which will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. This broader impulse was a reaction to violence that spread through the city after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, as well as its political reconfiguration by the Shiv Sena, a nativist Maharashtrian political party.61 That said, to insiders to the Indian art world, many of the references were quite playful: friends would have recognized the Gandhy house, as well as the actors and artists who played bit parts in the series. At the core of the work, however, is Pushpamala’s highly skilled but often studiously neutral inhabitation of the two characters. Most significantly, from this first photoperformance, Pushpamala chooses to inhabit what Anustup Basu calls “iconic diagrams,” the narrow portraits of virtue or vice that struggle to contain the actual women who play them.62 As mentioned, both of Pushpamala’s characters are marked by foreignness and vice, but also with whiteness. The Phantom Lady is based on Hunterwali, the eponymous heroine of a 1935 stunt film played by Fearless Nadia (Mary Anne Evans), an Australian circus performer turned actress who married producer Homi Wadia. The Fearless Nadia films were made before the consolidation of the Hindi film genre, and they offered a somewhat chaotic mix of the cinema of attractions with the lurid thrills of the underbelly of Bombay.63 Phantom Lady’s twin, the Vamp, parodies characters that became popular after the consolidation of the romantic melodrama, the primary film genre of the 1950s to 1970s, in which female characters were quite strictly classified as either good or bad. Serving as the foil for heroines whose virtue is a sign of their Indianness, vamps were often played by non-Indian actresses. One particularly important example is the French-Burmese actress Helen, who played roles that had little in common with one another, except that they are all outsiders.64 Pushpamala made the series at a crucial time for the development of film theory in India, when important works were being written by theorists who were also her close friends.65 Emergent writing on Hindi cinema grappled with how much female characters simply reflected male desire; the “good woman” character, in particular, lacks subjective depth. As she made Phantom Lady, Madhava Prasad was getting ready to publish his foundational writing on the censorship of the kiss in post-independence Hindi 42

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figure 23 E Pushpamala N., Phantom Lady, or Kismet #9, 1996–98, from a photo-romance with twenty-five black-and-white photographs, each image 10 ⁵/₈ × 16 in. (27 × 40.6 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 24 G Pushpamala N., Phantom Lady, or Kismet #20, 1996–98, from a photo-romance with twenty-five black-and-white photographs, each image 10 ⁵/₈ × 16 in. (27 × 40.6 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

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cinema, which he describes as the “prohibition of the private.”66 The film genre’s denial of interiority is absolutely key to understanding the Phantom Lady series, in which subjectivity is external to the characters the artist plays, and agency is found more in things than in people. Her exploration of these ideas is even clearer in her 1997 video work, Indian Lady, in which she performs the lighthearted gaiety of the film heroine in front of a studio backdrop of the city of Mumbai.67 Seemingly slight, parodic, and fun, the video in fact captured the extraordinary attention paid to costume and bodily gesture in normative Indian womanhood. Instead of collapsing the distinction between subject and object, Pushpamala obviates it with her absolute investment in surface. Indeed, Pushpamala has always been quite opposed to her work being framed by discourses of “identity,” which she sees as a peculiarly Western preoccupation.68 As her work practice solidified, she settled on the exploration of the constitution of visual types, or the surface-dependent classificatory schema by which people are recognized. Writing in Art India, critic Prajna Desai expresses some distress at this approach, complaining that “the photographs depend on the viewer’s ability to make connections, rather than the artist’s treatment of the subject.”69 What Desai criticizes—the lack of gloss, the disjointed narrative, the inclusion of incongruous elements—are products of Pushpamala’s deliberate focus on the significant fragment. I see little evidence that Pushpamala sought to produce work that “unif[ied] idea with image” in the way Desai suggests. In later series, Pushpamala began to invest extraordinary energy in re-creating visual cultural source material, across a range from amateurish mimicry to spectacular simulacrum. The rightly celebrated Native Women of South India (2004) capitalized upon historical research to juxtapose an array of sources, from mug shots to film stills to Mary Ellen Mark. These source images strongly determined the valence of the performance. Returning to Jones’s rich definition, the medium of performance “highlights the circuits of desire at play” in images. If, as Prasad argues for film, the entry into the private is foreclosed, then what is highlighted instead is the short-circuiting of desire and a collapse of the feminine figure into objecthood. But that reading leaves out the sense of improvisation, impersonation, and makebelieve that remains central to the work.70 According to art historian Chaitanya Sambrani, who assisted on set as a young graduate, although Pushpamala knew exactly what shots she wanted, the project still had the risky feeling of a guerilla film shoot, of doing something outrageous and fun. That seems fitting, since the character of Phantom Lady re-creates a truly exceptional episode in the history of Hindi cinema, one prior to and outside of the strictures of nationalist ideology. Fearless Nadia’s Hunterwali was not an iconic diagram, in Basu’s words, but a fantasy of power marked by the exotic appeal of whiteness or foreignness. Pushpamala’s impersonation of a figure so unlike herself is suggestive of the possibilities secreted within the image archive, and, indeed, within performance itself. When Pushpamala speaks about her entrance to performance, she cites Bhupen Khakhar’s 1972 catalog, in which he dressed up as an international spy, and as a toothpaste model—absurd, pop culture figures at odds with 44

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the self-seriousness of contemporary art.71 In a recent conversation, she also pointed to the British artists Gilbert and George, whose performance work she had become familiar with during her postgraduate studies in London.72 Pushpamala also cites as inspiration her mother’s experience acting in plays put on by private theater clubs in Bengaluru. The sense of fun when putting on a play, of wearing costumes in a lighthearted way, pervades Pushpamala’s stories of her mother’s theatricals. The sort of popular theater that is conceived as entertainment for the participants as well as the audience provided the artist a reference point for performance that was far outside of contemporary art. It has somewhat more in common with Bhupen Khakhar’s Mojila Manilal than with the experimental theater that facilitated Nalini Malani and Nilima Sheikh’s work. Yet even as a sense of humor and irony pervades the artist’s work, so does a basic curiosity about what it is to take on a persona that is not your own. To Pushpamala, the act of inhabiting another is always an act of critique. That principle might allow us to place Pushpamala’s embodiment of the Fearless Nadia character, itself a fiction, alongside Rummana’s choice to perform the ritual acts associated with the normative Hindu persona available to Indian women. Indeed, beyond the tonal difference between parody and passion, there are important commonalities to Pushpamala’s and Rummana’s work. Both worked from a baseline assumption of a critical approach to subjectivity within a context of everyday life structured by a religiously inflected nationalism. They were bolstered by their participation in feminist and critical discourses that articulated key differences from the unmarked feminism that ran through art networks. Performance allowed for a direct engagement with the subject-object relationship, as articulated by Amelia Jones; both artists found in things a set of mediating signs with which to work. For Rummana, in particular, the interaction with things allowed performance to intersect productively with installation, a medium that she explored concurrently. Both artists encouraged outwardly radiating arrays of meanings, embracing the significant fragment over the coherent whole in ways that we can recognize as fundamental to an emergent feminist art discourse that valued the situatedness of practice and the materiality of things. That principle resonated with the audiences for their work, particularly of the Telling Tales exhibition, which was shown in Delhi as Telling Times before moving on to the United Kingdom. Its significance was understood immediately in both contexts. British critic Jorella Andrews published a long and detailed review in Third Text that placed the artists in productive dialogue with one another and recognized the formal innovation of the work, as well as its feminist critique. CONCLUSION

The central question of this chapter—and, indeed, of the remainder of the volume—is what sustains changes in artistic form? As the remaining chapters make clear, the changes these four artists made were not anomalous in their artistic trajectories but rather fundamental and consequential shifts that were broadly influential within FEMINIST NETWORKS

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contemporary Indian art as a whole. Theater and film offered to these artists not just different ideas of space and narrative but also networks of like-minded, highly skilled people who were much more open and ready to work in collaborative ways than an art world that had, up until then, emphasized solo work. Immaterial infrastructures of thought and of friendship emerged together with these experimental forms of artistic work, building and sustaining feminist debate in and outside India. Curatorial discourse also found new ways to account for and make legible practices from diverse contexts. Multiple institutions in Australia, as well as more isolated actors in Japan, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, helped to support and circulate the work of these artists, as well as the curators in India who were identified as essential interlocutors. These exhibitionary and discursive networks moved Indian art and artists along new circuits. To this was added the more material infrastructures associated with the growth in biennial exhibitions and international art exchanges, as well as the financial support that came from a combination of market and nonmarket institutions. Biennial exhibitions in Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Fukuoka were almost entirely dependent upon public funding, even though their curatorial structures were independent of stateassociated actors. There were no legible links to culture ministries or state-run museums, at least in the Indian case. Overall, the material infrastructure remained ad hoc and underdeveloped, characterized by improvisation; for that reason, its discussion forms a smaller part of this chapter than later ones. An instructive story came from Sheela Gowda, who emphasized how new she was to international exhibition making when she participated in the Johannesburg Biennale by pointing out that she handcarried work to the exhibition. As she recalled, that gesture backfired, because there was no space in the crate when it came time for the artwork to be shipped back. Such logistical mistakes—based on equal parts informality and good faith—are totally foreign to the Indian art world today. Even smaller exhibitions, such as the two UK touring exhibitions and AustraliaIndia residency project, had concrete effects on the development of these artists’ work. They provided the funds to produce Rummana’s high-quality video recording and to build out Phantom Lady from a single day of shooting to a full narrative series. Although the funds spent were still relatively small, they were enough to allow artists to move away from media that had established sources of patronage into those that did not. Similarly, nonprofit patronage provided important physical infrastructure for Indian cultural production. An important example is the German cultural diplomatic mission’s Max Mueller Bhavan galleries, which produced events like Malani’s initial Medeamaterial performance. Indeed, during this period of rapid change, such sites were extremely active in their support for Indian contemporary artists working in new ways. Such material and immaterial infrastructure—the combination of key exhibition opportunities, curatorial and scholarly frameworks, networks of friendship, and 46

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discipline-crossing initiatives—were essential to sustaining the formal shifts that artists wished to make in their work. This chapter has traced out a number of significant infrastructures, including advances in feminist thought across intellectual areas, artists’ openness to theater and performance, and the development of more dialogic forms of curation in exhibitions that traced new geographies for artistic exchange. As this book’s method shows, however, the work of artists emerged in tandem with those infrastructures and, due to the productivities of the works of art that emerged, helped to sustain those forms of patronage and thought.

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2 PAINTING AND THE IMAGE CONDITION AT THE MILLENNIUM

A

TUL DODIYA’S SELF-PORTRAIT , Bombay Buccaneer (1994),

borrows from the poster for the hit film Baazigar, which stars Shah Rukh Khan as a psychotic yuppie in a love triangle (figure 25). The film poster shows the female stars reflected in Khan’s mirrored sunglasses; Dodiya replaces them with portraits of painters David Hockney and Bhupen Khakhar, done in their respective styles.1 Dodiya’s head and shoulders float over a semi-urban landscape showing a Khakhar-esque scene of a blackand-yellow Bombay taxi stalled in front of a roadside shrine. A second setting, overlaid like a scrim, shows one Hockney-like figure swimming, chasing his shadow, and another sitting meditatively on a high diving platform. The final two elements of the painting are a polo logo floating into the foreground off the artist’s shirt and a film-set clapboard set into the top corner of the frame. The painting is shocking in its virtuosity. As a self-portrait, it presents the autodidact Dodiya as a sum of his influences—rendered as freely circulating images, both high and low—while establishing, through his mastery of form, a slyly heroic sense of artistic subjectivity.2 49

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figure 25 Atul Dodiya, The Bombay Buccaneer, 1994, oil and acrylic on canvas with wooden clapboard, 72 × 48 in. (182.9 × 121.9 cm). Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, 2003 (E301042), Peabody Essex Museum (photo courtesy of the artist and Peabody Essex Museum).

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Jitish Kallat made a self-portrait, When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw (1995), as he finished art school, where he was caught, he now recalls, between the image culture he experienced in Bombay and Indian painting’s tradition of abstraction (figure 26).3 He draws upon skills learned from his mentor, Prabhakar Kolte (b. 1946), when he excavates layers of color with a palette knife. But the painting is principally a play on the reproduced image: a septuple self-portrait achieved with some help from a Xerox machine and photo transfer. In the main image of the artist, the head is distorted into a squat shape with puffy hair, a tropical flower tucked behind an ear. Its torso is painted as if dressed in a loose-fitting shirt, with a necklace of stenciled eyeglasses, below which the image of the head is echoed in a less detailed way, with the flower replaced by a palm tree.4 With each corner containing a less manipulated photo transfer of the artist for comparison, one suspects that the main image has been deliberately morphed until it looks like none other than Bal Thackeray, then leader of the city’s ruling hypernationalist party Shiv Sena. Thackeray was a master of political spectacle, and so the pun-filled title is another clue. It appears on the canvas twice, once printed under his image on a pendant, similar to one worn by the political leader, and once handwritten, apparently in permanent marker, next to a dated signature preceded coyly by a copyright sign. However complex, all this image work is carefully light and ironic, floating easily on a heavily worked, pockmarked and gouged-out painted surface of just the sort produced by the most serious of serious abstract painters. These paintings reflect the new image forms made available in the city from the mid 1990s onward, through the proliferation of visually innovative television channels, including MTV and Channel [V], as well as the quieter new ubiquity of duplication technologies like facsimile. Just a few years after the paintings were produced, these technologies were supplemented by the windows of personal computing and the hypertext links of the internet. A significant marker in that process of media shift came in 2000, when the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com boom landed in Bombay mere months before its global crash.5 The transformational impact of the internet was felt more keenly over the following two to three years, with e-commerce entering the art world through the gallery and auction website Saffronart.com in 2000 and with early critical interventions using the technology as an artistic medium coming from artists Shilpa Gupta, Raqs Media Collective, and Baiju Parthan by 2001–2. These technological changes occurred over less than a decade, in so accelerated a timeline that it felt like an onslaught of forms of image making and circulation. And yet instead of being a square challenge to painting, as critics often framed it in the moment, new media turned out to shape the medium without displacing it in the Indian art scene.6 Indeed, Dodiya and Kallat’s idiosyncratic pictorial strategies were somewhat overwhelmed in the first years of this century by a widespread engagement with a related but distinct form of painting, in which images based in photographs were often combined with text. That painting, which the critic Nancy Adajania called “new mediatic realism,” was more commonly (if somewhat inaccurately) called PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 26 Jitish Kallat, When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw, 1995, oil and mixed media on canvas, 60 × 38 in. (152.4 × 96.5 cm). Private collection (photo courtesy of Jitish Kallat Studio).

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photorealism and most closely associated with a group of young painters nicknamed the “Bombay Boys.”7 Their work became extremely popular with investors in art, in a practice of collecting that was itself transformed by changes in image culture. The manic pace of the market in painting drove an increase in the rate of artistic production, which was itself made apparent by the new forms of image circulation associated with capital investment in media. One of the less obvious implications of the changes in the image condition was the recuperation of somewhat older modes of image production, including cinema and the Xerox machine, highlighted respectively in these examples by Dodiya and Kallat. The equally old medium of the art book or magazine was subtly aided by advances in printing quality, which made good quality reproductions of painting more freely available in this period than in the decades before. Artists who visited the diplomatic reading rooms sprinkled through South Bombay were exposed to good images of painting from the West, and particularly from the United States and Germany. The surest sign of this shift was the emergence of the glossy, ad- and reproduction-filled magazine Art India, first published in 1996, just as unillustrated or badly illustrated newspaper columns dedicated to art criticism were declining. This increased circulation of images correlated with a recuperative attitude toward histories of painting that placed the local history of tension between abstraction and figuration—in which Bombay’s Sir J. J. School of Art was the chief promoter of abstraction and M.S. University in Vadodara the champion of figuration—into a broader historical context. Emergent painting practices in Bombay linked into the image condition by referring to its forms and adopting its techniques, while also circulating freely within its networks, both in themselves and through photographic reproductions. The term image condition, which denotes the material and immaterial conditions for image making and circulation, might seem to capture a seamless exchange that flattens distinctions between modes of image production and consumption. Instead, the term is best understood as an assemblage, which this chapter tracks through two crucial infrastructural shifts. The first is found in works of art, through their interventions in the image condition, and the second, in changes to exhibitions and the technologies of art circulation. In addition to the eruption of technologies of image making and circulation in this period, it is also important to understand the role of newly selfconscious practices of the production of locality. Those practices were associated with both the well-documented, virulently anticosmopolitan politics of the Shiv Sena, which shaped public and educational spaces, and in the series of oppositional articulations of place that rose to meet those politics. Associated with an antimodernist school of urban studies that championed the everyday, those ideas found institutional home in the Open Circle artists collective and the urban research center founded by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, PUKAR, as well as in Sarai, the project space cofounded by Raqs Media Collective in the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. These companion impulses were articulated best by Appadurai, who in 1995 PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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published his essay outlining production of locality as a twinned process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.8 Those ideas served as the principal infrastructureof-thought for the practice of painting in Bombay at the millennium. The late-1990s moment in which Kallat and Dodiya worked was rife with imagebased controversy, not least in the domain of painting itself. Accusations of obscenity leveled against the modernist painter M. F. Husain, which began in 1996, were followed by similar agitations against Fire (1998), a film about same-sex desire. Such campaigns were part of a broader political mobilization of the image.9 Even when national in scope, many of these events took place in Bombay, often under the aegis of Bal Thackeray, a former cartoonist who ruled the Shiv Sena political party from his house in a state-subsidized artists’ village in the less fashionable side of the suburb of Bandra. Thackeray’s political practice combined street-level political organizing, including coordination of widespread riots in the city in 1992–93, with acts of symbolic capture in which the space of the city was recoded. The most notable of these gestures is the official name change to Mumbai, using the Marathi-language name for the city to underline a regional and religious claim to ownership of what is, in fact, a multiethnic and multireligious community.10 As I describe in my book The Art of Secularism, struggles over the recoding of space included the South Bombay neighborhood of Kala Ghoda, which hosts several art world institutions, both public spaces and commercial galleries. While that symbolically rich neighborhood is both physically and socially far from the suburban localities where Dodiya and Kallat lived, all three areas of the city were self-consciously engaged in acts of coding and recoding space. Much of the art world experienced the image-based controversies and spatial recodings as an assault upon its cosmopolitanism, defined both as its openness to engagement with the world outside of India and as its linguistic and religious pluralism.11 The Shiv Sena’s actions were received by this group as exclusively political, for the broader legal discourse around offensive speech was folded in to a longer history of violence as a tactic. The idea that ideas of locality were produced, as articulated by Appadurai, made it possible to view the coding of space and image within a framework of globalization that was more attuned to political economy and the operations of capital. Although politically opposed, the Shiv Sena’s chauvinism was not necessarily different in kind from the pluralistic celebrations of the city’s particularity that are visible in works of art.12 In both cases, politics was interpenetrated with a spectacular form of image culture that was entangled in the expansion of the market, particularly in media.13 The image technologies that were of interest to Bombay painters, and especially to Kallat, tended to be those set loose from their spatial moorings to be understood as pure forms, to be reclaimed by artists. This view can and should be seen as part of a long historical process of the de- and reterritorialization of form. In her account of popular image culture, Kajri Jain locates the origin of this historical process in early colonial trade, through which new forms of image making were adopted by Indian artists.14 Looking at the development of Hindu devotional images, she traces 54

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how successive waves of image techniques upset any simple division between (artistic) form and (sacred) content. As she argues, image-making technologies “were not simply reincorporated into preexisting iconic schemata but were used to create devotional and secular forms that instituted new modes of address to—and brought into being—new constituencies of vernacular consumers.”15 From the colonial moment on, Jain argues, many artists and formal techniques continued to straddle the division between the realm of “fine art” and the wider vernacular or bazaar economy, and between the sacred and the profane. The division between fine and popular art existed, but was subject to self-reflexive theorization as part of its reterritorialization. Calendar art is a particularly clear case in which aspects of fine art, principally naturalism or a “scientific” approach to representation, was reterritorialized as a specifically sacred embodiment of Hindu culture. The inclusion of popular and/or religious image techniques in contemporary painting has a similar effect. While the Deleuzian language for understanding this practice did not move from academic circles into Indian artistic discourse, the tactics it describes were commonly used and understood. By quoting Bhupen Khakhar, who was well-known for his adoption of calendar art forms in his painting, Atul Dodiya endorsed the artist’s de-/ reterritorialization strategy. He also made it clear that he understood himself as repeating the gesture of removal of a visual technology—the film poster genre—from its popular art context of viewing. In his self-portrait, it functions differently, as a sign of the kind of locality that was prized within the fine art domain. The processes of reterritorializing deterritorialized representational forms was accelerated by economic liberalization. Forced by a crisis of borrowing, the liberalization of India’s economy led to enormous growth in the financial and media sectors, driven by speculative capital investments. This resulted in a new “media assemblage,” as Amit Rai puts it, that began just after liberalization with the launching of Rupert Murdoch’s STAR TV. By 1998, nearly seventy cable and satellite channels were widely available in India.16 Providers competed with one another to “Indianize” their content, in a process that took many forms. Some included an aggressive and explicitly regressive Hindu-ization, but the most consequential strategy, used by franchise channels like MTV and Channel [V], was to target the youth audience. Youth were closely associated with “a particular dynamic connectivity to media technologies in India, articulating with emerging notions, practices, protocols, and intensities of being one’s self.”17 Rai, who is particularly concerned with the effect of these new forms on perception, notes that each small bit of media content—whether a ring tone, a television show that enables participation via SMS, or a film-based wallpaper for the personal computer— accrues value for that audience inasmuch as it points across to the larger media ecology. Kallat and Dodiya recognized the power of this media assemblage and made the deliberate choice of artists to participate in and critique the emergent image condition. But their paintings also began to circulate as part of the new media assemblage and were therefore affected by the acceleration and transformation of systems PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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of communication. Alongside these material shifts in infrastructure, emergent infrastructure of thought focused on the meanings associated with place. The concept of locality was articulated by Appaduarai in dialogue with the city in which these painters worked, as a critique of globalization. As a description of the conditions of possibility for creating meaningful images in the moment, it became part of critical discourse about art, and, from there, began to shape the production and circulation of art. KALLAT: PAINTING, LOCALITY, CITY

Most introductions to Kallat’s work from the late 1990s include at least one reference to his youth, in acknowledgment of the reversal of the Bombay art world’s reverence for seniority and longevity. Few writers connected his age to the popular engagement with youth culture at the time, however. Instead, it seemed only as if Kallat’s painting combined technical sophistication with something very essential about the contemporary moment. Nevertheless, his solo exhibition at Gallery Chemould and Prithvi Gallery, his accompanying profile in Art India at twenty-three, and his showing in Bose Pacia Modern in New York and the Fukuoka Triennial at the age of twentyfive were then unprecedented. In Fukuoka he exhibited alongside another “young artist,” Subodh Gupta, who was in fact ten years older. By just a few years later, this accelerated timeline of the artistic career had become commonplace, a feature of the newly stimulated market in contemporary art. But in the late 1990s, it was unheard of.18 As already suggested, Kallat’s painting was brash and cannily intelligent, participating in the new image politics of the city while marshaling resources of a deeper art history. For example, one of two paintings collected by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1. Ordinary Recipe 2. Heading from My Old City Book, Mailing the Same to Good God’s Cook (1998, figure 27), uses as its central image the same photograph that appeared in the corners of When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw. This time the photograph is painted at an enlarged scale of well over six feet (2 m). The word “Thinker” is painted on the figure’s elbow, explaining the posture taken by the artist as an allusion to the sculpture by Rodin. One gets the feeling that Kallat is playing with cliché, understanding that what might at one time have been a profound statement on the human experience became, through its reproduction both in bronze and photography, utterly banal. This large self-portrait, as well as the textile-like background, was created by scraping away layers of paint, meaning that Kallat, in essence, painted a photographic negative. Another version of the “original” photo is provided in the lower right corner, through a photocopy transfer distorted, as Kallat reports, by feeding it through the fax machine while tugging on the paper, elongating the image.19 The top portion of the canvas, painted in a brown mottled with metallic paint, contains other, less distorted selfimages, plus the tracing of a map, presumably (but not obviously) of Bombay. Finally, on the bottom left, two small, cartoonish self-portraits ride piles of insects. Each of these elements occupies its own discrete space, making the entire painting like a 56

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figure 27 Jitish Kallat, 1. Ordinary Recipe 2. Heading from My Old City Book, Mailing the Same to Good God’s Cook, 1998, mixed media on canvas, 90 ⁹/₁₆ × 66 ¹⁵/₁₆ in. (230 × 170 cm). Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan (photo courtesy of Jitish Kallat Studio).

computer screen on which several independent applications or projects are displayed simultaneously. Peter Nagy, writing in the catalog for Kallat’s New York show, notes how familiar aspects of Kallat’s paintings would be for an American audience: “from the word and object pairings of Jasper Johns; through the tastes for funk and kitsch common to New Image Painting; to the layerings of cultural detritus practiced by a generation of painters in the 1980s.”20 Nagy was part of that 1980s scene as an artist and owner of the erstwhile East Village gallery Nature Morte. He had moved to New Delhi and revived his gallery there in 1997. He brought a new and distinct sensibility to the Indian scene and, along with a number of others, became a key promoter of experimental art, including the work of Jitish Kallat. Nagy, who also wrote catalogs and criticism at this time, was very adept at translation, anticipating and countering the partial readings of Western audiences while explaining novel practice to Indian ones.21 His essay on PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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Kallat correctly acknowledges how recognition of the painter’s American points of reference should be balanced with an understanding of his more deeply considered references to Indian painting. But overall, he finds that in Kallat’s painting “that which is specifically Indian is treated no differently than the images which have been imported,” while also describing how the painting captures a particular experience with painted surfaces that evoke the “mottled walls damp with mildew and the public stairwells splashed with streams of beetle-nut [sic] juice” of Bombay.22 Just like Kallat’s reference to Rodin’s Thinker, Nagy’s writing about the painter traffics in cliché. In part this has to do with the limitations of the catalog essay genre, a form of writing in which interpretation is attuned to the commercial success of the artist. But such rhetorical crutches as the dirty walls of Bombay are also signs of Nagy’s embrace of a wider uncertainty, both about what Kallat might end up doing as an artist and, much more significantly, about the terms by which contemporary art from India should be judged and who might constitute its audience. In place of a reading that emphasizes Kallat’s engagement with deterritorialized mediatic and artistic forms, Nagy places the painter’s work, quite literally, in Bombay, interpreting his work through the lens of locality: the culture of the street, the map, and the everyday life of the city. The discourse is protective and in Kallat’s case ironic, since Nagy’s writing asserts the representative quality of paintings that depend upon the undermining of image technologies. Nevertheless, the importance of locality as a critical and curatorial framework cannot be overstated. Indeed, not only did locality become the principal framework for understanding work like Kallat’s, but the spatial-cultural unit of choice became the city. This is best exemplified by the Tate Modern’s mega exhibition Century City (2001), in which Tate curator Iwona Blazwick built a survey of twentieth-century art out of ten exhibitions, each covering a decade of efflorescence in a city around the world. “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001,” cocurated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, framed the city as an incubator of art after the riots of 1992–93. Kapur and Rajadhyaksha’s curatorial text places contemporary art within a wider, local visual culture principally associated with the film industry.23 One section of the exhibition extended Kapur’s ideas about medium and modernism to pinpoint a rise of a narcissistic subjectivity among male painters. This is a plausible, if somewhat narrow reading of the large watercolors by Bhupen Khakhar that were included, which are described here and in later essays by Kapur as inward-looking sexual fantasies.24 The idea is somewhat more tenuously applied to Dodiya’s paintings on shutters, which use one of the Indian city’s most characteristic architectural features, the rolling steel shutters used on small shops. In Missing (2001), shown at Tate, each shutter is covered in a photorealistic rendering of a black-and-white photo of a child, including one of the artist, that rolls up to reveal a painted collage of Bollywood stars and key nationalist figures (figures 28 and 29). Kapur and Rajadhyaksha read Dodiya’s works as an “equalising” of signs, inviting “a literal reading of painted images” from a variety of sources.25 58

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figure 28 Atul Dodiya, Missing III (Atul), 2001, exterior: enamel paint, brass letters on metal roller shutter, with iron hooks, 108 × 72 in. (274.3 × 182.9 cm); interior: enamel paint and varnish on laminate, 92 × 66 in. (233.7 × 167.6 cm). Suresh and Saroj Bhayana Family Collection (New Delhi, India). As installed in Century City, Tate Modern (photo courtesy of the artist).

Of one of Kallat’s 1998 self-portraits as well as paintings by his contemporary Girish Dahiwale (1974–98), Kapur and Rajadhyaksha write, “The younger generation of Indian painters stretch the choice of identity, ideology, ethics to the point of near neurosis.”26 A pioneer of photorealism in Bombay, Dahiwale committed suicide as the exhibition was being planned. In one of the two large paintings in the show, we’ll pay our debt sometime (1998), Dahiwale’s self-portrait occupies the place normally held by M. K. Gandhi in a huge painting of a one hundred rupee note (on the right in figure 30). The image of the bill floats above a Bombay street during the commuting hour, its space filled with lower-middle-class men walking with purpose. In the middle of the painting are lyrics from Pearl Jam’s “Garden” (1991): “I don’t question our existence, I just question our modern needs,” followed by the title of the painting, which is taken from the chorus from Alice In Chains’s “Over Now” (1995). The scale is large and the PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 29 Installation view of Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, cocurated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, part of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at Tate Modern, London, 2001 (photo by Anthony Stokes, courtesy of Geeta Kapur, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

painting exact, made, no doubt, using a projected image. About this type of work, Kapur and Rajadhyaksha caution, “The current postmodern celebration of visual culture . . . needs a minimum political intent to bring cultural creativity into a new phase. . . . If the equation [between art and popular representation] is to gain further significance, artists have to grasp the democratic impulse at work in the city.”27 The Bombay section of Century City, with its mix of contemporary art and popular visual culture and with its urban focus (figure 31), is similar to one other international presentation of Indian art in the period, also curated by Geeta Kapur. For the 2003 body.city: new perspectives on India project at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, Kapur curated subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold, which widened its framework to include Indian cities beyond Bombay. Such single-country survey exhibitions had been held sporadically since the 1960s, but they became very common in the latter half of the decade. The grandest such project was Indian Highway, which was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and toured five museums between 2008 and 2012.28 That exhibition followed Kapur’s lead in being national but not cultural in its framing; it used social changes associated with globalization, including urbanization and accelerating communication technologies, as organizing themes. Anthropologist Manuela Ciotti has described the single-country show as itself exemplary of globalization, as one of many 60

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figure 30 Installation view of Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, cocurated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, part of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at Tate Modern, London, 2001 (photo by Anthony Stokes, courtesy of Geeta Kapur, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

portable forms that are repeated and restaged in different contexts.29 Like the works themselves, the exhibition form is driven by the twinned dynamic of de- and reterritorialization, promoting the principle of place/locality rather than, say, form or ideology as a generative force in contemporary art practice. The critical and curatorial framework of locality/city was still emergent at the millennium. Artists who helped to shape its terms were contending with an entrenched practice of painting in which the representation of the city was closely associated with social(ist) realism.30 The new configuration of city as locality encouraged Kallat to complete a shift he had already begun in his New York show, moving away from images of the self and toward what Ranjit Hoskote calls “the psychological architecture of the individual in the metropolis.”31 This is true of his 22,000 Sunsets (2001), in which the crowd is a loose collection of individuals, each taking in his own path (figure 32). Many of the figures are followed by a speech bubble containing the image of a sunset. This pivot in subject and tone was accompanied by a subtle adjustment in Kallat’s approach to the image. Like most of his other paintings between 2000 and 2003, the central image in 22,000 Sunsets was distorted primarily through a painterly simulation of digital degradation, of pixelation or of loss of resolution. As Hoskote writes, the images seem “to flicker on a television screen, their edges breaking up, as though in a hallucinatory documentary.”32 Also, in PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 31 Installation view of Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, cocurated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, part of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at Tate Modern, London, 2001 (photo by Anthony Stokes, courtesy of Geeta Kapur, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

place of the pockmarked texture of his pre-2000 self-portraits, this painting has a uniform surface, ridged so that it resembles the corrugation of cardboard. Both shifts have the effect of flattening the attachments to source images that made his earlier work seem like collage. Here, the image is much more seamlessly sutured together. It is possible to see this painting as a last moment of calm before September 11, 2001, and the global convulsions that followed, which included the devastating antiMuslim riots of early 2002 in Gujarat, a neighboring state to Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located. Much of Kallat’s work thereafter grappled with more violent processes of de- and reterritorialization. The crowds he paints are confrontational, typically six to eight lower-middle-class or working-class people, who stand as a unit and stare straight out of the canvas. In Tradigienne (Taste, Lick, Swallow, and Speak) (2002), it is a clump of women, one holding a baby, with their mouths open in what looks like protest. Two of them have long, oddly tumescent tongues, filled in with a line of coffins, and tipped with a white “mute” icon, familiar from computers and other devices. One final element, sitting above their heads, is the symbol of three monkeys associated in the Indian popular imagination with Gandhi—he adopted the motto of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”—balanced on the blade of a knife. These paintings, jammed full of signs, promote a different kind of looking than the self-portraits. 62

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figure 32 Jitish Kallat, 22,000 Sunsets, 2001, mixed media on canvas, 60 × 84 in. (152.4 × 213.4 cm). Collection of Czaee Shah (photo courtesy of Jitish Kallat Studio).

Anger at the Speed of Fright (2002) is concerned with the hair-trigger impulse to communal violence that is associated with urban crowds (figure 33). A small group of men looms menacingly into the foreground, their threat at once heightened and tethered to context by the juxtaposition of the crowd with a root system made up of knives. The roots feed a temple whose style is South Indian, a distraction from the more obvious political referent, the North Indian temple site in Ayodhya whose promoters’ murder triggered the riots in Gujarat. Similarly displaced from contemporary politics is the labyrinth system that occupies nearly half of this canvas, its center magnified in an optical illusion. These signs avoid any kind of didacticism, resonating more as part of a growing body of references shared between the artist’s works that relate to place, to autobiography, or just to one another. Kallat recapitulated some of these earlier works later in his career, frequently underlining how the framework of locality had, for him, largely been a matter of the relationship between the self and the outside world.33 In recent statements, he has been particularly keen to point out how references to space were always balanced with ones to time, and in particular with relationships between temporal scales. The painting’s title, Anger at the Speed of Fright, deals directly with the way heightened emotion stretches or telescopes the experience of time. He had used the title earlier that year PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 33 Jitish Kallat, Anger at the Speed of Fright, 2002, mixed media on canvas, 60 × 83 ⁷/₈ in. (152.4 × 213 cm) (photo courtesy of Jitish Kallat Studio).

for a large, temporary text-based work on found panels, made during a residency in New York. He painted phrases outlining the cycle of violence in white on a gridded blue background to create a whale-like shape.34 Later, in a 2010 commission for Mumbai’s city-focused Bhau Daji Lad Museum, he used the title for a collection of clay figurines engaged in hand-to-hand combat, a shift in medium and scale that provides what he describes as “a Gods-eye view of a frenzied mob.”35 The painting 22,000 Sunsets, which appeared to be about the general relationship between the individual and the collective, was in fact named after the number of days his father was alive. Kallat explores that number’s meaning more directly in his Epilogue (2010–11). These recapitulations should remind us that reterritorialization is also a product of the struggle to grapple with the experience of accelerated time that is so central to modernity in each of its stages, including the most recent one of globalization. DODIYA: “AN ARTIST OF NON-VIOLENCE” AND THE PROSPECTS OF PAINTING

Observant readers will note that the figure of Gandhi has cropped up twice already in these paintings. Mohandas K. Gandhi is a perennial subject of collective discussion, but there is evidence that his image became a particular flashpoint in the post-liberalization 64

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figure 34 Atul Dodiya, 2nd October, 1993, acrylic and oil on canvas, 68½ × 48½× 2½ in. (174 × 123.2 × 6.4 cm). Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, 2001 (E301092), Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (photo courtesy of the artist and Peabody Essex Museum).

period.36 Kallat’s reference to the three monkeys and Dahiwale’s play on the rupee note invoke Gandhi’s image ironically, in order to point out the contemporary nation’s failure to live up to the founding father’s vision.37 Atul Dodiya’s 1993 painting 2nd October engages with Gandhi’s image in this way, finding in an image of ritual memorialization of the leader’s birthday an expression of the betrayal of ideals constituted by the Bombay riots (figure 34). In a series of 1998–2002 works, Dodiya explored the Gandhi image through a variety of formal strategies. The series of watercolors exhibited under the title An Artist of Non-violence (1998) is discussed in detail next. But he also made cabinets of curiosities in Broken Branches (2001, figure 35), and, in the following year, a number of shutter paintings that used Gandhi’s image.38 While formally divergent, PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 35 Atul Dodiya, Broken Branches, 2002, installation featuring nine wooden cabinets, two chairs and one table; cabinets include hand-colored framed photographs, used artificial limbs, tools, found objects, billboard paintings; dimensions variable. As installed for the Atul Dodiya: Broken Branches exhibition at Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, April 7–May 31, 2003. Collection of Sumita and Arani Bose, New York (photo courtesy of the artist).

these works explore the continued political potency of Gandhi and his image at a moment when many feared that he and his legacy were in doubt.39 The watercolor series offers a particularly complex reading, one built around the following quote, which is attributed to Gandhi: I am not a seer, a rishi or a philosopher of non-violence; I am only an artist of nonviolence and desire to develop the art of non-violence in the realm of resistance. Playing on this phrase, Dodiya’s paintings recreate photographs of crucial moments of nonviolent activism and political negotiation, as well as documents that otherwise record Gandhi’s actions. They remind viewers of Gandhi’s deliberately calibrated image and body politics, from his control over the language of dress, to his determination to seek truth through the subjection of his body, to the trials of hunger or extreme endurance. Each of Dodiya’s paintings highlights a different aspect of the relationship between bodily practices and their representation in images, refusing any sort of final declarative statement about Gandhi or his legacy. Done in watercolor in a restricted color palette, the paintings are not exactly photorealistic, unlike a series of oils Dodiya 66

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made in the same year, one of which I will discuss next. His use of watercolor could instead be considered a refusal of what was quickly becoming a popular style of painting in Mumbai.40 Dodiya’s series highlights Gandhi’s actions in Gujarat, including the Dandi Salt March of 1930. One of his most celebrated acts of noncooperation, Gandhi walked some 240 miles from Ahmedabad to the sea and made salt in defiance of a tax levied by the colonial state. Dodiya’s The Route to Dandi recreates a map used in news-reel footage of the event, with the names of cities along the route painted in Gujarati script on a white and sepia landmass, into which encroaches an inky black sea. Overlaid are two distinct sets of anatomical drawings of leg bones and muscles, right and left, which appear to be painted using stencils. They serve as reminders of the endurance needed for the march. A second painting, Sea-Bath (Before Breaking the Salt Law), is based on a photograph taken at Dandi (figure 36). The painting recreates the portion of the photograph in which Gandhi is shown from behind, his spare body clad only in a loincloth, standing among followers. Dodiya paints the black and white photograph in the narrow palette of yellow, brown, and black that he uses for the entire series. His handling of the watercolor dulls the details of the photograph and emphasizes the contrast between the white of khadi cloth and the brown of skin. In a white blotch of paper cleared by a wash, Dodiya places an image from Piero della Francesca’s painting of The Baptism of Christ (ca. 1450s), a minor background figure removing his shirt in a gesture almost identical to that of a follower of Gandhi found in the source photograph. This quotation strikes an equivalence between the two scenes and the sacral status of bathing while invoking a canonical history of painting. Dodiya’s two watercolors set up the precise set of issues at stake in the series, which combines reconsiderations of Gandhi’s bodily efficacy, including his association with truth evidenced through physical sacrifice, with his control over communication, which for Dodiya is tied not only to the image but to the Gujarati language and social milieu. In other words, the series is tied less to the common-sense understanding of Gandhi as the betrayed father of the country—though that does enter into some of the paintings—than to addressing the misrecognition of the grounding of Gandhi’s efficacy in a precisely controlled, embodied mode of public communication. This ties Dodiya’s approach to Gandhi to the media politics of the painting’s present. This is quite unusual, as may become clearer if we compare his Sea Bath to Surendran Nair’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, also painted in 1998. In Nair’s nearly life-sized portrait, Gandhi is shown after his bath in the sea, his back glistening with salt. But in this imagined scene, the leader weighs himself while looking in a mirror that reflects the Indian tri-color. Nair’s is an image of a nationalist icon, rather than a historical actor, and in his version, Gandhi’s body politics look less like political communication than self-obsession. Gandhi’s embodied mode of communication has been the focus of anthropologists Joseph Alter, who considers the leader’s actions in their historical context, and PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 36 Atul Dodiya, Sea-Bath (Before Breaking the Salt Law), 1998, watercolor on paper, 22 × 30 in. (50.8 × 76.2 cm). Collection Atul Dodiya, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist).

William Mazzarella, who builds upon Alter’s work to relate nationalist publicity to the image condition after liberalization.41 Alter considers how to avoid the common, simplistic dismissal of Gandhi’s most extreme political use of the body, his fasting, as mere shrewd political calculation. Alter argues that the “moral chemistry” of Gandhi’s fasts can be understood only by grounding his search for truth in his practices of bodily discipline and self-restraint. Gandhi’s focus on practice—on the craft (or art) of seeking truth—is what accounts for his self-description as an “artist of non-violence.” As Alter argues, that craft was manifestly physical, involving a series of tests by which Gandhi could internalize “goodness, Truth, and nonviolence as biomoral entities,” rather than political tactics.42 Although not essential to the practice, photographs and other eye-witness accounts of fasts were the media by which Gandhi’s truth-force was spread. Dodiya’s Fasting in Rajkot is based on a photograph of a 1939 fast that lasted three days, in which the political aim was the establishment of a constitutional committee in the princely state of Rajkot in Gujarat. This is a lesser-known fast, likely chosen by the artist because it highlights a nationalist conflict within the present state of Gujarat, which was split between directly and indirectly governed territory throughout the colonial period. The establishment of a committee may seem a petty political aim, less 68

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worthy of exposure to the tactic of fasting than the evils of caste discrimination or communal violence associated with better-known fasts. But the truth in question is, in fact, the suitability of self-rule, or Swaraj, which for Gandhi was a perfect coincidence of public politics and individual biomorality. The image, particularly as it is subtly modified by Dodiya, approximates Alter’s recuperation of Gandhi’s biomoral practice, while leaving open a more ironic or irreverent interpretation. The interior light is softer and the handling of paint subtler here than in Sea Bath, and so Gandhi’s face, the only part of his body shown, is clearly rendered, more portrait than icon. The circle of adults that surrounds him expresses concern, but the crowd sitting at the side of his bed is less attentive. One boy, idly sticking out his tongue, sits in a pool of light, so his bright face competes with the Mahatma for the viewer’s attention. A final element is very subtle: one onlooker in the photograph, a man, has been replaced by a sliver of a face, which appears to belong to Anju Dodiya, the painter’s wife and a prominent artist best known for her dexterous, psychologically rich, reference-laden watercolors. She intrudes on her husband’s image while he, in a way, invades the practice of painting for which she is better known. This tricky substitution, much less obvious in its meaning than the one in Sea Bath, sits oddly alongside the extraordinary seriousness of the fast. It pushes the interpretation of Gandhi’s act away from biomorality and toward political calculation. That is reinforced by association with Dodiya’s insertion of his own self-portrait in The Postdated Cheque, in which his own figure replaces a man in the crowd laughing alongside Gandhi and Sir Stafford Cripps during the failed 1942 mission to negotiate India’s cooperation in the war effort. The title refers to Gandhi’s description of Cripps’s promise of Dominion status after the war as “a post-dated cheque drawn on a crashing bank.” It fits the already wry scene, in which, as Hoskote points out, Dodiya takes advantage of the tendency of painted laughter to “turn into a hollow rictus.” 43 The masklike expressions point forward to the suffering that followed their collective political failure, in a cascade of events of political violence, famine, war deaths, and finally Partition. By describing The Post-dated Cheque as an attempt to deal with the long-standing problem for painters of the representation of laughter, Hoskote reminds his reader that these paintings are about more than their subject matter. They also answer the question of the role for painting in any given moment. One answer is found in Dodiya’s attraction to the Gandhi image. Far from a stable icon, Gandhi’s image was a key part of the accelerating public discourse of image offense that emerged as a symptom of the processes of de- and reterritorialization. Mazzarella drew attention to these issues through his discussion of how Gandhi’s image became the subject of an international licensing agreement in 2002.44 Noting that Gandhi’s asceticism was often mistakenly conflated with Nehruvian socialism, Mazzarella argues that together they “came to represent deferral and denial, the big No that stood as a constitutive anteriority to the polymorphous Yes of consumerist erotics.”45 PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 37 Atul Dodiya, Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974, 1998, watercolor on paper, 45 × 70 in. (114.3 × 177.8). Collection Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist).

To Mazzarella, Gandhi’s asceticism stands at the moment of liberalization as a bodily practice of mass publicity that is “untimely,” in the Nietzchean sense of being at once archaic and suddenly relevant to the present. Dodiya’s insertions of his own and Anju Dodiya’s faces, as well as the Piero della Francesca figure, perform a similarly untimely eruption of one historical period into another. As he went on to develop in Censorium, Mazzarella attributes the image-based scandals in the late 1990s to the elite’s fraught relationship to the volatility of mass affect and its relationship to collective meaning. In this early piece, Mazzarella writes, “Gandhian publicity refused the distinction between reason and visceral experience on which both liberal and fascist ideologies have tended to depend. His was a body politics, but it was a critical body politics.”46 This criticality, as well as Gandhi’s refusal to separate the image from the body, resonates powerfully in a post-liberalization moment in which hedonistic pleasure and visceral response once more occupy a central place in political discourse. In practice, Gandhi’s body politics rarely held together as planned; the Dandi March was an important, and rare, success. These failures, so frustrating for both his contemporaries and later critics, are important for our purposes, because they allow us to see Gandhi’s critical body politics as speculative, as a practice that aims toward the realization of truth, rather than representing a truth already known. The failure built into Gandhi’s critical body politics underlies the most inspired painting of Dodiya’s series, his Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974 (figure 37). Dodiya paints Gandhi, affec70

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tionately called Bapu (father), into the room in which Joseph Beuys famously spent three days with a coyote, an animal the German artist associated with Native American communities and shamanistic practices. Beuys’s work, I like America and America likes me (1974), was intended to express the artist’s opposition to the US war in Vietnam, as well as the natural and cultural destruction wrought by settler colonialism on America and its native population. Dodiya’s juxtaposition rests less on these politics, however, than on the similarity between Gandhi’s self-designation as “an artist of non-violence” and Joseph Beuys’s well-known statement that “everyone is an artist,” by which he meant that the creativity associated with art should permeate every intellectual sphere, as an expanded form of artistic practice he called social sculpture. The comparison relies upon a productive misunderstanding of Gandhi’s bodily practices as performance art, which forces a realization of how his acts were grounded in a similar understanding of bodily risk as the one at play in Beuys’s performative interventions. The performance with the coyote was the high point of Beuys’s primitivist spiritualism, through which he aligned his artistic practice with shamanism as a way to access truth obscured by modern life. The juxtaposition configures the artist as a modern saint whose risk-taking ensures the truth revealed by his actions.47 Viewed in this way, Dodiya’s painting finds the roots of Beuys’s understanding of the truthtelling capacities of artistic practice in Gandhi’s critical body politics. That opens up the possibility of an alternative understanding of the political efficacy of art from that articulated by Kapur and Rajadhyaksha in their writing for the Tate show, which calls for an explicit association of art with democratic principles. Beuys, whose work attached a personal mythology to his political vision for Germany, provides a powerful alternative model of the artist-as-political-actor to that proposed in this period by Geeta Kapur. Dodiya’s gesture aligns that model with Gandhi by reminding his viewers of the misalignment of his critical body politics with democratic processes. Dodiya’s choice of Beuys as a model antecedent is deliberately obtuse, a rejection of the separation of image-based practices from the sculpture, installation, and performance for which the German artist is known.48 Beuys’s practice also defies art historical categorization, for some of his sculptural objects and environments, performances, lectures, and pedagogical interventions are understandable in the terms associated with the transnational movement of Fluxus, while others are more obviously neo-Dada in character. Dodiya would adopt one of Beuys’s modes of practice, the collection of artifacts, in his later Gandhi-based work, Broken Branches (2001). But otherwise, Dodiya’s work up until this point was exclusively in the medium of painting, and so this gesture, as well as the Gandhi watercolor series overall, is meant to extend the significance of image-based practice outside of the medium’s direct history. It does so, in part, by pointing to how dependent Beuys was, like Gandhi, on photographic documentation—that is, on images—for the effectiveness of his work. An Artist of Non-Violence takes as its explicit subject the political effects of bodily practices, but its implicit subject is the manner in which the communicative power of PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 38 Atul Dodiya, Dadagiri, 1998, oil and acrylic with marble dust on canvas, 69 × 69 in. (175.3 × 175.3 cm). Collection RPG Enterprises, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist).

the body is mediated through images, and, in particular, through photographs. These paired concerns are split in two subsequent bodies of work. In his series of watercolors exhibited as Tearscape, Dodiya’s exploration of the visceral power of the image is extended, twice over, through his adaptation of the votive image form associated with Bharat Mata (Mother India) and through his deployment of the abject.49 But another series of paintings reacts sharply against the impulse to ground art in place, instead exploring the wider, transnational history of the relationship of painting to photography. This is best articulated in Dodiya’s 1998 oil painting, Dadagiri (literally, bullying), which is a portrait of the German artist Gerhard Richter (figure 38). The title is a pun on the artistic movement, Dada, which is also the Hindi term for a street tough, with the suffix –giri meaning “practice of.” The painting also plays on the simi72

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larity of Richter’s and Dodiya’s appearances; it would be easy to mistake the painting for a self-portrait. Dadagiri was exhibited in Dodiya’s second 1999 solo exhibition, held in New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery, where it was shown adjacent to a series of oil paintings that juxtaposed citations of Hindu mythological images with references to artists as diverse as the Mughal painter Mansur, Raja Ravi Varma, Marcel Duchamp, and Bhupen Khakhar. But Richter it is perhaps the most apt figure with whom to consider the role of painting in an image condition saturated by photography. Dodiya’s Dadagiri includes a quote from the text of an interview that Richter did in 1986 with Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh’s asks, “So the negation of the productive act in art, as introduced by Duchamp and revived by Warhol, was never acceptable to you?” Richter responds, “No, because the artist’s productive act cannot be negated. It’s just that it has nothing to do with the talent of “making by hand,” only with the capacity to see and to decide what is to be made visible.”50 In his 1986 interview, Richter embraces the antiaesthetic impulse of Warhol, Duchamp, and Beuys while refusing their critique of creation and dissociating them from the supposed limitations of painting as a medium. It is likely that Dodiya recognizes his own thought in Richter’s position. Richter’s interview with Buchloh is mainly about how the artist came to understand the history of art and the work of other artists after his 1961 move from East to West Germany. Dodiya uses his portrait of Richter to assert his openness to a different and wider genealogy of art than the one important to Indian modernist painting, or even the deliberately transnational feminist discourse that animated the artists discussed in chapter 1. To the critic Gayatri Sinha, this gesture is part of “the gradual elision or ‘forgetting’ of a postcolonial identity and the easy absorption into the non-hierarchical fragments of postmodernity” that she considers central to Indian art after liberalization.51 In her estimation, Dodiya’s referential practice of painting can be placed in a wider field, alongside Kallat’s use of mediatic images but also Sudarshan Shetty’s and Subodh Gupta’s appropriations of the ready-made and Shilpa Gupta’s then-emergent conceptualism, as well as other contemporary practices. An extravagant example of this broader impulse is Bose Krishnamachari’s painting Death of Memory Is End of History and Self, Legends Exist Only with Memory (2001), which features painted portraits of Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Marcel Duchamp. Made after a period of training at Goldsmiths College in London, the painting is part of Bose’s larger project of institutional critique through which he understood his own practice while reconsidering the means by which art historical canons are constituted. In this and the broader series of works that he made upon his return to India, Bose appears to reject postcolonial thought in favor of American or continental European reference points. This is common among the artists Sinha cites, because this group sought to create an alternative geographical network to the exchange between India, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Africa described in the previous chapter. PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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Indeed, neither the “forgetting” nor the “absorption” that Sinha describes was really so easy, either formally or politically. As I have noted, the painters I’ve discussed—Kallat, Dahiwale, Dodiya, and Bose—all belabored the referential gesture, quite literally, by demonstrating various kinds and levels of artistic virtuosity in their works. And so perhaps the real question is this: what changed in art’s infrastructure, material and immaterial, that made it possible for this kind of eclecticism to appear to be easy? The quote that Dodiya pulls from Richter for Dadagiri emphasizes how personal art historical choices can be. But Richter’s interview with Buchloh also details the work involved in considering the history of art when one comes from outside, and notes how a personal archive of references is built not just from personal choices of how to make sense of one’s own practice but also from what might be more broadly acceptable ways by which artistic work may claim significance, in the dual sense of meaning and value.52 PHOTOREALISM AND COMMERCIAL CIRCUITS FOR IMAGES

Richter tried to reset the relationship between painting and photography by insisting that in his photorealistic works, “I’m not trying to imitate a photograph, I’m trying to make one. . . . I am practicing photography by other means.”53 As art historian Rosemary Hacker writes, in Richter’s work “the image lies at the intersection of the rhetorical trajectories” of painting and photography.54 In this period, Indian painting is driven not by its intersection with photography’s rhetorics alone—the photograph was only marginally more ubiquitous in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it was in the decades before—but by the new means of photography’s transmission, from Xerox and fax machines to television and the internet.55 Adajania coined the term new mediatic realism to link painting to the historical conditions of image transmission, as well as to the continuing commitment to realism. For our purposes, however, the less precise and ultimately backward-looking term photorealism is useful because it captures the critical reliance upon photography as a familiar frame of reference. It also points toward the continued insistence upon the primacy of painting as a medium by both artists and viewers. The term also indicates the value placed on mimetic skill and virtuosity, which these painters all demonstrate. Photorealistic painting flourished as the market for Indian contemporary art grew quickly after 2000. The infrastructural conditions of image production and circulation, including the spread of the internet, proved to be conducive to the growth not just of the market for painting but for photorealism specifically. In fact, the changes in visual media began, just in this moment, to transform the dissemination of Indian painting. In 1997, Neville Tuli published The Flamed Mosaic: Indian Contemporary Painting, a massive, lavishly illustrated volume that aimed at the production of what became, for a time, the most comprehensive history of the medium available for India. Tuli published the book under the aegis of a foundation dedicated to building art infrastructure that began holding auctions later that year. His activities were collected 74

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under the company name of Osian’s in 2000. Tuli’s book and his later auction catalogs exceeded in quality any other reproductions of painting then available. They also isolated the medium of painting from other forms of artistic production in a manner that followed the contours of the market, rather than the broader critical discussion of Indian art. In 2000, the internet-based gallery and then auction house Saffronart was founded in Mumbai by Minal and Dinesh Vazirani. The website was established at the tail end of the dot-com boom, as companies based in Silicon Valley began to establish Indian offices. Saffronart.com was directed toward the growth of US-based collections of Indian art, a targeting of the Indian diasporic community that made it similar to the social media site Chaitime.com, which for a couple of years connected Indian Americans to one another through content and chatrooms in the United States.56 But whereas Chaitime sought to develop internet capacity and publics in India, the Vaziranis were concerned primarily with connecting existing commercial structures in India for the circulation of art with e-commerce structures quickly being built in the United States. The Vaziranis’ success in this environment depended upon their initial avoidance of Indian e-commerce and their development of relationships with Indian galleries. In other words, these businesses are primarily important as visible symptoms of burgeoning growth in the Indian art market (although only a few years later Saffronart began to drive the market, rather than simply follow it). Indeed, the clearest sign of market growth was the rise in artistic production, seen in the frequency with which painters like Kallat and Dodiya held gallery exhibitions in the late 1990s. Both artists, like many others in this period, held solo exhibitions at least once a year between 1997 and 2008, developing relationships with multiple galleries inside and outside India. This was possible, in part, because of the founding of several new commercial galleries in this period, which helped to drive up the pace of the production and circulation of art. A later, truly decisive shift in the commercial market came when Bodhi Art Gallery was founded in Singapore by entrepreneur Amit Judge. Opening branches in India, Bodhi made huge investments in gallery spaces and publications, raising expectations about the scale of the business. An earlier result of growth of the commercial gallery sector was the segmentation of the market by particular artistic trends, which this increased pace of circulation made possible. Curators and critics Adajania, Hoskote, Shahane, and others identified painting engaged with media-circulated images as one of the first such trends, and a series of shows were held to both promote and evaluate its importance as a practice. Mumbai’s Guild Art Gallery took the lead, holding two important group exhibitions that explored the role of photographic images in painting in 2002. The more thesis-driven of the two exhibitions, Debt, featured the work of Anant Joshi, Justin Ponmany, Riyas Komu, and T. V. Santhosh and was dedicated to the absent fifth artist, Girish Dahiwale. In her text for the exhibition, Adajania places the work within the contemporary “visual culture of image-transfer,” drawing an exhibition driven by the artists’ personal PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 39 Baiju Parthan, Diary of the Inner Cyborg, 2001–3. Installation view (photo courtesy of the artist and the Guild Gallery, Mumbai).

relationships to Dahiwale, as well as their efforts to grapple with his death, out of its personal frame and into what can be understood either as a local sense of contemporaneity or a contemporary sense of locality.57 Debt included Riyas Komu’s portrait of Dahiwale, entitled a Pouch Full of Stories (I Carry the Weapon of Your Name) (2002). That painting was also shown in the second exhibition, Words and Images, which was curated by Girish Shahane. Shahane’s exhibition placed what he describes as “the style, now extremely popular, of posterised, photorealistic painting accompanied by text” into a larger artistic context. The exhibition surrounded the group of younger painters associated with the gallery within a broader group of artists, including both older artists and several women whose practices buck the photorealistic trend. Other commercial galleries also identified and supported the trend of photorealistic painting, including 2002 exhibitions in Mumbai’s Tao Art Gallery and Sakshi Art Gallery, which hosted Himanshu Desai’s large group show, Quotable Stencil, and Ranjit Hoskote’s exhibition Clicking into Place, which was sponsored by the Japan Foundation.58 Hoskote’s title likens the click of the photographic shutter to that of the computer mouse, while the curatorial framework points to the emancipatory potential of both photographic sources and digital practices for painting that engages with locality. 76

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The exhibition included a photo-based painting by Kallat, as well as Shibu Natesan’s Desert Route (2001), which builds upon a photograph of a bus stuck in the sand but whose real subject might be the strength of light. Hoskote describes Kallat and Natesan as exemplary of a critical approach to the photographic source. From the work of Baiju Parthan, whose paintings he and Adajania had long championed, Hoskote chose his interactive “cyber-installation” Diary of the Inner Cyborg (2002), one of his first works on the internet (figure 39). In the same year, Hoskote curated a less celebratory exhibition, Real in Realism, in Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery, which invoked the vogue for photorealistic painting in order to question its conceptual solidity. Presenting each of the six painters—Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Gargi Raina, Jitish Kallat, Natraj Sharma, and Shibu Natesan— through interviews about their work, Hoskote’s curatorial text denies the possibility of realism, or of relating the painted image to its referent in the world. Hoskote and Shahane, both long-term presences in the Bombay scene, appear in their exhibitions to sound an alarm about the terms in which realism and image-based painting was being understood. This is echoed by Marta Jakimowicz’s essay for a 2003 group show of work by Komu, K. P. Reiji, Ponmany, and Santhosh at Sakshi Art Gallery. She places the PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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artists in an “initial, positive phase within [a] recharge from realism” that will inevitably, she writes, find its own limitations.59 In their texts, Hoskote and Shahane express uncertainty about painting that they are otherwise helping to promote. Their ambivalence likely has something to do with the manner in which the art market had seized upon this sort of painting and made it its object, in a process of market acceleration that began to take hold as early as 2003. This situation is most visible in the public record through the activities of Saffronart. com.60 As stated, the website’s business model was based on collaboration with commercial galleries, particularly in Mumbai and Delhi, and so, as a matter of course, works by artists shown in Guild, Tao, Sakshi, and Vadehra (among other galleries) were placed on the site. In this early period, the site offered works of art for outright sale, showing an image of the work as well as basic data about it and the artist who produced it, plus provenance information, if available. The intended audience was American nonresident Indians (NRIs), who would presumably be familiar with ecommerce sites like eBay and Amazon (which were founded in 1995 and 1994, respectively). Like other internet-related businesses established at the time that took advantage of relatively low-cost, high-skilled labor in India, Saffronart was initially predicated upon the relative prices assigned to Indian art. The site allowed the prices to remain nearly equivalent to those offered in Indian galleries, which were, by American standards, extremely low. The prices lessened the risk of acquiring works of art at a distance, based only on a photographic image. Galleries shipped the works framed, with certificates of authenticity organized by Saffronart. In December 2000, Saffronart held its first online auctions, which, unlike the sales Sotheby’s and Christie’s hold of Indian modern and contemporary painting, mixed the secondary and primary markets. That means that some consignments came from galleries while others came from collectors. As with the traditional auction houses, the emphasis was on the so-called Modern Masters, but from the beginning the work of younger artists was also included. In the first auction, just three paintings from artists in this age group were sold: two by Baiju Parthan and one by Shibu Natesan. But twelve works sold the following year, and by 2002 younger artists’ work began to account for between one-quarter and one-third of auction lots sold. The December 2003 sale showed signs that Saffronart auctions were beginning to set rather than follow prices, with paintings by Kallat, Atul Dodiya, and Santhosh greatly exceeding their estimates. During the years of the boom market, roughly between 2004 and 2008, Saffronart auctions, like those of the international houses, attracted a significant amount of public attention to prices and practices of speculation.61 As was typical of auctions by all major houses, Saffronart auctions were confined to painting until 2005, when they sold a work by Atul Dodiya that incorporated elements of installation. Before that point, even artists who were primarily known for their sculpture, like Subodh Gupta, N. N. Rimzon, and Sudarshan Shetty, were represented in Saffronart auctions by painting or drawing. Only at the height of the market boom 78

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was any amount of sculpture sold in these venues, despite the enormous market and exhibitionary significance of Indian sculpture and installation as a whole. The issue was less the dominant position of painting in the market than the reliance of auction houses, and particularly of the internet-based Saffronart, on the confidence that collectors first placed in photographic reproductions of painting and then in their circulation by digital means. Buyers of works on Saffronart.com were expected to rely upon a printed photographic reproduction or a digital image on a computer screen in order to acquire the work of art, often at no small geographical distance. In this early moment of digital culture, visual technology and the habits of mind it has cultivated were in rapid development. It appears that the practice of painting most easily supported by a digital platform was that which sought to forefront the image itself, through a collapse in the distinction between photography and painting. That supposition is supported by the fact that, except during the very height of the boom, only a small segment of contemporary Indian painting really thrived on Saffronart.com. What fared best were paintings that engaged with the image condition, whether by self-consciously exploring the rhetorical shift between painting and photography, as did Kallat and Dodiya, or by treating the image more seamlessly, as in the more straightforwardly photorealistic painting of Santhosh and Komu, or by engaging through painting with what was then still called “cyberspace,” as did Parthan. The latter three artists were disproportionately represented on Saffronart’s digital platform in this era, compared to their work’s overall visibility in international exhibitions or on other auction platforms. Their paintings, often quite large in person, scaled well in reproduction in catalogs and on the internet, their images typically knitting together, more finely resolved, in their miniature reproduced form. A spectacular example of the way these paintings were shown on the Saffronart platform is the story of an untitled 2002 painting by Santhosh, which was sold in the May 2004 auction for approximately US $3500 and resold in 2008 for just over $140,000. The work takes as its central subject a familiar photograph of the Hindenburg disaster. The photograph is recreated in painting so that it is recognizable but blurred, using a technique closely associated with the practice of Gerhard Richter.62 The blur is largely invisible in the digital version of the painting from 2004, however, because the low resolution of online photographs at the time produced plenty of blur of its own. With the improved technology of 2008, the surface of the painting is much more visible, with the crispness of its photographic reproduction facilitating appreciation of its painterliness.63 In his 2003 essay on this and the rest of his series of paintings, Hoskote describes Santhosh’s transformation of the source image as “all the more shocking for its unobtrusiveness.” The subtlety of the shift into painting may allow for the work’s easy slippage (back) into the digital-photographic image, an ease that can account for its appropriateness for the digital art market. In a suggestive essay written for a series of back-to-back gallery exhibitions T. V. Santhosh held in Zurich, London, and New York in 2008–9, art historian Santhosh S. PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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figure 40 T. V. Santhosh, Blood and Spit, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in. (121.9 × 182.9 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist and the Guild Gallery, Mumbai).

described the artist’s project as the production of “copies without an original.”64 That phrase is typically applied to digital photography, which simulates the outcome of analog photography while doing away with the mediating role played by film. Santhosh S.’s observation is perhaps driven by the artist’s 2005 turn toward the materiality of film in his work, as he began to make paintings that resemble photographic negatives that have been “solarized”: partially developed to encourage the development of halo-like effects (figures 40 and 41). Pairs of green and orange or green and purple replace the greys and whites that would appear in black-and-white negatives. Noting how the artist presents the negative as the image itself, Santhosh S. argues that the paintings undermine the claim to a connection to the real and expose the pure spectacle of the photographic image instead. He further describes how T. V. Santhosh’s choice of war photography as his principle source archive raises the stakes on the question of referential truth. But while Santhosh S. correctly identifies the central rhetorical mechanism of the work, he fails to consider how T. V. Santhosh’s painting itself, in its material, consumable form, operates in relationship to its more easily circulating digital image. The ease with which Santhosh’s work slips between the image-original and image-copy seems to be as fundamental to its character as a commodity as it is to its effectiveness as art. While the 2002 paintings were easily distinguished from one another by their subject matter, the works after 2005 bleed easily into one another. In these paintings, the for80

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figure 41 T. V. Santhosh, Better Lessons—II, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in. (121.9 × 182.9 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist and the Guild Gallery, Mumbai).

mal operation of image transcription and color inversion becomes the true subject of the work. Indeed, Shaheen Merali dismisses the task of reading the paintings’ iconography and form entirely in his 2009 essay, focusing instead on the artist’s role in wrenching open a space for Indian art.65 My contention is that this 2005–9 period in Santhosh’s painting is an extreme example of a broader slippage between painting and digital image that was encouraged by the new modes of market circulation of painting, in which the painting was reduced to its image and its circulation. Despite the critique internal to T. V. Santhosh’s work, the speculation that facilitated its circulation overwhelmed the meanings found within the paintings themselves. More broadly, photorealistic painting became associated primarily with the rapid circulation of art, including the quick movement through the cycle of photographic presentation and exhibition and the phenomenon of overproduction.66 This happened very quickly, in the small temporal gap between the series of 2002 exhibitions in which the conceptual frame for painting was being deliberately staked out by curators and critics, and Santhosh’s post-2005 digitally circulated paintings of solarized analog photographs. In that period of three years, ideas about the contemporary image condition and its relationship to de- and reterritorialization solidified. The certainty about image vitality that followed market support also allowed the market for painting to continue to grow. The bubble economy most closely associated with the PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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arrival of new media, and particularly the internet in India in 2000, also drove the production of the painting most closely engaged with its effects. This is yet another instance of a collapse in the boundary between the infrastructures of circulation—in this case, the art market and its institutions—the form of artistic work, and the frameworks by which it is understood. CONCLUSION: PLAYING ON THE IMAGE CONDITION

So far, this account ties the transformation and revaluation of painting quite tightly to the dramatic changes in India’s image condition. By way of conclusion, two other cases demonstrate more loosely and playfully how crucial image conditions were for art in this period. Ranbir Kaleka and Rashid Rana made work that moved across painting and new media in ways that linked infrastructural challenges to formal experiments. In the case of Rana, his adoption of image technologies allowed his works to evade the infrastructural barrier of the India-Pakistani border after they began to be circulated digitally and produced on site. In the case of Kaleka, his work introduced within itself opportunities to contemplate the uncanny materialities of the image. Indeed, Ranbir Kaleka’s experimental practices trace the outlines of this period. His 1998–99 work, Man Threading Needle, involved the projection of a video of a man onto a painting of the same man. It is displayed on an easel, as if it were simply spot-lit, with little movement and sound, until, with quick jerks, the man blinks, gulps, or attempts to thread the needle.67 In the years following, Kaleka made single- and multiplechannel videos, usually nonnarrative and deliberately slowed-down works that concentrated viewer attention. He also continued to paint the richly colored, libidinally charged, neo-expressionist canvases that he had developed since the 1980s. Kaleka’s work shifted in scale and ambition with Crossings (2005), a four-channel video projected on six-by-eight-foot (1.8 × 2.4 m) paintings that he made in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Avijit Mukul Kishore and musician Madan Gopal Singh (figure 42). The four painted images—a family of four seated, then standing in a row, a vendor flanked by bird cages, and a man seated in profile on a chair—are overlaid by fifteen minutes of video footage, some doubling the painting, others overwhelming it. The central narrative in Crossings, of a Sikh man dyeing, drying, and then tying his turban, is external to the paintings, and recurs as images move across the four projections, with the man eventually landing on another shore, in America, his turban now multicolored. As Kaleka argues, the point of this practice is to expand the potential of both painting and video. He writes, I do not see this work as a hybrid or a composite, but a fecund image-structure breathing to the rhythm and beat of one heart. There is an inner connection, logic between the video-movement and the painted/sculpted surface. The video image is tied to the concrete and the material (literally). I see the work possessing a kind of wholeness. . . . .68 82

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figure 42 Ranbir Kaleka, Crossings: Two Stories, 2005, four-channel video installation with four acrylic paintings on canvas, sound, 15 min. Collection of Shumita and Arani Bose (photography by Bose Pacia Gallery, courtesy of the artist).

Kaleka traces the conceptual space of his practice, what he calls an “image-structure,” between the time-based, illusory video image, and a painted image that is materially rich but static. It is worth noting that the rising ambition of Crossings included a thematic expansion to incorporate the sorts of signs of de- and reterritorialization that animate other Indian painters in this period. But its form internalized India’s experience of media shift differently. A similarly canny play on the relationship between painting and the digital image came in the work of Pakistani artist Rashid Rana. Rana’s I Love Miniatures (2002) constructs a stereotypically “Mughal” portrait out of a collage of small photographs of advertising in Lahore. The work came at a critical moment in Pakistan, when the movement to rethink the miniature painting tradition as contemporary art was gathering steam. As Adnan Madani points out, Rana’s initial foray into photo collage, though formally new, was “carefully retreading artistic territory—the critical subversion of Mughal portraiture, especially royal portraits, was most famously accomplished by Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Quddus Mirza.”69 But Rana found the central formal device in photo collage—or photo mosaic, as Madani puts it—that would allow him to abandon painting while retaining his link to the modernist tradition established in Pakistan’s largest art school, the National College of Art, Lahore.70 Rana’s work was included in Beyond Borders, the first exhibition of Pakistani contemporary art ever held in India, which was shown in Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern Art in early 2005.71 Two Indian galleries, Delhi’s Nature Morte and Mumbai’s Chatterjee + Lal, collaborated to hold a solo exhibition of Rashid Rana’s work PAINTING AND IMAGE CONDITION

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at the same time. Thus began an extremely successful campaign, first to promote Rana’s work to Indian collectors and then, by extension, to cultivate patronage for other Pakistani artists through Indian art institutions. Madani notes how risky this move was, commercially speaking, because digital and photo-based work had basically no share of the market at the time. Rana’s work is less understandable as photography, however, than for its interventions in debates in painting. Not only does his work engage with the debates regarding contemporary miniatures in Pakistan but it is fully responsive to the concern about changes in the image condition that was driving Indian painting at the time. The works shown in Beyond Borders, like All Eyes Skyward during the National Parade (2004), comment upon the circulation of images on television. The large image of a crowd looking up, likely at a military plane showing off overhead, is one that would be broadcast on Pakistani state/public television. It is made up of stills from Bombay cinema, from films broadcast over satellite channels or by local cable operators to fulfill public demand. Much of Rana’s work between 2002 and 2006 employed found images that established links to locality, pointing outside of themselves in ways familiar to viewers of Kallat’s and Dodiya’s work. They often directly addressed the complexities of the India-Pakistan relationship, or the politicization of the Muslim and/or Pakistani image condition after the September 11 attacks. In other words, and like Kaleka’s experiments with painting and video, Rana’s photo collages fit within the grounds staked out by painters in India in this period, while remaining formally distinct, as well as innovative in its squaring of the relationship between de- and re-territorialized forms. Despite his novel use of form, the conceptual overlap between Rana’s work and Indian painting allowed him to make a surprisingly smooth entry onto the Indian commercial gallery scene. This transition was helped along by his choice to directly address the Indo-Pak relationship in his early work, as well as efforts of exchange that are addressed further in later chapters of this book. But for some time, Rana was the only artist to become quite central in Indian discussions of contemporary art without actually spending a significant amount of time outside of Pakistan. His choice of medium made it possible for Rana to be a presence in Indian artistic debates without challenging the closed border between the two countries.

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3 MATERIALITY, EPHEMERALITY, HAPTICS

D

Johannesburg Biennale, Sheela Gowda participated in “Art and Nature,” an international workshop held in Buddha Jayanti Park, a large green space in central New Delhi. Sponsored by Lalit Kala Akademi, Japan Foundation, and Germany’s Goethe Institut, the workshop included fifteen Indian, Japanese, and German artists, who gathered under an environmental theme.1 Unlike her paintings for the biennale, which used finely sifted cow dung as pigment, Gowda used coarse cow dung with oil, pigments, and other materials mixed into a thick, moldable paste, which she made into bricks and slabs and inscribed with designs or the mark of her hand or foot (figures 43 and 44).2 Some of these pieces were topped with bits of gold leaf. For her untitled installation, she arranged the bricks into a tight circle and propped the slabs up against trees, in imitation of votive stones used in rural subaltern communities. Unlike the dung paintings, this site-specific installation was ephemeral, disassembled at the end of the workshop.3 Gowda continued to make dung-based paintings and installations URING THE RUN OF THE 1995

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figure 43 E Sheela Gowda, untitled (site-specific installation at Buddha Jayanti Park, New Delhi), 1995, cow dung, gold leaf, variable dimensions (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 44 G Sheela Gowda, untitled (close-up of site-specific installation at Buddha Jayanti Park), 1995, cow dung, gold leaf, variable dimensions (photo courtesy of the artist).

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for at least one more year, after which her need to care for her young son forced her to remove the medium from her home studio.4 Two years later, during a 1997 international workshop hosted by the Khoj International Artists Association (see the “Networks and Frameworks” section later in this chapter), Subodh Gupta assembled dung cakes into a cylindrical, hutlike structure. Approximately ten feet (3 m) high and open to the sky, the work, later titled My Mother and Me (1997), was built by Gupta and assistants from truckloads of dung cakes bought premade at market (figure 45). During the 1999 Khoj workshop, Gupta followed that up with a performance, Pure, in which he spread his nearly naked body thickly with a dung-mud mixture and stood in an area of ground prepared with the same substance, the soil neatly sealed as is done in homes in rural India (figure 46). Tools and domestic items he had collected in a Bihari village where he had lived as a teenager were buried in shallow holes that were dug to fit their shapes. In the documentation of Gupta’s performance, he stands patiently as he is photographed, and then he lies on the ground, insects crawling over him, as the dung dries. Gupta made a video, also called Pure (2000), that riffed on that performance, and he used dung-prepared canvases in a series of paintings made between 1999 and 2002. The strongest association with cow dung is likely disgust, but after it is worked by the hands and left to dry, the substance loses its stench. What is left is a rich, even sweet aroma of soil and a robust material, strong enough to endure the process of collecting, transporting, and shaping into bricks or pats. In person, its aesthetic qualities are directly at odds with its abjection at the moment of creation, which lingers as only one of the material’s connotations. As both Gowda and Gupta emphasize, cow dung has other meanings in the Indian context, even beyond its uses as cooking fuel and in the sealing of dirt surfaces. Understood as one of five sacred substances connected to the cow, cow pies are burnt and dung is applied to the skin in various rituals associated with purification.5 These layers of meaning adhere to the works of Gowda and Gupta, with differences of emphasis depending on their choice of artistic medium, whether painting, installation, or performance. As they move across different media, it becomes clear that the central concern of this work is materiality, by which I mean the qualities and capacities of cow dung as a substance. In one sense, it is not at all surprising to find artists concerned with the properties of matter. The key distinction here is between artistic explorations of the materiality of things and the two previous chapters’ discussions of the capacities of artistic media, whether thought of in terms of “medium specificity” or measured against a politics of representation.6 Sheela Gowda notes a newfound lack of self-consciousness about “the purity of the medium” in a 1996 interview, attributing the shift to the shock of Hindu fundamentalist violence and placing her use of cow dung alongside other “experimental” art that addressed that issue. She also recognizes changes in the social structure in India that were similar to those outside the country, making a careful reference to the process of de- and reterritorialization associated with globalization. M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 45 E Subodh Gupta, My Mother and Me, 1997, cow dung, ash, wood, 12 × 12 × 12 ft. (3.6 × 3.6 × 3.6 m). Collection Devi Art Foundation (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 46 G Subodh Gupta, Pure, 1999, performance and installation of found materials, Modinagar (photo by Khoj International Artists Association, courtesy of the artist).

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figure 47 Subodh Gupta, Bihari, 1999, cow dung, acrylic, sequence light on handmade paper, 30 × 43 in. (76 × 109 cm). Collection Lekha and Anupam Poddar, New Delhi (photo courtesy of the artist).

This understanding, she says, led to her “seeing the familiar with new eyes, as new possibilities.”7 Gowda’s statements are echoed in Subodh Gupta’s interpretation of his own, slightly later, embrace of cow dung, which he connected to his personal experience of migrating from Bihar to Delhi. Accelerating rural-to-urban migration, particularly from Bihar and the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, was among the signal phenomena of post-liberalization India. In video footage of an interview made at the time of Gupta’s 1999 performance, he introduces his work by talking about the aesthetics of everyday life in small-town and village Bihar (figure 47). He roots his work in his sense of the separation between an aesthetic experience that combined everyday forms of religiosity with labor, and an urban everyday life in which both were rendered invisible. Indeed, both artists ground the meaning of cow dung in a type of (subaltern, women’s, often ritual) labor that seemed to be threatened by new economic and social forms. Gowda and Gupta’s experiments with cow dung are crucial not only due to their exploration of new materials but also because they occurred within the newly productive institutional form of the international artist workshop. Though not new, international artist workshops multiplied quickly in the mid and late 1990s. These M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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temporary spaces for artistic production existed alongside or were framed against the market, as artist-driven alternatives to commercial galleries and large international exhibitions, alike. International artist workshops promoted the production of materials-based, site-specific, often ephemeral works of art, like those by Gowda and Gupta just discussed. These works were made in literal dialogue with like-minded artists from other artistic communities. While after a time modes of artistic practice engaged with materiality began to exceed this infrastructure and thrive elsewhere in artistic networks, these forms of art continued to be connected to the workshop form’s modes of viewing and production. The promotion of engagements with materiality over questions of medium began with artists but was quickly recognized as significant by critics and curators. It led to the production of work that strained and stretched existing art infrastructure, particularly by emphasizing ephemerality. This chapter is concerned, therefore, with the relationship between materiality and ephemerality. But whereas in the first two chapters of this book, key terms have described either conceptual frameworks or infrastructural forms, materiality and ephemerality must be understood as both. Artistic explorations of the materiality of particular things, and their capacities within artistic work, were both prompted by ephemeral institutional forms and led to changes in those institutions’ material form. Similarly, ephemerality emerged not only as materiality’s definitional counterpoint but also as an important condition for the production of works of art whose physical vulnerability was both prompted by forms like the workshop and challenged an art world increasingly tied to speculative investment. WHY MATERIALITY, WHY THEN?

It is conventional to begin art historical accounts of the transdisciplinary material turn by noting how deeply the discipline has always already been engaged in the study of materiality.8 Indeed, for all its investment in human creativity, art history has long held that “human beings are not the sole repository of agency, intentionality, vitality, and purposiveness,” as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai wryly describes the material turn’s central insight.9 The goal of the materiality literature, like other engagements with the post-human, is to provincialize the human subject by grappling with the relationships between human and other orders of being, including things, animals, and nature. This is the agenda of environmental philosopher Jane Bennett, whose writing aims at a “cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body.”10 She at once limits those forces temporally, to the “moment of independence (from subjectivity)” of things, and expands their significance, positing “active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness (vibrant matter),” or a “vitality intrinsic to materiality.”11 Her work builds explicitly on that of Bruno Latour, whose focus on sources of agency, or actants, forces acknowledgment of a continuity between human and nonhuman intervention, and therefore a collapse in 90

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the distinction between subject and object.12 By positing the vitality, rather than just the agency of things, Bennett inverts actor-network theory’s diminution of the human subject. Her goal is less to understand vital matter (by translating or describing it) than to cultivate our “experience” of the different-but-important materialities of persons and other things. She considers such experience essential to addressing the ecological challenges posed by the present.13 In his critique of the material turn, Appadurai singles out Latour’s work for its radical rejection of the mediating role of language in social life, arguing that “mediation, as an operation or embodied practice, produces materiality as the effect of its operations.”14 Indeed, although he goes on to propose a method for rethinking mediation, Appadurai’s main contribution here is negative, in highlighting Latour’s hostility to the question of meaning.15 His University of Chicago colleague, Bill Brown, more evenhandedly argues for a generative relationship of materiality and mediation, in an essay focusing on how changes in mediatic technologies (and therefore forms of mediation-as-signification) produce anxieties about dematerialization and, therefore, renewed investments in materiality.16 Brown argues, “when critics view media as a threat to materiality, they generally mean that our human experience of materiality has been compromised, and they thus extend paradigmatic claims about modernity, which tend to retroproject some prelapsarian intimacy with the real.”17 This suggests that the appeal of materiality comes in its dialectical relationship with mediation in both its subject-centered definition, as signification, and its object-centered meaning, as communication or image-making technology. Concerns with materiality have a strong genealogy in Indian twentieth-century art, mostly articulated through experiments with “poor materials” in the sculptural practices of Ramkinkar Baij, K. G. Subramanyan, Raghav Kaneria, and Pushpamala N., N. N. Rimzon, and their colleagues in the Kerala Radical Artists Group.18 Sheela Gowda’s and Subodh Gupta’s work can easily be seen as an extension of this genealogy; that is one way that their cow dung experiments were immediately legible to critics. But the material turn in Indian artistic practice in this period was much broader than what is represented by earlier practices, which occupied a minority position in an art scene dominated by painting and questions of representation. The material turn in contemporary Indian art is more properly understood through artworks’ “sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces,” in Bennett’s terms, and by Brown’s understanding of the relationship between the materiality effect and an avalanche of digital image technologies. Bennett’s account allows for a focus on the encounter with the art object, while Brown’s explains the appeal of cow dung’s materiality through its associations with forms of labor and modes of religiosity threatened by India’s urban development.19 Brown’s insight allows us to view the materiality-ephemerality dyad as another instance of the de- and reterritorialization that drove changes in painting in the same period, while Bennett’s suggests how materiality escapes the question of meaning altogether. M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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A material like cow dung—or kumkum powder, or textiles, or utensils, or wood— may very well be loaded with significance. As Kapur points out first in her introduction to Dispossession, such materials make meaning primarily through their metonymic attachments to practice. But to speak of materiality is also to refer to a particular form of sensuality that is connected to a thing’s concrete, physical reality: its thingness. The materiality of cow dung lies in those dimensions of its experience that exceed the meanings or contexts to which it is attached. That said, our central concern is limited to the experience of a material like cow dung as art. We attend to the ways art’s materiality is constrained by the conventions of exhibition, which typically limit modes of apprehension to looking. In critical writing on art, the materiality of a work is therefore measured by its “tactility,” which refers to a haptic form of perception in which looking simulates touching.20 It is useful to remind ourselves that tactility/the haptic pertains only to the viewing of the object, not its making or even its curation, since the artist and art handlers are not prohibited from touching the work. The account that follows therefore emphasizes the presentation of materiality-rich works of art in exhibition. MATERIALITY AND MEANING

After abandoning cow dung as a material, Sheela Gowda began to create long ropes out of strands of red thread that were strung onto sewing needles and then cemented together with glue and coated with kumkum powder, a vermilion-red pigment applied to the center part of married Hindu women’s hair. The best-known work in this mode, And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001), consists of two ³/₄-inch ropes approximately 375 feet (114 m) in length, with a neat fringe of silver sewing needles at one end and slow petering out of threads on the other (figure 48). Gowda installs the rope by looping it around hooks or other architectural features, creating irregular lengths and coils on gallery walls and floors. Curators Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson showed the work in Drawing Space, a 2000 exhibition at Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London.21 Describing it as a straightforward concretization of the exhibition title, Gopinath and Watson set up a counterpoint between the work’s formal qualities and its meanings. They point out how the impression given by photographs of “lines of looping abstraction” contrasts with the in-person experience of the work, which “conjure[s] a potential body of arterial vessels,” or what they call “bunched coils of human energy.”22 Their interpretation picks up from an earlier British exhibition of Gowda’s pilot work in this idiom, an untitled single rope (1997) made on a smaller scale, which was included in Rasna Bhushan and Jane Connarty’s Telling Tales—Of Self, of Nation, of Art, a group show held in Bath the year before. Gowda’s work appeared alongside that of Ayisha Abraham, Anita Dube, Rumanna Hussain, and Pushpamala N. The curators understood the artists’ work as political speech, governed by an underlying theme of “resistance to oppressive or restrictive social structures,” in which the act of making 92

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figure 48 Sheela Gowda, And Tell Him of My Pain, 1998/2001, thread, pigment, glue, needles, variable dimensions. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Julie and Babe Davis Acquisition Fund, 2002 (photo courtesy of the artist).

oneself visible can be read as political.23 Their framework is particularly apt for Rumanna Hussain’s installation, The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal (1997), which honors the wife of the last ruler of the princely state of Oudh, who led an army against the British in 1857. Her “monument,” constructed from sculptural and image fragments, highlights, in its very impossibility, the shrinking social space for Muslims and, even M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 49 Rummana Hussain, The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal, 1997, papaya molds, bed of rice, calligraphic text, photographs, dimensions variable (© Estate of Rummana Hussain, courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi).

more so, for Muslim women, in post-Ayodhya India (figure 49). Bhushan and Connarty’s frame also works well for Ayisha Abraham’s documentation-based work, a deep dive into the personal archive of her Kerala Christian family. But although storytelling is crucial to Pushpamala N.’s Phantom Lady photo-romance, the materiality of that work, as well as that of Gowda and Anita Dube, slips out of the curators’ frame. The curatorial emphasis on the politics of representation—the production of political identity through language—underplays the sensory experience produced by the intense materiality of Gowda’s and Dube’s work. Sensory experience is treated as a remainder, as what lies outside of the analytical frame. There are hints of that approach in the evocative language used by Gopinath and Watson to describe And Tell Him of My Pain. Indeed, Bhushan and Connarty describe Anita Dube’s Silence (Blood Wedding) (1997) in similarly evocative language, as “an unholy mix of meanings and materials” that “forges a link between desire and death” (figures 50 and 51). Dube’s Silence (Blood Wedding) is a series of sculptures in which human bones are covered with red velvet and ornamented with lace, beadwork, and embroidery and displayed in individual, clear plexiglass vitrines. Some larger bones, like the pelvis, are presented as stand-alone sculptures, while others are assembled into a bird, a fan, or a necklace. The works are beautiful, sensual, and deeply unsettling.

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figure 50 Anita Dube, Silence (Blood Wedding), 1997, bones, velvet and trimmings, plexiglass vitrines, and other media (photo courtesy of the artist).

Dube wrote a reference-laden introduction to them for the Bath show, supplementing the already suggestive title with more autobiographical associations to her doctor father and embroiderer mother, as well as social associations with craft traditions. This tethers the work to the context of its production, but it hardly captures why this work was so exciting. Dube articulates a distinction in Silence (Blood Wedding) between meaning and materiality in a 2000 interview with art critic Kamala Kapoor. In the midst of a rich discussion invoking nearly a dozen symbolic and referential readings of the series, Kapoor observes the work’s “undeniable visual seductiveness” and asks, “what are your views about the fetishistic enticements inherent in the decorative?” Dube replies, “ . . . with me decoration is not a fetish. It’s a need to emphasize my closeness to the object, to record a glint as an optical caress—an unbearable optical caress.”24 This exchange not only shows Dube’s extraordinary control over language—her very articulateness arguably hampering discussion of the materiality of her work—but also her deliberate investment in the haptic. For all the associations attached to the beading and embroidery techniques used in Silence (Blood Wedding), Dube points here to their material qualities: specifically, to the way their shininess stops and touches the eye.

M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 51 Anita Dube, Silence (Blood Wedding) (close-up), 1997 (photo courtesy of the artist).

Dube does not extend this discussion of materiality to the materials themselves, instead focusing on how they are worked. While she tells the story of how she acquired the human bones, the velvet she describes only as fragile, before noting the symbolism of the colors she dyes it (here, red, but in other works midnight blue, black, and saffron). She ignores how velvet offers tactile pleasure, one denied not just by the conventional prohibition against touching artworks but also by the plexiglass vitrine. In the absence of actual touch, viewers are left only Dube’s “unbearable optical caress,” a haptic form of viewing that is pitted against the taboo against touching human remains. Put simply, for all its layers of references, the experience of Silence (Blood Wedding) is driven primarily by its balance of conflicting materialities: velvet’s insistence upon being touched and human bones’ power to elicit disgust. It is worth noting that these material qualities are ready-made, preexisting and persisting beyond the process of art making. That distinguishes Dube’s work from Gowda’s And Tell Him of My Pain, in which the artist’s process transforms the material more thoroughly. Production images record two stages of work, one in which Gowda has strung long skeins between the walls of her house in order to thread the needles, and the other in which she bathes the collected threads in a wet mixture of glue and pigment.25 In a remarkable 2006 interview 96

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with Ayisha Abraham, Gowda attributes the integrity of the work to the process of its production. “I want the material to speak,” she says, “at the same time it has to serve my purpose, I need to control it, subvert it.” The production of the rope, she writes, is like “a private performance.”26 The process of threading each needle, she told curator Trevor Smith in the same year, “empowers every inch of it, giving it something that you might not at first be able to identify.” Once the rope had absorbed her labor, she argues, it is “not just a form but . . . also a process,” which “makes [the work] intense, gives it a hard to define presence,” that goes beyond beauty.27 “In a way,” Gowda continues, “the visual appearance is a mere skin” while “the underlying layers are dark.”28 Works by Dube and Gowda appeared together in another landmark exhibition, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, which originated at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2003, although planning began in 1999.29 One of the most ambitious aspects of this rich, exploratory exhibition is the allusion made in the title to Harald Szeemann’s landmark 1969 exhibition, When Attitudes Become Forms: Live in Your Head. In his introductory essay, curator Philippe Vergne links his own effort to the earlier exhibition’s (limited, Euro-American) internationalism and to its focus on two interlocking forms of practice: one, the development of site-specific or location-dependent work, and two, a rejection of “the illusionistic or anecdotal function of art in order to privilege forms and processes.”30 Vergne argues that these forms of practice remain fundamental in the “global age,” even as their terms have expanded significantly. He lists a series of reorientations, including the “notion of proximity and locality, . . . the performativity of audiences and artists across disciplines, which is a possible lead toward multidisciplinarity, the critique of museum authority, the increasing importance of the everyday, and the subversive potential of art.”31 But above all, the decisive gesture is the introduction of culture to the forms that were central to the earlier exhibition, so that site specificity is reconfigured to privilege “cultural sites,” and forms and processes include those attached, in associate curator Douglas Fogle’s terms, to “tradition” or the “vernacular.”32 Alongside works by Gowda and Dube, the exhibition featured contributions by Ranjani Shettar, who was then just emerging out of Bengaluru, and Raqs Media Collective. Shettar’s Thousand Room House (2000), a honeycomb constructed out of clear plastic sheet, rope, and wire, was deeply engaged with materials (figure 52).33 Raqs set up two sites—one a website and the other a physical pavilion—for interaction and ideas that explicitly worked the tension between mediation and (im)materiality. (Their work is discussed in the next chapter.) Gowda showed And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001), as well as a dung-based installation, Private Gallery (1999). Anita Dube’s large wall drawing constructed from the ready-made ceramic eyes used for Hindu icons, The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters (2003, figure 53), referred in its title to religious nationalism through a reference to Goya’s Caprichos etchings, in which he satirized a corrupt Church. All of these works hit many of Vergne’s points, from locality to the everyday to subversion. M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 52 Ranjani Shettar, Thousand Room House, 2000, polythene sheet, cotton rope, eyelets, thread, and copper wire, 50 × 50 × 18 in. (127 × 127 × 45.7 cm). The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio (© Ranjani Shettar, courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi).

The lasting argument made by Latitudes regarding the work of Shettar, Gowda, and to a lesser extent Dube was that it could be understood as extending the balance between conceptual and form-driven practice associated with the 1960s EuroAmerican artists featured in Attitudes. The artist most often cited as a precursor to their practice is Eva Hesse, whose experiments with materiality have been linked to feminism. This is most important for the reception of Sheela Gowda, particularly a 2009 essay by Trevor Smith that contextualizes her work by comparing it to that of both Hesse and Carl Andre, both of whom were featured in the 1969 exhibition. Building upon his 2006 interview, Smith frames his reading of Gowda with Andre’s insight that “the culture of labour, how we go about taking care of our basic needs, is intimately connected not only to who makes art but the very character and quality of that art.”34 Less than her choice of materials, then, it is “Gowda’s embodiment of disappearing forms of manual labour in her works” that connects it to a wider art history.35 In keeping with the Latitudes framework, Smith notes that Gowda departs from Andre’s Marxist sense of labor to consider work as “different forms of cultural knowledge that inhere in the making of objects.”36 Smith’s reading emphasizes the way that materials are transformed by human contact. Smith’s argument builds upon art historical rethinking of the category of materiality in 1960s Euro-American sculpture, contemporary to the planning of Latitudes, that sees 98

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figure 53 Anita Dube, The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters, 2003, ceramic and enamel eyes, installation view of How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, 2003, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (photo courtesy of the artist and Walker Art Center).

“tactility” as a method for resolving the crisis precipitated by the exhaustion of medium specificity. Recognizing, as Alex Potts argues, that “sculpture was simultaneously very much a going concern and on its last legs,” the tactility of works like Joseph Beuys’ Fat Chair (1964) forces a haptic engagement from the viewer while also displacing the structure associated with the medium.37 Briony Fer places Hesse’s latex work in a similar matrix of artistic experimentation, while describing the material’s haptic appeal to the viewer—its skinlike qualities, its eventual disintegration—separately from its appeal to the artist as a “provisional, found, and casual” material that “demanded an intense physical involvement.”38 In contrast to Smith’s notion of Gowda’s thread ropes as the “embodiment” of labor or cultural knowledge, the 1960s analogy would demand a reading of the rope’s tactility—its weight, the matteness of its pigment, its simultaneous solidity and vulnerability to decay or ruin—along with its reference to violence. A materiality-focused reading of Dube’s The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters might discuss ceramic eyes as a mass-produced thing, a ready-made commodity with uncanny properties, alongside the political position staked out by the work. There is clearly something to the historical analogy at the heart of Latitudes, between material experimentation and the cultural fragment, as well as between the historical junctures of late capitalism at the onset of postmodernism (à la Jameson) and the even later capitalism of globalization.39 The work that Gowda, Dube, and M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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Shettar showed in Latitudes emerges not just from the kind of rapid changes in industrial infrastructure that Potts sees in the 1960s in the United States but also from the intense debates about the historical status of conventional artistic media I discussed in the first two chapters. Like the 1960s sculptors Potts and Fer describe, Gowda and Dube also developed their practice in an emergent dense field of practice in which artists took different positions. But Potts and Fer articulate how the materiality of this earlier moment was read within a robust art critical frame, in which the key questions were about artistic movements, namely the role of structure in sculpture or the room for alternatives to minimalism. In this respect, Gowda, Shettar, and Dube are on completely different ground. Both the curators/critics and the artists themselves are eager to read the materiality of the substances or things in terms of their cultural significance, while remaining silent about the position they might take within a discourse of art. This produces a strange situation, in which the materiality of the work, experienced as haptic in exhibition, refers to meanings and an experience of the same materiality that lie off stage, escaping the frame of the exhibition. In their statements, Gowda and Dube counter this discourse by placing their work in an Indian genealogy of artistic practice that makes their choices legible within a discourse of art. But international curators read their work outside of art history, as commentary upon the Indian cultural and social condition, placing the work in a similar discourse of locality as that explored in painting. The substance or thing used by the artist is primarily read as a token or sign, a cultural signifier put into circulation, or, alternatively, as an element of practice, a substance and thing in use. Art that combined a symbolic richness with openness to a haptic response triggered by an artwork’s irreducible materiality became indispensable in this period. As these works began to circulate in networks less dependent upon the discourse of representation, however, they only grew in power. NETWORKS AND FRAMEWORKS

As part of their roundtable discussion, the curators of Latitudes briefly discussed the “support system” in India for the work they exhibited, comparing the relative lack of support in the Indian art market for installation and video, observed during their short research trip, to the analogous, if better-known, situation in China, in which experimental art was exclusively generated in alternative, artist-run venues.40 Vergne notes that “what is interesting is how different support systems enter into the making of the work.”41 The institutional form that most influenced the development of the Indian artists shown in Latitudes was the short-term international artist workshop. While other such workshops were held in the years in which the Walker team did their research, the support system for materials- and process-based sculpture and installation was dominated by a single workshop, Khoj. Founded in 1997, Khoj International Artists Association is based in Delhi and is affiliated with the UK-based Triangle Network, which helps to connect member organizations similar to Khoj, primarily in the 100

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Global South. Although it must be seen as part of a larger impulse in this period toward the production of global networks of artist collectives, by 2001, Khoj had established itself as a crucial node for artistic exchange. Khoj was established in terms that emphasize the production of networks, rely upon short-term but recurring projects rather than enduring modes of institutionalization, and depend upon a mixture of international foundation and cultural diplomatic support and private Indian philanthropy for its funding basis. The artists who founded Khoj were initially motivated by the desire to recreate the positive experiences some had in workshops in Africa, where Triangle Network–affiliated workshops had already been established. Anita Dube made her first velvet work, Desert Queen (1996), at the Tulipamwe Workshop in Namibia, and Manisha Parekh participated in the first Wasanii International Artists Workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1997.42 Khoj articulated three long-term institutional goals at the outset: to integrate itself in the Triangle Network, to initiate contact among South Asian artists, and to tilt the balance of the network toward the Global South.43 In other words, Khoj was driven by the desire to produce artist networks, rather than by any particular artistic or political ideology. Its orientation toward artistic practice and friendship makes it somewhat similar to the Kasauli Art Centre workshops discussed in chapter 1, which gave artists time to work and encouraged informal collaboration. But it also stood in direct opposition to other artist-driven collective projects, including the explicitly secularist and leftist Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, or SAHMAT. SAHMAT was founded in 1989 to extend the assassinated CPI-M theater activist’s work but reconfigured itself to confront Hindu nationalism. As I have written elsewhere, SAHMAT’s activities were led by a group of very prominent artists, and they commanded the attention of a large majority of India’s artist community.44 On the other end of the scale was a set of efforts in Bengaluru led by artist C. F. John, which gathered together a set of emerging artists to create collaborative, ephemeral public projects.45 The Bengaluru-based group persisted for a number of years but lacked the international networking that bolstered Khoj’s effectiveness as a platform. Later, Khoj-workshop attendee Suresh Jayaram opened 1. Shanthi Road in Bengaluru, which became a Triangle Network affiliate in 2003. Founded by artist Anthony Caro and collector Robert Loder in 1983, the initial triangle was the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Workshops expanded first in Africa, then to the Middle East, South Asia, the Americas, and Europe.46 When I spoke with Robert Loder and Alessio Antoniolli, the former and present directors of the umbrella organization Triangle Arts Trust, in 2016, they both highlighted the simplicity of the organization’s form, its lack of ideology, and its flexibility and adaptability. Triangle operates with minimal central bureaucratic structure; all its member organizations are autonomous and self-governing. The organization’s insistence upon administrative and ideological leanness comes in tandem with the studied formlessness of the workshops. Their comments reinforced previously published statements, M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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as when Loder discussed the impetus for the workshops in a 2008 interview with artist Abhishek Hazra: We are not actually engaged in helping to sell work or helping to promote an aesthetic. . . . What we are doing is to respond to a need that we found very widespread. To have the basic essentials of any professional practice, you need to have space to work in, you need to have stimulus, you need people to talk to, you need an audience, you need, above all, to have freedom. And that is why we exist in places where there are quite severe restraints.47 In Loder’s terms, the Triangle Network workshop was meant to provide just enough to allow for artistic productivity and nothing more—certainly nothing that could be considered coercive. To the organization’s new chapters it offers its experience and contacts in the foundations and diplomatic entities that typically support international contemporary art, with which Triangle Network has developed a track record of financial transparency and productive work.48 Such groups tend to fund specific projects rather than support organizations in themselves, however, so like many nonprofits, Khoj at first depended upon volunteer labor to sustain itself. The two-week workshops hosted by Triangle Network chapters uniformly allow individual artists free time to work during the day while asking them to meet together for slide presentations and talks at night. This relative lack of structure is in deliberate contrast with residencies more focused on producing work for an exhibition or a patron. Workshops do typically hold an open studio at the end, but those are deliberately informal affairs at which artists are encouraged to exhibit even semifinished work. This event consistently generates debate across the network, for it is too structured for some, while others wish for a full-fledged exhibition at the end of the workshop. As Antoniolli put it, “the success of the network and the success of the Triangle model is that it’s providing a framework, but it’s not providing content.”49 He argues that its reliance on form and its anti-ideology allow Triangle Network to remain flexible and vibrant. The first two-week Khoj workshop was held in 1997 in Sikribagh, a twenty-two-acre green space with a colonial bungalow in the middle of an industrial area, Modinagar, outside of Delhi. As is standard with Triangle workshops, around one-half of the participants were from the host country, while the others were chosen from outside, usually including some artists already connected to the network. The core of Indian participation came from the Delhi-based working group, including workshop coordinator Ajay Desai, Subodh Gupta, and Prithpal Singh Ladi, along with Dube (figure 54) and Parekh. (Fellow working-group member Bharti Kher participated in the following year.) Artists were also invited from Mumbai, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Of the international participants, David Koloane, founding member of the South African Thupelo workshop, had the longest association with Triangle Network, reaching back to 1985.50 The inclusion of such experienced participants encouraged 102

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figure 54 Anita Dube, untitled (tree wrapped in thread), Modinagar Khoj Workshop, 1998 (photo courtesy of the artist and Khoj International Artists Workshop).

continuity with workshop norms that had been set and continuously adjusted over decades of practice. The nearest contemporary to Khoj, as well as its most useful counterpoint, is Mumbai-based Open Circle. Founded in 1998 by Sharmila Samant and Tushar Joag, fellow artists Shilpa Gupta, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, and Mohua Ray joined as trustees when it gained legal status as an arts trust in 1999. In the following year, Open Circle joined six other organizations led by artists who were alumni of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam to form the RAIN Network, which eventually grew to include sixteen partner organizations.51 Open Circle’s first major event was a threeweek international workshop in Mumbai in 2000, with sixteen artists from nine countries and a resident theorist, Chaitanya Sambrani. The artists included Bharti Kher and Anita Dube of Khoj, as well as members of RAIN/Rijksakademie network organizations, like Ade Darmawan of ruangrupa and Greg Streak of Pulse in South Africa. The workshop was convened under a theme of displacement and cultural difference, which were defined as questions of power, and articulated through a seminar in which Sambrani was joined by Geeta Kapur, leading Indian artists Sudhir Patwardhan and Nalini Malani, and Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera and South African artist and activists Andries Botha.52 The residency ended with an exhibition in five commercial galleries in the city. M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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Open Circle’s inaugural workshop/seminar/exhibition was clearly a success in terms of forging or deepening networks of practice, but it was far more prescriptive in its theme and far more insistent upon its public intervention than its counterpart at Khoj. Open Circle moved fairly quickly away from the focus on building artist networks, and even from articulating its aims in art-centered terms. From 2001, it adopted a much more explicitly political-economic agenda, seeking to build networks between artists and activists. That year, it led a series of study sessions on economic reforms and protests against the hydroelectric dam on the Narmada river, then under construction, before shifting gears to respond to the riots in Gujarat in 2002, the Iraq War in 2003, and the World Social Forum in 2004. Open Circle worked through direct action and public programing, attempting at once to craft effective political messages through public interventions, performances, and documentary films, and to extend its audience to include workers and youth. In this sense, Open Circle placed itself, as a nonprofit arts trust, alongside other NGOs oriented toward social justice and operating in civil society. In its view, its goal was not to politicize art, but to “aestheticize politics.”53 There was significant initial crossover between Khoj/Triangle Network and Open Circle, with Khoj-associated artists participating in Open Circle events and Open Circle artists participating in both Khoj and Triangle Network/Gasworks workshops and residencies.54 There was little to no overt disagreement between the organizations in terms of what might constitute meaningful artistic practice or what sorts of international networks might be useful or beneficial to the development of contemporary art in India. Nevertheless, the contrast between the two organizations—their aims, the forms they adopted, and especially their understanding of the place of ideology—is quite stark. Open Circle was driven by its political commitments, which extended to an astringent attitude toward international funding. Even as a member of RAIN, the collective refused financial sponsorship from the Rijksakademie, allowing those funds to support international visitors’ travel while finding other money for the programs themselves.55 Open Circle was determined to maintain its independence from the international foundation and diplomatic funding that sustained Khoj’s activities. For a short time, Open Circle functioned as an artist collective, showing artist projects under a collective name in exhibitions in the early 2000s. Their most important showing came at the Eighth Havana Biennial, alongside other members of RAIN.56 Their installation was a mock-up of an advertising campaign for a satirical treatment for an imagined malady, “Neuro Terminal Hyper Regressive Consumeritis Syndrome.” The remedy was pacifiers, which were offered to visitors. The idiom of the work, its mimicry of commercial aesthetics and critique of consumer capitalism, drew recognizably from the individual concerns and practices of Open Circle trustees without being dominated by any single signature style. In convenient contrast, Khoj working-group member Subodh Gupta also showed at Havana that year. His untitled installation resonated thematically with his work in the 104

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workshops, but his appearance in the show had little to do with his association with the platform. Drawing on a body of work from that year called Saat Samunder Paar (Across Seven Seas, 2003), Gupta showed sculptures and a photorealistic painting that highlighted work migration to the Persian Gulf.57 By capturing images of migrants at the airport transporting the bundles and boxes of consumer goods, typically electronics, that might justify their sacrifice, Gupta focuses on the desire that drives mobility. 58 Observational rather than critical, the work’s incisiveness comes in its form, particularly in the canny combination of the ready-made with the made. That particular combination became a marker of artists associated with Khoj. MATERIALITY, EPHEMERALITY, AND THE TEMPORALITIES OF INFRASTRUCTURE

While Triangle Network workshops encourage in artists a sense of freedom from constraint, certain imperatives are smuggled in under the guise of openness. The workshops emphasize locality, even for local participants, because they are typically held in relatively isolated but richly meaningful sites. As in-house critic for the 1997 Khoj workshop, Dube describes how Gupta’s My Mother and Me made use of Modinagar’s semirural context, which ensured that cow dung cakes were readily available. She notes that other participants worked with skilled artisans in the area, including British artist Stephen Hughes and C. K. Rajan, who worked with sign painters, and Radhika Vaidyanathan, who used unfinished baskets bought from makers just outside of Sikribagh’s gates. Most artists combined aspects of site specificity, as in a work by Cuban artist Luiz Gomez that used a metal sheet to simulate a solar eclipse, with improvisations with collected, ready-made materials or detritus. Dube highlighted the assemblages of African artists David Kolaone, Ludenyi Omega, and Yoba Jonathan: “Old gunny cloth, used tea bags, old window/door frames, plastic strings, etc., anything was used in defiant gestures that spoke of survival in bare material conditions.”59 As she describes, the workshop format pushes toward humble materials attached to everyday life, while also pulling participants away from the creation of enduring works. The infrastructural difficulty of transporting artworks from the workshop site, as well as its short duration, encourages the production of temporary interventions that are often attuned to space. In other words, the work produced at the workshops tends to develop along a dialectic of materiality and ephemerality. Time and time again, the limits were blurred that are drawn around the artwork, its objecthood, or more precisely its separation from the materiality of everyday life. In some cases this was achieved through site specificity, as with the prepared ground imbedded with tools that was part of Subodh Gupta’s 1999 workshop project, Pure. Others worked through performance, whether solitary, as in Chinese artist Song Dong’s silent meditation, his head resting against a wall, or collaborative, as in Pushpamala N.’s Sunhere Sapne (1998, figure 55). In this series of hand-colored performance photographs, Pushpamala sent up the Bombay M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 55 Pushpamala N., Sunhere Sapne #10, 1998, from a photo-romance with ten hand-tinted black-and-white photographs, image 7 × 9 in. (17.8 × 22.9 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

film conceit of the twin role, then back in vogue, by sketching out a skeleton plot featuring separated-at-birth characters of a demure housewife and a showgirl. She not only used Sikribagh well, staging “stills” in locations around the grounds, she assembled her crew and set of extras out of the workshop participants. The finished photographs are themselves materially fascinating, employing vanishing photographic techniques, even as they record a past performance event. For the 2001 workshop, Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera collected hundreds of tiny mirrors at the bazaar and tea bags used by workshop participants, and, working alongside local seamstresses, she sewed them onto either side of an enormous garment (figure 56). She wore the cloak to the British Council–sponsored after party for a performance called Made in India (2001), in which she prostrated herself in the doorway and forced attendees to walk on or over her body to enter. Bruguera’s performance combines attention to the intrusion of the workshop’s temporary artist 106

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figure 56 Tania Bruguera, Made in India, 1998, cloak worn for performance at British Council (photo by Khoj International Artists Association, India, courtesy of the artist).

community into a less fluid local economy with consideration of the distinction between artistic and artisanal modes of work. A similar impulse drove Natraj Sharma’s work for the 2001 open studio day, which invoked a popular aesthetic of material improvisation (jugaad) in toy making, through a four-foot (1.2 m) high metal bus Sharma had fabricated by a local welder from ready-made pipes. Gluing enlarged photographs of the artists on the bus windows, he lightly satirized the workshop community that began in a long, bumpy ride out from Delhi.60 As an assemblage of a local approach to fabrication, globally circulating material forms, and image tokens of the human relationships formed at the workshop, Sharma’s sculpture is a fair imitation of the workshop, as a concentrated, temporally distinct node in a Triangle Network in which concepts, participants, and organizational structures stretch across space and time, endlessly replicable and extendable. The 2001 Khoj workshop participants were particularly attuned to the manner in which Triangle Network both was and was not analytically, politically, or materially separable from the broader networks that allow for the circulation of things to the bazaar or people to Modinagar. Those things, in their materiality, and those friendships, in their intensity, were brought into visibility through the workshop as the “actors,” or actants, that bring to the network its unique ontology. As Latour argues, the actor network is “not something that is traced or transcribed by an entity” but rather “is an entity that M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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does the tracing and transcribing.”61 This ontological quality of the actor network is what makes it feel, to participants, simultaneously so material and so ephemeral, so powerful and so fragile. It collapses the distinction between infrastructure and the phenomenon itself. The 2001 workshop was the last that Khoj held in Modinagar. Thereafter, they organized itinerant workshops, still using the two-week Triangle Network model but traveling from site to site around India, including Mysore, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Srinagar, Bihar, Dharamsala, Pune, and Goa. In each case, effort was made to include several local artists, thereby broadening and strengthening the Khoj network within India. At the same time, Khoj transformed itself into a stable platform by first renting and then buying a building in Khirkee Village, an unplanned, semirural community that was quickly being swallowed up by the southward development of New Delhi.62 Their permanent space allowed them to establish new forms of programming. But, as Triangle Network directors Loder and Antoniolli consistently argue, to invest in a building involves sacrificing the studied impermanence of the workshop in favor of a more literal interpretation of the idea of an institution. Khoj immediately used their Delhi spaces to offer six-week residencies to small groups of artists, always mixing some artists from India with others from abroad. The residency program was similar to the one at Gasworks, which Triangle Network established as its London headquarters in 1994, whose three-month residencies had become important ways for a small number of Indian artists to reach a broader curatorial and critical audience. Gasworks often offered residencies to key people associated with affiliate workshops and like-minded entities, including leaders of the other Triangle Network affiliate organizations in South Asia, which came to include Vasl in Pakistan (2000–), Theertha in Sri Lanka (2000–), Sutra in Nepal (2002–4), and Britto in Bangladesh (2002–).63 Through a Ford Foundation–funded project called South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA), South Asian artists were able to travel to residencies in chapters throughout the region.64 SANA allowed member organizations to shift their emphasis toward slower and more enduring forms of institution building, while offering rare opportunities for face-to-face interaction between artists from states that routinely make such cross-border travel impossible.65 The differences between the workshop and the residency in terms of time and space are significant. Workshops last from two weeks and take place in an isolated camp, whereas residencies last six weeks or more in a communal house in a huge city. The difference changes the quality of the network, slowing its circulation and knitting it more closely with other actants, both human and nonhuman. Among the projects that stand out as expressions of this slower, more densely knitted version of the network is Mithu Sen’s 2003 Twilight Zone, an installation that referred to a notorious 1973 rape of a nurse, Aruna Shanbaug, who had been left in a vegetative state by the assault.66 Sen’s installation had at its center a bed with a meticulously embroidered black satin duvet and a canopy hung with long hanks of black hair. The bed sat in a 108

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room on which she had used charcoal to draw wild loops and patterns that reached for figuration and seemed like transcriptions of dreams. Sen’s rendering of the twilight zone between life and death retained the attention to materiality and labor, not to mention the site specificity familiar from Khoj workshops. But the work was developed in a slower, more meticulous, and more fully realized manner. A more exploratory example comes in Bharti Kher’s 2002 project from the first residency in the permanent Khirkee Village space. She made a single photograph, The grass is always greener and searching for roots (2002), promising in her artist statement that it would be the first of ten in a series called Hybrids. The grass is always greener . . . features an attractive female body, likely Kher’s own, dressed in a little black dress and heels and balanced on a stool, with an ape-like head and fur-covered shoulders. Made over the next two years, the Hybrids series used then novel digital photographic techniques to produce more fantastical combinations of the animal and the human or the animal and the machine, staged interacting with one another or with things, like cupcakes or a slaughtered goat (figure 57). In a much later piece in the magazine Seminar, Kher introduces the images as engagements with gender and domestic space. In one, she voices a figure’s thoughts about human underestimation of the animal: You only hear with your ears but I can hear with my entire being. You only speak with your tongue; I smell you with my tongue and I taste the world with my eyes, whisper and speak through my flesh in a language you cannot begin to hear; man only sees with his eyes open and I see with mine closed: all the deadly calm that precipitates chaos.67 Though mostly light and witty, Kher’s images meditate on questions of ontology. They “raise the volume on other materialities,” as Bennett writes, by literalizing the “nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body.”68 Like Sen’s installation, Kher’s photo collages demonstrate that many of the Khoj workshops’ implicit concerns remained within the residency format’s slower temporality of circulation. The transition between workshop and residency was perhaps more dramatic in terms of space, for a residency at Khoj places the artist at the center of the Delhi art world, just as a Gasworks residency puts the artist in London, or a Vasl residency allows an artist to explore Karachi. The clearest effects come in the experience of international artists, particularly for South Asian artists who could not easily travel to India without Khoj sponsorship. Pakistani artist Bani Abidi came for the 2001 Khoj residency, where she made her compelling video, The News (2001), a work that explores the complex, rivalrous Indo-Pak relationship through news broadcasters’ partisan narration of an event (figure 58). Her deft handling of the intense affect at the heart of the cross-border relationship, substantiated by her playing both roles, proved irresistible. As with Rashid Rana’s photo collages, described in the previous chapter, Abidi’s work was at once discursively familiar and formally exciting. The work was M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 57 Bharti Kher, Chocolate Muffin (Hybrids series), 2004, digital print on archival Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper, 45 × 30 in. (114.3 × 76.2 cm) (photo by Bharti Kher Studio, courtesy of the artist).

acquired by Delhi collectors Anupam and Lekha Poddar, who provided key market support for the experimental art developed on Khoj’s platform. The Poddars remained important supporters of Abidi’s work as she lived in Delhi under severe movement restrictions after her marriage to Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee. The Poddars’ support for artists associated with Khoj is just the most visible lineament connecting this “alternative” platform for the production of experimental art to a market that increasingly valued and circulated the same sorts of practices. This cooperation between market-driven and nonprofit art institutions was absolutely crucial to the development of contemporary art in India in this period. Alongside the 110

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figure 58 Bani Abidi, The News, 2001, two-channel video, 4:24 min (photo courtesy of the artist).

concurrent speculative market for contemporary painting, practices that engaged with materiality gained a strong foothold in the art market, particularly for the class of Indian-specialist collectors attempting to shape the development of contemporary art. Khoj’s openness to private support, as well as its growing emphasis on institution building and permanence, led to the development of important, relatively long-term relationships to patrons. This led to a weakening of the organization’s investment in Triangle Network or in networks in general. Commenting on the end of Ford Foundation funding for the South Asia Network for the Arts, Khoj director Pooja Sood asked, “Are networks a means to an end or are they an end in itself?”69 SUBODH GUPTA AND THE SHINY VESSEL

Just as the Poddars are among the most visible collectors, Subodh Gupta is likely the most visible artist in the Khoj network, as a founding member, participant in two of the first workshops, and the first emissary to Gasworks. In this period, Gupta inscribed relationships between market and nonmarket institutions where they did not previously exist—relationships he made possible by transitioning from the cow dung he explored at Khoj workshops to bartan, or the mass-produced stainless steel vessels commonly used in Indian homes. In the work for which he is best known, which was largely produced after 2004, Gupta combines household objects into large sculptures—a shiny massive skull or an enormous spill. Because of its deceptive simplicity, much of the aesthetic effect of this work rests on Gupta’s choice of objects. In bartan, Gupta has found a densely significant medium, but one that signifies less as a symbol than through its evocation of a haptic response based in sense memories of touch or use. In this key period, his work came to exemplify how the dialectic of materiality and ephemerality functioned within the market for contemporary Indian art. Gupta first worked with stainless vessels in his installation The Way Home (I) (1998–99), which formed the literal center of his first solo exhibition at Gallery M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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Chemould in Mumbai (figure 59). The artist distributed almost two hundred plates, serving utensils, and cutlery in a circle surrounding a large fiberglass cow. Interspersed with the ready-made utensils were a number of cast-stainless guns, replicas of kattas, or the homemade weapons that circulate in the cities and countryside of Bihar.70 Lying unobtrusively among emblems of the domestic and every day, these shiny fake guns almost blend in with the vessels until the viewer gets that shock of recognition. Surrounding the installation were three large images of cows, oil and acrylic photorealistic paintings on canvases that had been spread with dung. In the exhibition catalog for the show, Bharti Kher, Gupta’s wife, commented wittily on this spatial relationship. “Imagine a scene,” she writes: 3 cows; a brown one, a brown and white one, and a toffee-cream one, look down at “The Way Home.” Toffee-Cream (symbolizing mother, goddess, nation, and nurturer) remarks: “No Hindu would use one of those guns on me.” “One of the advantages of being a cow,” replies Brown.”71 These were among Gupta’s last dung-based works, though he did continue to refer to the cow. Between 2001 and 2004, he made stainless and brass casts of cow dung cakes and the bicycles and scooters used to deliver milk in small-town India. This period also marked Gupta’s transition to enduring rather than ephemeral modes of practice, with the majority of the work properly understood as sculpture, not site-specific installation. Critical writing around Gupta’s work mines the cultural or historical associations with stainless steel vessels. In his 2009 essay on the artist, art critic and classical music scholar S. Kalidas recounts how steel utensils became a common item in the household after the growth of the domestic steel industry in the 1950s and 1960s.72 Kalidas is just old enough to remember their novelty and the resistance they met from his Nehru-doubting Tamil Brahmin grandfather. But as Bharti Kher later recalled, when Gupta began to use bartan, he was interested in the way these utensils were being reevaluated contemporaneously by a design-conscious urban elite, for whom the stainless utensil is fashionable for its clean lines and connection to international design. The dual connotation of the medium—as upper-class high design and middleclass quotidian object—is a product of shifting practices of consumption and the resulting new sociologies of desire. This interest also drove Gupta’s work for the 2003 Havana Biennial, which dealt with the material culture of work migration. But while Gupta’s vessel-based works are trailed by these historical and contemporary associations, as the works became larger and their forms more generalized, the symbolic weight of the vessels became less important than their properties as a medium. For much of his post-2004 work, Gupta has followed a process by which he buys vessels ready-made at wholesale prices in the market and then has them assembled to create a sculptural form. The range of possibilities of this practice can be seen 112

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figure 59 Subodh Gupta, The Way Home, 1998–99, cast aluminum chrome, fiberglass enamel paint, stainless steel utensils, and sun film, dimensions variable. Collection Arario Gallery, Beijing (photo by Nature Morte, courtesy of the artist).

through a comparison of two closely related works, Very Hungry God (figure 60) and God Hungry (figure 61), both from 2006. In both cases, the scale is monumental, and the sheer size of the work conveys a sense of mastery. Very Hungry God is a huge skull constructed out of vessels, with sunken eye sockets and teeth made from lined-up buckets.73 The title places the work in a kind of ritual context, a prompt Kalidas follows to suggest that the work refers to the skull-bone begging bowls of Sadhus, or itinerant holy men. In God Hungry, by contrast, the vessels spill by the hundreds out of three monumental arches in the deconsecrated Sainte Marie-Madeleine church in Lille, France.74 This site-specific work carries little symbolic information beyond the vessels’ sheer profusion and the visual pleasure it offers. That pleasure comes primarily through the shininess of the metal that Gupta deploys strategically in his work.75 In The Way Home, the uniform shininess of vessel and gun first encourages the gaze of the viewer to flit along the objects, and then stops her short, forcing her into a moment of contemplation and a reckoning of meaning. In later pieces, distraction is never disturbed, and the viewer is left to flit about. Of Very Hungry God, an American critic observed, “the sheer spectacle of this work with its M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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figure 60 Subodh Gupta, Very Hungry God, 2006, stainless steel vessels. As installed at the Eglise Saint-Bernard, Paris for In SITU Fabienne Leclerc, Paris Francois Pinault Collection (photo by Marc Domage, courtesy of the artist).

dazzling vacancy all but blinds you to its essentially morbid content.”76 The artist’s desire to command attention is replaced with an embrace of inattention. Walter Benjamin was among the first to describe the form of aesthetic experience that replaced contemplation, one based in proprioception, or the tactile or embodied knowledge of habit. In anthropologist Michael Taussig’s gloss: This tactile optics, this physiognomic aspect of visual worlds, was critically important because it was otherwise inconspicuous, dwelling neither in consciousness or sleep, but in waking dreams. It was a crucial part of a more exact relation to the objective world, and thus it could not but problematize consciousness of that world . . . . In rewiring seeing as tactility, and hence as habitual knowledge, a sort of technological or secular magic was brought into being and sustained.77 This new form of perception is tied absolutely to the mechanical process of photography—it has to do with the impersonal aspect of the medium—and what Taussig describes as “capitalist mimetics.” Replacing the form of mimesis associated 114

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figure 61 Subodh Gupta, God Hungry, 2006, stainless steel vessels. Site-specific installation in Sainte Marie-Madeleine church in Lille, France (photo by Marc Domage, courtesy of the artist).

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with magic or the sacred, capitalist mimesis fills the space left by the postEnlightenment “withering-away of the mimetic faculty.”78 As Taussig describes, Dada experiments with the readymade have conventionally marked, art historically, the explicit insertion of capitalist mimesis into artistic practice. Gupta gestures in his monumental work toward Dada, while also providing the double-edged spectacle of plenty that constitutes the artist’s vision of economic liberalization.79 Here, mimesis is literal as well as figurative. Materially, the ready-made utensil is more uniformly, perfectly shiny than the hammered vessels still available in the lohar (blacksmith’s) market could ever be. Conceptually, bartan figures centrally, as Kalidas writes, in the post-Independence history of consumption, or the desire for things. And in terms of perception, when placed against each other or made into architecture, Gupta’s installations combine habitual knowledge based in physical memories of vessels in use with proprioception, the unconscious habits of museum-going or hall-navigating that allow the distracted viewer to function. Gupta’s use of bartan celebrates distraction, and through its aesthetics of shininess—under those lights Gupta’s work is physically difficult to contemplate—the artist encourages the haptic.80 In his reading of Benjamin, Bill Brown points out that physiognomic (embodied, material, haptic) modes of perception were secondary effects of the dematerialization at the heart of photography/film; that is, the separation of the image from its referent and its attendant circulation.81 But here we must pause, because while Gupta’s work is grounded in themes of circulation, based first on his own migration to the city and then on his observations of the migrations of others, in its material form it is flamboyantly resistant to movement. His sculptures are so large, so heavy, that truly ingenious acts of engineering make their production, circulation, and exhibition possible.82 Bartan might be a humble material, but Gupta’s installations are anything but. Their materiality, by which I mean here their concrete nature as things with a particular physical form, asserts itself in the labor needed not just for their making, as in the more meticulous work by Gowda or Sen, but also for their exhibition. The physical scale of Gupta’s work in this period—the claims it makes on art-world infrastructure—is an index of its value. The shoestring humility of the work he created at Khoj or showed in Havana gave way, around 2004–5, to complex works that demand logistics teams, cranes, reinforced floors, and other unusual requirements in order to be made and seen. The line that the artist drew between the alternative platform in which he developed a relationship to materials and the sphere of art that can support his post-2004 sculptures crosses scales of value and unites frameworks of artistic practice. It is also inscribed in the material changes in his work. Although Gupta was by no means the only Indian artist traveling on this path, he was a major force in forging it and has arguably made best use of its circuits. Writing in 2002, Peter Nagy notes Gupta’s “hunger to create ambitiously-scaled works, sculptures which are generally difficult to display within India’s small gallery spaces and certainly fall outside of the very narrow interests of its collecting class.”83 116

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Though initially associated with Nagy’s gallery Nature Morte, Gupta used relationships with European and American commercial galleries—Pierre Huber’s Art & Public in Geneva, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Gallery Continua in San Gimigiano, Arario Gallery in Beijing and Seoul, and the multiply centered juggernaut Hauser & Wirth—to support this growth in the scale of his practice. This involved the extension of an existing international network for contemporary art to include Gupta, as well as the development of supporting institutions in India itself. Those include his large studio in the Gurgaon suburb of Delhi and the emergence of gallery spaces large enough to contain his work, as well as collectors more than willing to acquire it.84 Most accounts emphasize the extraordinary rapidity with which these connections were made, as well as the acceleration of monetary value attached to his work. Credit is given to Gupta for prising open a discursive space for his work through his adroit accommodation of the international art world’s curiosity about India as a site of artistic production, as well as the intense visual pleasures the work offers. But as with the market in Indian painting, which depended upon the development of infrastructures of circulation (some using the internet), the infrastructures that made Gupta’s work possible were always already material as well as discursive. A close look at Gupta’s biography suggests that his work may have circulated farther and earlier than the discursive framework that allowed for its recognition. Marking this disconnect in a 2008 interview, Gupta said, “I’ve been working for 8–10 years almost for European galleries and at that time nobody in India knew about it.”85 Just as the fact of his circulation did not sink in at home, Gupta was perpetually being “discovered” abroad, despite participating in a dozen international exhibitions by 2000. The insistence upon Gupta’s novelty can be understood as an effect of the justifying discourse of an art world self-consciously expanding its geographical reach. But it also raises the question of whether this recurrent forgetting is a product of the reliance of Gupta’s work upon distraction, a pleasurable, “dazzling vacancy,” and his rejection of more straightforward modes of meaning making. CONCLUSION

The strategy of repurposing everyday things as artistic media emerged in the divergent contexts of the deliberately improvisational space of the workshop and residency and the more demandingly substantial contexts of international exhibitions. These distinct art-world spaces were connected by artists like Gupta and Gowda, whose work repeatedly stretched established curatorial frameworks, in part through the satisfaction they offered to viewers that lay outside of meaning, in materiality. Theirs is among the most disciplined engagements with materiality among Indian artists, beginning with their shared choice of the abject stickiness and crumbly earthiness of cow dung. And so their work most clearly prompts the dual dialectics explored here, namely the relationship of materiality with ephemerality, most straightforwardly in these early dung works, and with mediation, or, more broadly, with language. The work of Gowda and Gupta, along with that of Anita Dube and the collection of artists associated with M AT E R I A L I T Y, E P H E M E R A L I T Y, H A P T I C S

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the Khoj workshops, forged different relationships within the field mapped out by these axes. Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, Sheela Gowda continued to probe the possibilities of materiality, sometimes in its relationship with ephemerality but often on its own. Increasingly, her practice came to address the material record of rapid change in India, through the collection and presentation of artifacts with a minimum of mediation. As described in the introduction, the exemplary work Behold (2009) juxtaposes stainless-steel cylindrical car bumpers with rope made from black human hair. It riffs on the talismanic use of hair ropes to ward off the evil eye from other cars and drivers, while also meditating on materials and labor. Knowledge of the labor involved in the hand-tied hair-rope, which is made from castoffs from the global trade in Indian hair, supplements the pleasure of the bumpers’ shininess and the more visceral experience of the hair, bristling in short lengths out of its weave. As with Gowda’s Behold, most artistic engagements with materiality in this period emerged from a sense of vanishing, an encroachment upon everyday life by digital technologies and new mobilities, migrations, and speed of travel. The forms of production that this work took worried the relationships between materiality and ephemerality, the visual and the tactile/haptic, and language/discourse/mediation and matter. But this proved to be very fertile ground. Curators like Phillip Vergne were able to locate these broad concerns art historically, and organizations like Triangle Network were able to instantiate and develop new practices institutionally. These practices were driven, in part, by the expanding networks of actants—of people and things—as well as the accelerating movement across those currents that proved to be so central to the time. And yet, for all of its investment in materiality, Gowda’s work shows a distinct understanding of its limits. Behold, which was acquired by Tate Modern in 2014, at once offers a spectacular ocular experience and points to deep wells of context. It invites the assignation of easy, familiar dyads like tradition/modernity, machinemanufactured/handmade, or superstition/rationality to the two materials used. But the more contextualizing information viewers hold, the more easily those assumptions are subverted and interrupted. The concept that Gowda wants to explore lies in that area of complication, through which the assemblage of materials as ready-made signs coheres into something new, without ever losing sight of the materials’ sensual properties. And so it goes: the very investment in materiality the artist makes raises the specter of meaning/mediation and the production of discourse.

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4 LANGUAGE, THE DOCUMENTARY, AND ART IN A DISCURSIVE MODE

W

ORKING INDEPENDENTLY OF ONE ANOTHER , but also

nearly simultaneously, the artists discussed in this chapter reacted to expectations of cultural legibility by doubling down, so to speak, on language. Through their insistent use of language as a medium, these artists altered and often created new and more precisely meaningful discursive ground for their work. A pithy example of the kinds of discursive strategies they employed comes from Raqs Media Collective, the Delhibased group known for their engagements with new media practice and theory as well as with the city as a social unit. In their performances, lectures, and writings, Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who make up the collective, typically refer to their experience of “a city like Delhi,” rather than Delhi itself. This shift in reference point plays with the expectation of particularity and representativeness. It allows the collective to ground their practice in their immediate surroundings while undermining any sense of the city’s uniqueness; it is at once particular and general, an exception and the rule. 119

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This is just one of several discursive strategies used by Raqs and their fellow travelers. Some of these artists’ foundational works pay outsized attention to the sense impact of words. Take, for example, this description of an encounter with the IndiaPakistan border: I have a compass which keeps spinning me into zones of conflict. It’s a very peculiar feeling here, because that very line scattered my family across the Subcontinent. Like seeds in the wind they flew, each carrying their own box of color. In this quotation from the opening of A Season Outside (1997), Amar Kanwar plays with the sound and feel of words, introducing an insistent, poetic drumbeat and figurative language into a capsule autobiography (figure 62). He also chooses words that are just one tick away from common speech, which draws attention to subjective experience. That technique is also often used by Raqs Media Collective. Epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, awe, fatigue, nostalgia, ecstasy, fear, panic, remorse, epiphany, anxiety . . . These words, which Raqs placed on clocks in one of their best-known works, Location(n) (2002, figure 63), open out into rich, confusing, often momentary emotional states—special words for special feelings. Each describes something deeply personal that also, when considered more closely, turns out to be connected to the social. This linguistic intersection of the individual with the group is even clearer for the word used by Shilpa Gupta in the same year: Blame (2002–4, figure 64). In poster, stickers, and on bottles of red liquid used as props for a series of performances, Gupta used the following text: Blame Blaming you makes me feel so good So I blame you for what you cannot control Your religion, your nationality I want to blame you It makes me feel good.

The word blame is explained by slogans that mimic claims made for pharmaceuticals, describing, straightforwardly and unsparingly, the active ingredients of communal violence. All three works are more than these words, which constitute only part of the larger documentary, multimedia installation, and graphic and performance works in which they respectively appear. Here I isolate these works’ encouragement of pleasure in 120

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figure 62 E Amar Kanwar, still from A Season Outside, 1997, digital video in color with sound, 30 min (© Amar Kanwar, photo courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery). figure 63 H Raqs Media Collective, Location(n), 2002, clocks, video, soundscape, computers, free software, as installed at Emoção Art.ficial exhibition, Itaú Cultural Institute, São Paulo, Brazil, 2002 (photo courtesy of the artists).

language, in the sound of words and the capaciousness of their meanings. Analogous to Anita Dube’s evocative definition of the haptic as an “optical caress,” these works press on the enjoyment of words, often for their own sake. Some works explore the psychological connection of language to various forms of violence, while attending to the embeddedness of that violence in the social. Others explored in this chapter consider the power of language to persuade, as well as its failures to do so. In all cases, the dominant language of these works is English. Competency in English—with its colonial history and role as a lingua franca for the urban elite—is a necessity for navigating the Indian art world. It also eases the circulation of art and artists in L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 64 Shilpa Gupta, Blame (detail), 2002–4, interactive project with bottles containing simulated blood, posters, stickers, video (photo courtesy of the artist).

international art networks that are also bound to English for similar reasons and with similar ambivalences. It is with that in mind that I begin by emphasizing the affective attachment to language in these works. Such pleasure has plenty of near-time precedent in Indian writing of all sorts, from academic to expository to literary. While modern Indian art had been substantially shaped by considerations of communication and narration, and was also often closely aligned with literary communities, up until the late 1990s words themselves only rarely entered into artworks.1 For whatever reason, conceptual art, with its serious engagements with text, had never really gained a foothold in India, and other postmodern art practices depended quite exclusively on images. Indeed, of the three artists considered here, only Shilpa Gupta came to language through an interest in conceptual art, which she began to explore while still a student at Bombay’s Sir J. J. School of Art and then as Rummana Hussain’s studio assistant. Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective, which formed in 1992, represent the more important conduit for engagements with language within art, namely documentary film. By the early 1990s, documentary film had a vibrant new center in the Mass Communications program at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Well into the 2000s, Amar Kanwar continued to consider his work primarily as documentary film, while by 2000 Raqs had adopted the term “media practitioner” to describe their multifaceted work, which 122

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included cofounding the semi-academic platform Sarai at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi in 2001. Kanwar and Raqs entered artistic networks in an unusual and dramatic way. As the story goes, in the midst of planning for the discursively rich, multi-sited eleventh edition of documenta, curator Okwui Enwezor visited Delhi in 2000.2 While there, he came upon the work of Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective, the latter in an exhibition of internet-related art, as well as the photographer and environmental activist Ravi Agarwal.3 None of them considered themselves artists, but two years later, there they were, in one of the largest and most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the world. One of Raqs’s works for documenta was also included in How Latitudes Become Forms, a result of the simultaneous visit to Delhi by Walker Art Center curator Steve Dietz.4 It’s quite a story of discovery. But while it may explain the appearance of these figures on the art world’s radar, it does not allow us to understand how their work came to be supported more generally by the larger Indian art infrastructure. At no point in the period traced out by the three works already introduced, roughly between 1997 and 2002, was it clear that language-rich, discursively driven work would gain the centrality that it eventually did in Indian art networks. Writing about Indian art typically couches this uncertainty within a larger story of medium, and particularly of the lack of support for media-based or time-based art in the market.5 It is quite true that one barrier to the acceptance of electronic media art was the lack of facilities for its exhibition. The first space to regularly show video and electronic art, the Apeejay Media Gallery in New Delhi, opened only in 2000. As with site-specific installation practices, funding sources based on nongovernmental organizations and foundations were therefore essential to the development of media- and time-based practices. Institutional networks for media- or time-based work were initially isolated from the commercial gallery sector, although that separation became less clear over time. And yet neither the challenges these artists posed to the infrastructure for Indian art nor the effects of their practices on it were limited to the question of medium. For Geeta Kapur, the key question prompted by Kanwar’s work was instead discursive site; her writing focused on the relationship the documentary form had to art, and with it, to the political status of the artist as citizen.6 In that respect, it helps to place Kanwar’s work in video and Raqs’s new media practice next to the mixture of electronic, new media, and performance practice of Shilpa Gupta, simply because she did come to prominence through art-world networks. For despite the significant differences in their backgrounds and points of reference, in its use of language her practice has much in common with that of Kanwar and Raqs. In all cases, questions of language are independent of medium, following instead upon the dialectical relationship between materiality and mediation. As chapter 3 establishes, renewed interest in materiality—as a sign, Bill Brown notes, of the “prelapsarian real”—is typically driven by changes in mediatic form.7 In this period in India, discursively driven work emerged simultaneously and in productive tension with L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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materiality-rich practices as two distinct responses to the broad and rapid changes in media discussed earlier in this volume. While some Indian artists explored how the experience of art can escape the symbolic register and rely upon other sensual modes of apprehension, others considered what might be possible within the realm of language itself. Because language entered into contemporary art in India largely from outside, initially bypassing its densest, most worked-over fields of practice, it tended to be strongly marked by alternative discursive conventions, exhibition spaces, and networks of circulation. Some of these distinctions were relatively stable, while others were much more vulnerable to collapse. Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective were embedded in the conventions of documentary film/video, with its balance of word and image. Raqs borrowed terminology from the emergent fields of digital media studies and urban studies, as well as new ideas about institutions, which they put into practice with the platform called Sarai. Gupta’s use of language built upon conceptual art, as well as her early work experiences with graphic design, already seen in the Havana Biennale project with Open Circle. And so the question is not actually what happens to language, in general, so much as what happens to particular linguistic conventions when they are drawn into an institutional space of art, especially a swiftly changing space in which language has been only infrequently present? And then, of course, the question flips, and it becomes possible to ask, what does the intrusion of discoursedriven practice make possible within Indian art’s institutional structures? ENWEZOR’S DISCURSIVE INTERVENTION

Nigerian-born, US-resident curator Okwui Enwezor meant his edition of documenta to be a radical intervention, which he envisioned as a series of three displacements, or modes of “extraterritoriality,” that would undermine the historical Euro-American exclusivity of the exhibition. This began with a curatorial strategy focused on moving away from the “gallery space” into a “discursive” mode of practice.8 He returned to Delhi in May 2001 to convene one of four discursive platforms that were meant to extend the typical one-hundred-day, Kassel-centered format of documenta, as well as to expand the exhibition well beyond the disciplines of art.9 The discursive platforms modeled a public sphere of global reach and postcolonial consciousness. Enwezor’s selection of partners and topics of discussion built upon his recent experience with the Second Johannesburg Biennial (1997), which combined the first edition’s intense engagement with art-world inequality with broader discussions of politics. It is significant that in the reception of both biennials, political art and the discursive mode were broadly synonymous. Each of the documenta platforms built upon academic humanities and qualitative social science discourse associated with the geographic site, but with carefully selected voices brought in from outside. One platform brought prominent scholars in postcolonial studies to Germany, one explored the legacy of cultural studies on the Carib124

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bean island of St Lucia, one addressed emergent African urban studies scholarship in Lagos, Nigeria, and one considered issues of transitional justice in New Delhi. The New Delhi discussion brought together a group of specialists in the aftermath of the major conflicts of the 1990s—predominantly post-Apartheid South Africa, postgenocide Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia—with voices leading India’s exploration of the memory of Partition violence. The disciplinary perspectives varied, but the dominant framework was law and political theory, with scholars and writers greatly outnumbering creative practitioners. The dominance of social science perspectives in the New Delhi seminar was countered by a film series held over two weeks at the India Habitat Centre that surveyed documentaries addressing genocide and conflict. The program included documentaries covering nearly three dozen conflicts, some produced through the NGO Witness, which partners with local organizations to produce films addressing human rights abuses. Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside was the sole film included that concerned India, and there is evidence that its approach to Partition influenced the make-up of the platform as a whole. As Kanwar states at the film’s outset, portions of his family joined the massive migration across the new border that split the region of Punjab, a movement of millions undertaken in an atmosphere of horrific violence. His film is representative of a new approach to Partition historiography, in which individual memories of violence, passed down imperfectly through families, were newly considered to be legitimate historical evidence. In a series of books published just before and after the 1997 fiftieth anniversary, Partition began to be taken seriously as an object of historical memory, with two collections systematically recording oral histories of violence against women and two others considering how more recent violence echoed this formative event.10 The text of Kanwar’s film combines three modes of analysis then newly available for public discussion: personal and familial memories, including those of gendered violence; archival documents addressing traditions of righteous violence and Gandhian nonviolence; and arguments grounding the repetition of violence in psychology. As discussed further below, its speculative and poetic narrative, when placed in counterpoint to its sequence of deceptively straightforward images, raises the question of what documentary film might add to the rich discursive ground that was then being staked out by some of India’s most prominent public intellectuals. The New Delhi platform included scholars who were part of a rapidly solidifying network of thought that combined South-South exchange with exposure (and often residence) in New York. With the exceptions of Alfredo Jaar and Eyal Sivan, the platform bracketed art practice from its discussion. It excluded from explicit participation even artists who had worked with Enwezor before, like Vivan Sundaram, who had shown in Johannesburg. This had the effect of weakening whatever ties there might have been between key debates, in and out of the academy, about how to address political aims in sophisticated, progressive ways and existing discussions of the political in art. Reactions to the program in the Indian art press were muted; the “special L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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report” on the platform in Art India, written by Nancy Adajania and Meera Menezes, was a straight summary of the proceedings.11 Although it included some comments about objections raised by the audience, the piece had no overall editorial position. The exhibition, which Enwezor called the “Fifth Platform,” was designed to be contemporary art’s answer to discourse—its contribution as an alternative mode of knowledge. Having thus far reserved public judgment on Enwezor’s project, upon viewing the exhibition, Indian critic Nancy Adajania let loose. In comments originally presented at Transmediale Berlin during the run of documenta XI, she articulated a genealogy of political art in India before suggesting that Enwezor’s alternative selections were wrongheaded. She dismisses Ravi Agarwal’s photography as “neo-orientalist,” describes Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside as “impressive” but “didactic,” and finds promise only in the contribution of Raqs Media Collective.12 Adajania’s text reflects the larger disjuncture between the criteria applied by Enwezor and his curatorial team and debates in the Indian art world. It expresses a sense that, for all his talk of multisited curation and geographical inclusion, Enwezor had ignored the sophisticated set of debates about political art already underway in places like India.13 Further, she writes, “When art duplicates political rhetoric, it only becomes another propaganda device, and all the sophisticated word-peddling vis a vis the “local” is visually reduced to good old ethnography.” Adajania couches her rejection of discursivity in art within a critique of the politics of representation, arguing that it leads inexorably to ethnographic images. But what comes through most strongly is the strict opposition she constructs between language—whether “rhetoric,” “propaganda,” or “sophisticated word-peddling”—and art, which she describes as the “activity of image-making.” As the previous chapters of this book have established, Adajania was a champion of new media practices; her distrust is limited to language, which she reflexively excludes from art. As mentioned, she is not alone in applying this categorical distinction to documenta XI. Critic Anthony Downey cautioned that artists remained obliged to “explore the extent to which art is indeed different from politics or other forms of documentary.”14 Downey uses a similar concept map to Adajania, in which politics, the didactic, and the documentary are seen as categorically opposed to image making, aesthetics, and art. A careful reading of Kanwar’s work, at the very least, shows that the filmmaker was acutely aware of the power of this distinction for his audience. Already in A Season Outside it is possible to see how Kanwar weighs and develops strategies to successfully override the critical framework Adajania employs to evaluate his work. And in the film commissioned for documenta XI, A Night of Prophecy (2002), the central questions are the relationships between aesthetics and politics, images and language, poetry and prose. AMAR KANWAR AND THE LIMITS OF THE ESSAY FILM

One of the most striking features of Kanwar’s A Season Outside is the filmmaker’s voice-over narration, which is marked by the reflexivity and subjectivity considered 126

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essential to the “essay film.”15 Essay films, like written essays, telegraph the thought process of the author rather than presenting a tight, linear argument. While the impetus of A Season Outside is his family’s experience of migration, Kanwar’s narrative is grounded in a desire to know. As Kanwar’s voice states, “Obviously, I’m trying to understand the dynamics of division, and, in turn, find a method for dealing with conflict.” To understand or find this method requires going beyond the self. For, as the voice goes on, “It is true that our own pain can be the greatest teacher. And the answers probably lie in my heart. But to understand, I have to travel through the hurt of others and the institutions that have arisen from their sorrow.” The film takes many turns, with sections considering the rituals of state at the India-Pakistan border, Gandhi’s linking of nonviolence to a subjective form of truth, the history of righteous violence among the Sikh community (figure 65), domestic violence during and after Partition, scenes of the Tibetan refugee community, and a more psychologically grounded understanding of violence as a compulsion. In the midst of this, Kanwar’s voice-over predicts, it becomes less clear whose viewpoint is whose: “Now I wonder who is watching: you, me, or someone else’s memories.” The search for a method ends inconclusively (and some say unsatisfyingly), with a simple suggestion that an escape from the cycle of violence may be found “in the big eyes of a little child.”16 In this way, the film balances the authorial voice with attention to the social subjectivity that is more standard in documentary film. Its understanding of subjectivity as social is grounded in contemporary historical and psychoanalytic scholarship on violence. That approach can be attributed, at least in part, to Kanwar’s research partnership with labor historian Dilip Simeon, whose background includes activism on the Left and, much later, work on behalf of victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi. While Kanwar’s personal experience propels the narrative, the most striking images in the film are the ones furthest from the director, from the now-iconic sequences at the India-Pakistan border to an arresting scene in which Tibetan refugees reenact brutal assaults against their community by the Chinese army. The film benefits from Kanwar’s exploration of others’ pain, as well as from his survey of various positions on violence and consideration of its possible justification. This is typical of the essay film, which often “confound[s] the perception of untroubled authority or comprehensive knowledge that a singular mode of address projects onto a topic.”17 Kanwar’s choice to adopt the essay form for A Season Outside places his film closer to writing. So does the poetic quality of his text, by which I mean Kanwar’s investment in the language he uses, its rhythm and sound and the choice of particularly evocative words.18 The voice-over moves in and out of the poetic register, often within the same scene. For instance, against footage shot of the barbed wire that marks the India-Pakistan border in Punjab and following his introduction of Gandhian ideas of the search for truth, he says the following: L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 65 Amar Kanwar, A Season Outside (installation view), 1997, digital video in color with sound, 30 min (© Amar Kanwar, photo courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery).

[7:07] When you look for answers inside yourself, deep inside you find particles with different truths, and in the clash of their haughty orbits probably lie the roots of violence. You could have your position, and you could be armed with your truth, but what happens if you instead start arming your truth? Can I say that when the rage in your heart sets the horizons on fire, and when the truth of your tribe starts to bloat, then very soon the boundaries of division begin to smell of a putrefying corpse. In between the lines you will keeping finding the body of a man trying to cross over.

[Shot: Barbed-wire border fence at night] You will find him wearing short pants, monkey cap, rubber gloves, and frozen on the wire by the electricity of our collective fear. He will be stuck there, over and over again, in the early hours of almost every foggy morning. Only the butterflies and birds are free to fly across and even sit safely on the wires, as they do not earth the circuit. [8:40] 128

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The framing text at the beginning and end of this clip is relatively prosaic, the first marking fairly straightforwardly his adoption of Gandhian ideas about the search for truth and the last envisioning the harsh realities of the border fence. In between, the text that I have marked in italics is more poetic, its difference from ordinary speech marked by the way the words fall into a rising poetic meter, a collection of iambs and anapests that accelerate the text. Such passages, which crop up throughout the film, are also marked by carefully worked, compressed images. They form a distinct linguistic register, as separable from the statements that drive the film’s subjective narrative of inquiry as they are from the other voices in the film: quotations from letters by Gandhi and the words of an anonymous “old monk.” When commentators describe A Season Outside as “poetic,” they tend to do so inexactly, by collapsing its focus on experience with its exploitation of the qualities of language. But in this work Kanwar separates these two: he treats the poetic as a separate linguistic mode that conveys less of his subjective experience than other parts of the narrative. When Kanwar carries his interest in poetry forward into his next major film project, A Night of Prophecy (2002), however, he combines them, by treating the literary form as a more immediate entry point to the subjective experience of others.19 When Kanwar recounts the impetus for this film, as he did in a lecture-performance at Frieze London in 2010, he describes a long period of travel through India around 1999 and 2000, moving from one conflict zone to another while making a series of films on ecology, violence, and unrest.20 “It was clear, or at least it seemed to me at that time, that a large wheel seemed to be turning. It seemed, almost, that consciously and willfully someone was planning a catastrophe, had already set it in motion, and we were all caught in it.”21 One sign of the coming catastrophe was a breakdown in language: “All conversations seemed like arguments, the contestants extremely verbose, and every point of view was intense and exquisitely articulated. . . . Everyone spoke quite well, but seemed to be trapped by the limitations of the vocabulary that formed their own opinions. I began to feel as though no one was really listening, or could really listen anymore.” This failure of discourse led him to remember a moment, years before, when he read Prakash Jadhav’s “Under Dadar Bridge,” which had been included in a landmark collection of Marathi Dalit poetry translated into English.22 “Reading it had unlocked my mind in an instant,” Kanwar said, and gave him the sense that he understood not only the poem, which had been written two decades before, but also something about the present moment. He became interested (“quite illogically”) in meeting the poet. When he eventually did, the footage of that meeting, during which Jadhav recites “Under Dadar Bridge,” was included in the film (figure 66). A Night of Prophecy is composed of recordings of poets in Maharashtra, Nagaland, Kashmir, and Andhra Pradesh, each place engaged in complex struggles over caste and class oppression, as well as ethnic, religious, and linguistic identity. In sharp contrast to A Season Outside, in which places and conflicts were at least labeled, little to no conL A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 66 E Amar Kanwar, A Night of Prophecy (still), 2002, digital video in color with sound, 77 min (© Amar Kanwar, photo courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery). figure 67 G Amar Kanwar, A Night of Prophecy (still), 2002, digital video in color with sound, 77 min (© Amar Kanwar, photo courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery).

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textualizing information is given about these struggles. At times the poetry names specific causes of suffering, like caste, but what is offered is not at all analytical. The recitations, mostly in song, often include an audience or other participants, and that footage is typically cut together with shots of the poet’s milieu. Viewers who are unaware of the locations listed or the caste and community connotations of names might not understand how great the physical and social distances covered in the film are. That includes the significant gaps between the eleven languages featured in the film, many too small in number of speakers to be classified among India’s twenty-two official languages. While original languages are heard, the poetry is presented as English subtitles. This is true even when the language of composition is English, as in Nagaland. Although each poet has a considerable audience, it is nearly impossible to imagine a single person who could understand all of the poetry presented. That includes the filmmakers, who did not understand much of the poetry except in translation, which often began during the shoot. The film’s reliance upon translation effectively separates the poetic function of language, which resides in the qualities of signifiers, from meaning, which, for nearly all viewers, would be both approximate and visual, found in the subtitled text alone. The experience of listening represented on screen, among the poets’ audiences, is therefore quite different from the one offered to the audience of the film. Kanwar’s film is built upon his extraordinary optimism about the experience that poetry offers, its ability to undermine the lockstep strictures of prose, which so often fails to convince or even inform. Does translation interfere with that experience? Perhaps if one sticks to a strict definition of the poetic function of language, but less so when one thinks of poetry in more general terms. Late in the film, lines by Englishlanguage Naga poet Easterine Kire Iralu work out this other sense of the poetic: how many men how many women how many children they have killed for crying out freedom I cannot recall for these are not the things out of which that one can make songs or poems or dreams.23

As Iralu’s poem asserts, poetry is not made from acts of violence, but rather from the affect such violence produces (figure 67). In its accumulation of examples, the film implicitly argues the same thing, showing how the poetry of struggle draws upon an ocean of rage, sorrow, and loss. Maybe the kind of empathy that poetry encourages— the forced stretch to understand the experience not only of the individual poet but also

L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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of the audience or chorus of fellow reciters or singers—is only heightened through the mediation of translation, which forces the recognition of difference upon the reader. A Night of Prophecy gives the audience so much poetry while denying it nearly everything that we associate with prose. The film asks the same question as A Season Outside— how might we come to a truer understanding of conflict—while providing a completely different answer. In place of the multiple analytical perspectives offered in the first film, the second offers a form of speech that declares itself external to the production of knowledge. Kanwar’s sharpest critique of the processes by which truths are generated came in between these two films, in Many Faces of Madness (2000). This short film, made for the Foundation for Ecological Security in Anand, Gujarat, looks at the exploitation of the environment by industry, including the issue of groundwater pollution. After footage linking chemical dumping to wells pouring out black effluent–filled drinking water establishes its cause, Kanwar’s voice-over raises the question of why the problem persists. It is not a lack of evidence: the voice lists more than a dozen agencies that know about the problem, but do nothing in the name of economic development. “We have all the information we need, but it does not lead to consciousness. It does not lead to wisdom, either.” The limits of knowledge drive much of Kanwar’s work thereafter. Even though The Lightning Testimonies (2007) revisits the problem of violence and The Sovereign Forest (2011) looks at issues of environmental exploitation, both films rest on questions of evidence: what constitutes a fact, what sort of language will be heard, how can meaning be made. In each work, Kanwar remains unconvinced by prose and looks to alternative registers for more convincing forms of meaning. In these later films, he looks beyond poetry to kinds of evidence that are best conveyed in his films through images, whether of archival records or of the land. In his statements about those films, Kanwar presents words, icons, and images as essentially equivalent. In a 2005 interview, the film theorist Anne Rutherford tries three or four times to get Kanwar to separate the visceral or material qualities of his images from “the content of any sign or symbol.” But he refuses. Kanwar repeatedly translates her questions about the sensory or somatic qualities of images into issues of meaning, making it clear that the distinction between images and text is not central to his work. While forefronting meaning, he discusses the multiple points of entry that audiences might have to his films: “How do you find a zone, place, territory, image, icon, or symbol that has many unseen strings coming out of it?” he asks. “What will make you stumble upon that image?”24 Could it be language? RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE AND THE NGO FORM

Kanwar presents his move away from conventional documentary film as a matter of ideas: as a critique of knowledge production and as a new openness to the complexity of his audience. Yet he also made significant changes in the way he financed his films. While A Season Outside was financed by a private trust, A Night of Prophecy was commissioned by documenta XI and the Renaissance Society at the University Chicago, which held a solo 132

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exhibition of Kanwar’s work in January 2003. Hamza Walker, then curator at the Renaissance Society, showed what came to be called Kanwar’s Trilogy, which includes A Season Outside, A Night of Prophecy, and To Remember (2003), a short film commissioned for the show that contemplates the changing meanings of Gandhi’s assassination in the wake of communal violence in Gujarat. These exhibitions marked Kanwar’s entrance into the art world and a decisive shift in patronage for his work, as he began to fund his films primarily through institutional commissions, as well as private collecting. His move was made possible by new infrastructures for the production and circulation of art and documentary film, which were hastened by the shifts in curatorial discourse initiated by Enwezor, Walker, and others. An emergent assemblage linked the art world with the sections of the academy and nongovernmental organizations that had previously been recipients of international foundation funding. Artists were drawn into an organizational infrastructure that existed to link the state and the market. Emblematic of neoliberalism, this infrastructure valued flexibility and organized itself around initiatives and projects. But this sector had also come to understand itself as insufficiently engaged with questions of culture and meaning. Through partnerships with NGOs and through the development of NGO-like platforms for their own work, artists were drawn in to both supplement existing initiatives and begin new ones. In so doing, they engaged the public in new ways, raising expectations for the manner in which art would participate in broader discourse. In the case of Indian documentary film, filmmakers were initially pushed toward foundation funding by their dissatisfaction with state-based sources. Amar Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective were at the center of this phenomenon. Kanwar’s A Season Outside was commissioned by the independent Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), as part of the “India’s Quest” series of experimental films. PSBT was meant to provide an alternative to the existing (but in this period not terribly dynamic) staterun outlets for documentary film: Doordarshan (TV) and Films Division. Films made outside of the state-sponsored gambit were typically distributed by the filmmakers themselves and screened at film festivals and in small venues like universities and film societies. Funded by the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of HH the Dalai Lama and the Ford Foundation, PSBT commissioned seven films for “India’s Quest,” including A Season Outside and Raqs’s In the Eye of the Fish (1997). Part of the format was to link filmmakers to prominent scholars with expertise on themes of social importance—for Kanwar, nonviolence; for Raqs, education—while questions of form and style were left open to the filmmakers’ discretion. As project director Rajiv Mehrotra writes in his foreword to the accompanying book Double Take, which was edited by Raqs, the goal of the project was to create “an alive and dynamic context in which documentary films can live and breathe freely.”25 The PSBT was able to receive foundation funding because of its nonprofit, charitable trust status, just like Khoj and Open Circle, which were founded at nearly the same time. Just as the Indian art scene was strongly affected by the latter two L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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organizations—both by the innovative formats they used and the new access to international networks they provided—documentary film was strongly affected by PSBT. Around this time, Raqs Media Collective began to be disillusioned with documentary film as a practice, however, and they began the discussions with Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram that led to the establishment of Sarai in 2000. In a 2000 interview with media theorist Geert Lovink, Narula, Bagchi, and Sengupta all discuss Sarai as way to maintain the productive tension between film, writing, and design that had become central to their discussions as a collective.26 A para-academic institute dedicated to research on new media and urbanism, Sarai is housed within the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). CSDS was itself a longtime recipient of foundation funding and an intellectual ally of the NGO sector. But despite its association with CSDS, Sarai remained independently funded, with a series of international grants supplementing its initial, three-year institutional partnership with the Waag Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam.27 In 2012, after producing Sarai Reader 09, an exhibition and book, the organization’s engagement with contemporary art and locality practices drew to a close. Indian public discourse was self-consciously critical about the increasing role played by NGOs and external foundations in India. Indeed, the two categories were often conflated. As Adajania recorded in her account of the 2001 documenta XI platform in New Delhi, the consensus view among the Indian audience was that “many [NGOs] are compromised by their co-option into the dominant political apparatus.”28 Such speakers would dismiss as naïve PSBT director Rajiv Mehrotra’s comfort in the ability to “breathe freely,” after rejecting state funding in favor of sponsorship by the nonprofit sector. This distrust deepened as the public sphere was reorganized by proliferating NGOs, a shift that was driven by declining investment in and by the State and the redoubled efforts of international foundations to promote civil society after the end of the Cold War. The institutional shifts associated with NGOs included their assumption of some of the tasks of the State—the production of reports regarding pollution, to use the example cited by Kanwar, but also the provision of education, housing, and other forms of welfare—on a project-to-project basis, with an organizational structure that combined public and private sources of funding. The effects of this structural shift hit the art and documentary film worlds at the same time, in the mid 1990s. The rapid changes in institutional structure seen in this period were accompanied by a great deal of self-consciousness about how artists should place themselves and their work. Regardless of how critical individuals were of NGOs, their organizational structure was highly influential on the art world, in part because the laws that governed nonprofits demanded a certain kind of uniformity. As nonprofit, charitable trusts, arts organizations were governed by the same institutional structures as other NGOs, both internally, in terms of their relationship to the Indian state, and externally, in their competition for funding from the same large international foundations. The Ford 134

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Foundation, which had provided funding to projects at CSDS for decades, was a crucial actor in extending resources typically offered to NGOs dealing with issues of development into the arts and culture sector, making grants to PSBT, Sarai, and Khoj. Ford also established a major endowment at the India Foundation for the Arts, which used this seed funding to begin making grants in 1995 and grow into a self-sustaining organization. In the first year, they funded projects by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a member of Raqs Media Collective, and Sameera Jain, who edits Amar Kanwar’s films. Raqs Media Collective proved adept at harnessing the new possibilities held open by this transformed public sphere, even as they began to find documentary film too narrow a genre to contain their practice.29 Through Sarai and in their own identity as an artist collective, they drew simultaneously on different kinds of support to fund several parallel forms of practice.30 In this sense, they imitated the institutional form of the NGO by participating in a set of local and international networks and by placing value on flexibility and agility, even while they rejected what they saw as the typical NGO’s ameliorative developmentalist agenda.31 As part of Sarai, Raqs Media Collective engaged, along with others, in various forms of design and writing that changed in format and emphasis depending upon the project. Some efforts were exhibited in art venues, whereas others were published in annual Sarai Readers. Members of Sarai came from disparate institutional forms and different methodological approaches, but they prized debate, and they drew new media, urbanism, and artistic practice together in new and innovative ways. Sarai and Raqs quite quickly became what they would later describe as nodes— concentrations of matter or points of intersection in fractal or rhizomic network systems—in their key text work, “A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons” (2002).32 Raqs extended this common definition in a characteristically clever way, by rewriting nodes as “no-des.” This neologism combines the English word “no” with the North Indian word des, meaning land or territory, to become “that site or way of being . . . where territory and anxieties about belonging, don’t go hand in hand.”33 Through this playful imitation etymology, Raqs marks how the form of the nodal network could cause the “cruel historical baggage” of first- or third-world identities to be shed in favor of the deterritorial mode of being they became strongly identified with.34 Raqs’s early online project, OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) (2002), articulated a similar idea, but in terms of cultural production (figure 68). Users were invited to offer their digital cultural products for reuse as “recensions,” or retellings in which the distinction usually granted an original is replaced by an alternative, more properly digital value of ubiquity.35 As an open-ended platform, OPUS is “not really ‘a work’ [of art] at all,” according to Pamela Lee, but rather evidence of Raqs’s “gaming the spaces left in the commons’ wake.”36 Raqs saw Sarai as an instance of “networked authorship,” in which they perpetually shifted between roles as “initiators,” “provocateurs,” “mentors,” “respondents,” and “an attentive and sympathetic but not uncritical audience.”37 This rolling fragmentaL A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 68 Raqs Media Collective, OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification), 2002, internet platform. First presented at documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002 (photo courtesy of the artists).

tion or redistribution of roles was a necessary extension of the profound antihierarchical impulse of network theory. In their discussions with Geert Lovink shortly after Sarai’s founding, the group emphasized the starkly hierarchical nature of Indian society, as well as their resentment of more global inequalities. Despite its relatively small reach within India at the time, Raqs and Sarai were optimistic about the internet’s capacity to upend all that through the extension of horizontal networks across space. Writing for the Manifesta biennial publication five years later, they were only more convinced, arguing that the habits of cultural production already entrenched by the internet would lead to profound changes in the structure of the art world as well as in art, as it (then) already had in other realms, from popular culture to science. This involves, they write, the substitution of centered locations with “the logic of a flexible and agile network that responds to emergences and tendencies on a global scale.”38 That very logic, in point of fact, drives the spread of NGOs. The principal critique of NGOs in India is political, but in two senses of that term. The first objection, which was raised at the documenta platform in Delhi, concerns the ways that international organizations perpetuate the power of the metropolitan centers of the West, even when their stated aim is empowerment of either individuals or civil society as a sector.39 The second has more to do with the way NGOs interfere with the relationships of people to the State. Particularly with regard to basic infrastructure like water or housing, the intercession of NGOs changes the processes by which everyday people make claims for resources.40 For some, including Arundhati Roy, this has defanged popular politics, transforming what were once questions of rights based in citizenship into technocratic processes underpinned by guilt or benevolence.41 It is 136

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worth stating that, despite long-standing Left affiliations (and a longtime friendship with Roy), the Raqs Media Collective’s writing at the time did not include this more agonistic sense of politics. Thus, while Raqs quietly adopted the infrastructural form of the NGO in Sarai, they attempted to demonstrate, performatively, how the horizontal network forms associated with digital technologies could upend the inequalities that justified NGOs’ outsized presence in India. This was clearest in Sarai’s joint initiative with educational nonprofit Ankur, Cybermohalla. In five informal settlements in Delhi, they set up Cybermohalla media labs, which combined research with residents on their forms of life with efforts to develop Indian-language computer software. In its organizational structure, Cybermohalla was indistinguishable from the “transnational advocacy networks” that Arjun Appadurai identifies as “grassroots,” bottom-up agents of globalization and describes as “part movements, part networks, part organizations.”42 Cybermohalla reports about life in informal settlements should be placed alongside other qualitative research by similar organizations, including that commissioned through Appadurai’s action-research project PUKAR, in Mumbai. But while it had some of the concrete, demonstrable aims associated with grant-based funding, Cybermohalla’s efforts to capture narratives of everyday life in conditions of extreme poverty were less easily understood in purely instrumental terms. “Cybermohalla is about liberating its participants from the reformist pedagogical projects that cast them into the role of sufferers and victims,” Alexander Keefe writes, even as “it simultaneously offers to outsiders a privileged glimpse into the lifeworlds of the underprivileged.”43 SHILPA GUPTA AND THE IMPERATIVE MODE OF ADDRESS

A complementary approach to that of Raqs Media Collective comes in the work of Shilpa Gupta. In the period between around 1999 and 2004, Gupta’s work addressed issues associated with the NGO sector while collapsing the boundaries between artistic, NGO, and capital infrastructures.44 While similarly engaged with new media, Gupta was much less optimistic about the possibilities for technological overcoming of structural inequalities.45 In Gupta’s work, the internet was an extension of earlier colonial and capitalistic regimes of exchange, rather than an emancipatory technology. This emphasis allowed her to reject the novelty of her historical moment, in terms of both new media and NGO-based organizational structures, while finding ways to use its new infrastructures strategically. Her critique was bolstered by the manner in which she rooted her practice in longer genealogies of conceptual art. The rejection of techno-optimism can be found in Gupta’s solo project Your Kidney Supermarket (2002–4, figures 69 and 70), which parodied the illegal trade in organs and medical tourism for an exhibition, Upstream (2002), that commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the Dutch East India Company.46 As the faux e-commerce website maps, the organ trade follows the basic south-to-north, Black/Brown-to-

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figure 69 Shilpa Gupta, Your Kidney Supermarket (exterior view), 2002–3, video and interactive installation, street shop, edible sugar kidneys, posters, sofa, acrylic cases, steel stands, stickers, green lights, ship model and take-away kit containing instruction manual, tea leaves, cotton cloth, sugar, brush, game. Hoorn, the Netherlands (photo courtesy of the artist).

White, poor-to-rich, and female-to-male routes established by colonial companies. The product is introduced with heavy irony: Your kidney dreams have come through and now you can place an order for a good kidney through the fastest and easiest trade route. No longer do you now need need [sic] to depend on reciprocal love from your closet [sic] relative for a kidney donation and no longer do you have to wait for years in long queues in unpleasant hospitals.47 The website was just one part of a brand campaign offered on print, digital, and video platforms for blue, red, and yellow organs “grown” in plastic vitrines. The vitrines, along with other kidneys in plastic DIY kits to take home, were installed in an empty storefront in the Dutch seaside town of Hoorn and, two years later, in the Oxford Bookstore just off Marine Drive in South Bombay. The literature distributed with the kidneys in Hoorn notes that complaints are to be addressed to the “local VOC (Dutch 138

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figure 70 Shilpa Gupta, Your Kidney Supermarket (interior view), 2002–3 (photo courtesy of the artist).

East India Company) office,” which was down the street. In India, people were advised to contact “your local hospital ward boy” because, as Gupta writes in her artist statement, “the trade is so deep there.” The target of the work was consumers: not of illegally traded kidneys, necessarily, but of nearly everything else, and the ways that the internet is just one of many technologies helping to maintain global inequalities traceable to the colonial past. A second project for the exhibition was equally pointed in its critique but quite different in its tactics. It used exhibition project funds to buy forty-five hand-powered tricycles for use by the physically disabled (figure 71). On the back, written in the place usually reserved for charity or NGO sponsorship, a bilingual advertisement in English and Bambaiya, the colloquial street language of the city, read 1000 Saal Baad ek Sawaal [After 1000 Years, a Question] Purab Paschim ki Kahani [East-West Story] Opening Soon in Nearby Theatres with the Super-Hit Song “Jab pani ulta bahega/Jab apan ke paas maal ayega/Tab paschim desh mein/Apan dhoti kurta style bechega.” [When the waters reverse directions, when we’ve got the goods, then we’ll sell our dhoti-kurta style to the West]

While the text was parodic, adopting the form of a film advertisement, the tricycles were totally functional. Massive, sturdy, and with ample storage space, they were carefully designed to withstand use on Mumbai roads, where the disabled must travel because of the condition of sidewalks. Gupta sent one tricycle to Amsterdam, where it L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 71 Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2003, from a set of forty-five hand-powered tricycles donated in Mumbai. Installation view from crossing generations: diVERGE, exhibition cocurated by Geeta Kapur and Chaitanya Sambrani, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, December 2–14, 2003 (photo courtesy of the artist and Geeta Kapur, facilitated by Asia Art Archive).

was shown in the Scheepvaartmuseum (National Maritime Museum), but the rest stayed in Mumbai, where they could be put to use. The project served to convert funds that would have provided Dutch audiences with a thoughtful critique of capital flows into something that would benefit people in Gupta’s community. Unlike with Cybermohalla, in which the partnership between Raqs/Sarai and Ankur was openly discussed, Gupta did not choose to publicize her partnership with the Fellowship for the Physically Handicapped in Mumbai, which advised her on the project and made possible the production and distribution of the tricycles. Gupta had intended to add one final work to Upstream, in the form of text to be 140

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posted on the outside of the Amsterdam museum. But the words she suggested, which included “I hate that U colonise me, you took my riches, you made me poor, and now you call me exotic,” were rejected by museum leadership. After she discussed this unwanted change to her work in a television interview, a member of the public painted “400 years of arrogance” on the door of the museum. This reaction was unexpected, but satisfying—not just because it completed Gupta’s work for her, but also because it clarifies that Gupta uses text primarily in the imperative mode, as a prompt. Her language seeks to shape her viewers’ behavior, just like the genres of advertising and instructions that it copies. “By provoking and probing her viewers’ reactions,” Adajania writes, “by developing approximations of public feeling and conventional wisdom, Gupta investigates the micro-politics of a society.”48 Her provocations reach back to conceptual art, from which she adapted her approach to participation. Gupta’s use of instructional text began in art school. A 1996 work instructed visitors to sign slips labeled “I care for you” and place them in a clear plastic box.49 A helpful signboard sketches out the action in three easy steps. Gupta printed fifty or sixty slips of paper, figuring that would be enough, but she ran out, having underestimated her viewers’ desire to follow her instructions. (Gupta reported to me in an interview that she was amazed and a bit disappointed.)50 A 1998 work consisted of a stack of cards, each saying “Next time you are happy and lonely and want to share your happiness call 91–226427721: shilpa.” Gupta proposed distributing audiocassettes with edited responses from callers. In their form and even in their look, printed in Courier typeface, these early text works refer to the prime decades of conceptualism. Just as her classmate at the J. J. School, Jitish Kallat, referred intelligently to the movements in American painting he found resonant with the post-liberalization image condition, Shilpa Gupta understood conceptual art’s critique of late capitalism as analogical to her own.51 In these early works, instructions are just one part of an overall brand campaign. Your Kidney Supermarket, already deadpan in tone, is rendered all the more absurd by her instruction to make a kidney garden: users were asked to plant the kidney, along with tea leaves, in the ground and wait for it to grow. Similarly impossible instructions feature in Blame (2002–4), where buyers of the bottles of blood-red liquid are told: “Squeeze small quantity on dry surface. Neatly separate into four equal sections (these can be unequal too). Tell sections apart according to race and religion. Separate blood according to race and religion.” The obvious impossibility of these tasks seals the irony of the advertising copy used to market the product in stickers, posters, and, in her performances on Mumbai’s local trains, for which the artist either traveled by herself, offering to sell bottles to commuters, or went with a mock buyer. Instructions engage viewers in a more direct way than the rest of the work. The posters and stickers, applied to public walls and the interiors of auto rickshaws, trick viewers into the kind of distracted, associative viewing central to the recognition of brand identities. The advertising copy, once read, is ironic, meant to shape consumer behavior in the exact opposite direction from its declared meaning. The intended mesL A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 72 Raqs Media Collective, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, or, 28°28′ N / 77°15′ E: 2001/2002, 2002, four of ten thousand stickers (photo courtesy of the artists).

sage is not at all ambiguous: it is meant to repel, and to shame people into recognizing the assignation of blame as thoughtless and lazy. While clearly similar in format to the stickers Raqs Media Collective made for display around Kassel at documenta XI, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, or, 28°28′ N / 77°15′ E: 2001/2002 (2002, figure 72), there is a distinct difference in the two works’ treatment of language. Using found text from 142

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public spaces in Delhi, Raqs’s stickers capture the alarmist language of surveillance: “Careful! Abandoned objects may contain explosive devices;” or, “Entry permitted. Access denied. Have you registered with the relevant authorities?” Others, deprived of context, are eerily indeterminate in meaning. “May I help you communicate?,” one sticker asks, while others say, “No actors, only victims,” and “Learn to speak English by psychological methods.” In contrast with Gupta’s liberal use of the imperative, Raqs finds ambiguity in the conventions of public messaging. There is a crucial contrast between these messages, which are as apt for Delhi as they are for Kassel, and the accompanying video installation (figure 73). Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life maps Delhi’s geographical location with images and texts of its most marginal, illegally built spaces, tying issues of encroachment to deep colonial histories. Particularly when translated into English, Hindi, Turkish, and German, the stickers subvert the sense that Delhi is exceptional, however. Instead, as Adajania argues, the work establishes that “the ‘Third World’ is not a geographical given, but a condition of marginality that can be found in any society, including seemingly advanced nations like Germany.” Gupta also addresses the striking uniformity in languages of power, seizing upon the rising global regime of surveillance in this period, particularly after the 2003 onset of the US-led war in Iraq. This experience drove her 2004 untitled interactive video installation, in which viewers are urged to join in mock military training, as well as her There Is No Explosive in This (2007), which invited people to carry suitcases labeled with that phrase around London. Both works continued to explore participation by using instructions as a written genre to set up precise frameworks for interaction.52 Gupta also began to flip the script, so to speak, and to use technologies associated with instruction, discipline, or control to display texts written in other genres. One of her best-known works, a 2005–6 untitled wall drawing, narrates how hard it was to “cut the sky in half, one for my lover and one for me,” because no matter what barrier she erects the clouds kept floating from one side to the other (figure 74). Written in the shape of a flag, its letters are made from yellow caution tape emblazoned with the phrase “there is no border here.” Allegorizing conflict through a romantic relationship, this text adopts the lyric poetic address also prized by Kanwar’s A Night of Prophecy. The work’s underlying tone of melancholic longing is prompted by knowledge of the suffering that borders can provoke, and encourages the same empathetic connection that prompts Kanwar’s turn to poetry.53 But the text is also leavened by Gupta’s characteristic note of absurdity, both in its basic conceit and in its adaptation of the yellow tape most often used to cordon off crime scenes. Largely a symbolic barrier, the presence of yellow tape is typically enough to shape people’s behavior—never mind that the slogan Gupta emblazoned upon it muddies its message. A particularly powerful disruption of public messaging technologies came in her 2008–9 untitled motion flapboard, the technical term for the slightly old-fashioned mechanical information boards used in train stations (figure 75). The text is displayed L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 73 E Raqs Media Collective, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, or, 28°28′ N / 77°15′ E: 2001/2002 (installation view), 2002, three videos, soundscapes, floor mat. First presented at documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002; Office for Contemporary Art, Brussels, 2003 (photo courtesy of the artists). figure 74 G Shilpa Gupta, There Is No Border Here, 2005–6, self-adhesive tape, dimensions variable (photo courtesy of the artist).

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figure 75 Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2008–9, motion flapboard, 20 min loop, 74¾ × 8 ⁹/₁₆ × 9¹³/₁₆ in. (190 × 21.8 × 25 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

one line at a time, each phrase held for a few seconds before the letters start flapping into a new position. Like many of the works discussed above, the subject of the work is violence and its causes, but meanings are elusive or indirect. Across the twentyminute cycle, phrases point to key years and death tolls, touching on the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent and on contemporary global terrorism. Ideas from linguist and activist Noam Chomsky and bioengineer and artist David E. Edwards appear in paraphrased form. Inverted spellings are introduced into the text, “creating a visual and mental play,” Gupta writes.54 The work depends upon the satisfying materiality of the flapboard as a slightly arcane messaging technology with stable associations with travel and punctuality. In his account of the work, curator Shanay Jhaveri focuses on how the time-based work is experienced, hitting upon the moments of release from the flapboard’s staccato messaging, the quiet seconds before its letters shift. “This instant of being in the middle of somewhere or the midst of something, without any directional prescriptions,” he writes, “underscores the communal as well as individual need for a self-reflexive disengagement from the dominant logics of transparence and immediacy in the communicability of information” that characterizes the present.55 Among the three artists under consideration here, Shilpa Gupta’s uses of language are the least poetic and the least connected to academic discourse. That is because L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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Gupta is primarily interested in the manner in which language can help to facilitate particular forms of interaction or participation. In a parallel distinction, Gupta frequently complains about the imperative to discuss her process in public discourse, while Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective are both adept at talking about their work and seem to embrace how their narration shapes their works’ interpretation. Gupta is very disciplined in the way she draws a line around her work and refuses to supplement it with additional interpretation. That is very unusual in an art world hungry for the artist’s word as well as her work. A CONVERGENCE AROUND LANGUAGE

Speaking to Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2008, Shilpa Gupta described how much change the art scene in Mumbai had undergone in the past decade. “There’s a big fusion of everything now,” she said, “Everything is acceptable. But eight or nine years ago there seemed to be a clear division between supposedly political and non-political art.”56 The previously robust categorical distinctions between art and image and between politics and language that informed the reception of documenta XI began to break down quite quickly afterward. While openness to language was not the only indication of this shift, it is among the easiest to track. As artists who had previously restricted themselves to images began to engage with language in various ways, discursively driven practices began to circulate more easily within Indian art’s infrastructure. Two exhibitions track this key shift: crossing generations: diVERGE, curated by Geeta Kapur and Chaitanya Sambrani and presented by Gallery Chemould in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai in 2003; and iCon: Indian Contemporary, curated by Peter Nagy, Julie Evans, and Gordon Knox and presented as a collateral event at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Crossing generations: diVERGE commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Gallery Chemould, so selections were drawn from the long list of artists that had some sort of association with the gallery. Language was by no means dominant in this large exhibition of over fifty artists, but it had a definite presence. Kapur and Sambrani chose language-engaged works by painters Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, and Nilima Sheikh that each pointed to an important new thread in the artist’s practice. They were shown alongside Amar Kanwar’s To Remember, one of Shilpa Gupta’s wheelchairs, Nalini Malani’s Unity in Diversity (2003), and a presentation of Gallery Chemould’s archive by Vivan Sundaram. Even this relatively modest presence of language-based work is notable when compared to the other exhibition Kapur curated that year, subTerrain, at Berlin’s House of World Cultures. This international exhibition, which would have been planned over a longer period of time, more scrupulously maintained the previous tendency to avoid language. Just two years later, iCon: India Contemporary introduced language in more deliberate ways, combining works by Raqs Media Collective, Nalini Malani, and Anita Dube, whose work all typically included language, with Atul Dodiya and Natraj Sharma, both known 146

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for citation-rich, image-based painting, and Ranbir Kaleka, who combined painting and video. In the 2003 Chemould show, Dodiya and Nilima Sheikh continued to show some ambivalence about the place language might hold in their painting. Both artists’ works experiment with poetry, and particular with the lyric subjectivity already identified with Kanwar’s Night of Prophecy and later work by Shilpa Gupta. Sheikh’s paintings for the exhibition extended her work with the poet Agha Shahid Ali, who adapted the Urdu lyric form of the ghazal to English in order to capture his exile from Kashmir, the paradisiacal mountainous state that has been under violent dispute since Partition. It is also Sheikh’s ancestral home. She showed the first two works in her celebrated series of monumental scrolls that take their title, Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14) from a poem by Shahid.57 Designed to be suspended in the middle of the room just like the Songspace project discussed in chapter 1, the reverse sides were initially painted with color fields. Sheikh later added quotations from poems and academic writing discussing the territory’s long and tumultuous history. A similar exploration of lyric poetry comes in Atul Dodiya’s Antler Anthology (2003), a series of large watercolors in which contemporary Gujarati poems are juxtaposed with meticulously painted objects, such as botanical specimens and animals, cycles of the moon, and quotations from his own and his friends’ paintings (figure 76). Visually, they recall his 1999 Artist of Non-Violence series, discussed at length in chapter 2, in which almost all of the photographs of Gandhi that Dodiya paints are located within Gujarat itself.58 For readers of Gujarati, Antler Anthology is quite literally a poetry collection, with quotations drawn from prominent literary figures, all but two still living. These paintings share in Sheikh’s and Kanwar’s promotion of poetry as an antidote to political dysfunction, which Kanwar described as an inability to listen. But instead of using translation, as Kanwar did, Dodiya presents nonreaders of Gujarati with text as one of many visual signs, brought together in paintings of startling beauty. Whether read or seen, these works extend Dodiya’s central tactic of the appropriation of images to include writing. The visual meaning of text is raised also by Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice (2003, figure 77). This work uses the transcript of the speech that India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave at midnight on August 15, 1947, as the country gained its independence from British colonial rule. Kallat stenciled the words in adhesive onto a series of five mirrors and set the chemical on fire, burning the words into surfaces that warped in the process. As viewers read the famous speech, they are confronted by their own distorted reflections. Unlike Kanwar’s use of Gandhi’s letters in A Season Outside, in which the historical text is one of many contending arguments, Kallat uses Nehru’s words as an icon of India’s democratic promise, distorted through disfunction and violence. The treatment of the word as an image extends to the method he uses to etch the letters into the surface, which should be tied to Kallat’s longstanding focus on technologies of image transmission that decrease reliance upon the artist’s hand. L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 76 Atul Dodiya, Antler Anthology II, 2003, watercolors, charcoal, and marble dust on paper, 78 × 45 in. (198.1 × 114.3 cm). Collection Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, (photo courtesy of the artist).

Kallat retains his word-as-icon approach in the two further works in the series, which recreate speeches by M. K. Gandhi (Public Notice 2, 2007) and Swami Vivekananda (Public Notice 3, 2010). In all three cases, the text is available to be read but also functions as a metonym for the broader set of meanings attached to the historical figure or moment.

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Dodiya’s invocation of contemporary Gujarati poetry and Kallat’s presentation of Nehru’s speech were both prompted by the eruption of the Indian state of Gujarat into violence in February 2002. Their works offer richer and more hopeful ways of being in the world than the bleak, violence-driven society revealed in pogroms. Those works were joined by Nalini Malani’s video Unity in Diversity, which juxtaposed written accounts of acts of violence against women and girls during the Gujarat violence with an iconic proto-nationalist painting by Ravi Varma, which imagines India as an ensemble of communities, each represented by a woman in regional dress. In Malani’s work, unlike Kallat’s or Dodiya’s, the images are iconic and the text is discursive, but the political position is similar: the contrast between degenerate reality and past ideal evokes shame in a viewership that considers itself part of India’s (or Gujarat’s) political community. These works continue to associate language with politics but find a place for language within image-based practices. That familiar coupling of language and politics was found in the Venice exhibition only in Malani’s work. Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain (2005), a five-channel video work, directly extended Unity in Diversity’s focus on violence against women. It drew upon an essay by anthropologist Veena Das that recorded stories of the rape and abduction of women at the time of Partition. She argues that men, understanding women’s bodies as metaphors for the nations of India and Pakistan, forced women “to bear the signs of their possession by the enemy.” Malani’s video was surrounded by a more discursive intermedia installation by Raqs Media Collective and Ranbir Kaleka’s Crossings: Two Stories (2005), a four-channel video projection on paintings, which dealt with Sikh experience and was discussed in chapter 2. Those three artists were the core of the pavilion in the planning stage, which depended, in part, on a pledge by Montalvo Art Center director Gordon Knox to facilitate these three commissions through residencies at his space.59 When the curatorial team secured a larger space, they invited three more artists, Atul Dodiya, Natraj Sharma, and Anita Dube, who were deeply invested in debates about medium and materiality.60 Dodiya and Sharma created work that brought painting into three dimensions, while sculptor Dube created a text-based relief sculpture from ceramic eyes. Sharma’s series of paintings of sky were juxtaposed with a three-dimensional grid through which planes flew, a comment upon the construction of space. Dodiya’s Stammer in the Shade (2005) used language in a kind of institutional critique. A series of nine paintings based on Italian painter Enzo Cecchi’s work were doubled and obscured by the sheets of plywood used in shipping crates, functioning here as oversized labels, anchored in metal frames to the wall. Viewers could peek behind to see the works or just stare at the captions, written in raised white paint imbedded with marble dust. The final work, Anita Dube’s Serenissima (journey on the red sea) (2005) extended the work with ceramic eyes that she had shown in How Latitudes Become Forms, in which she used the objects

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figure 77 Jitish Kallat, Public Notice I, 2003, adhesives, mirror, wood, stainless steel, each 78 × 54 × 6 in. (198.1 × 137.2 × 15.2 cm). Collection of Shumita and Arani Bose, New York City (photo courtesy of Jitish Kallat Studio).

to trace out words in curling script (figure 78). La Serenissima, an affectionate nickname for the city of Venice, has little connection to the quotation used in the work, which is attributed to Lebanese-French artist Mereille Kassar: “Resistance is the elegance of life. The will of a human being to safeguard this elegance transcends the tragic destiny that attempts to reduce and deny.” These two sentences are cut into 150

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the wall and surrounded by an irregular border of ceramic eyes, which also trace parabolic lines and weblike patterns around the long, straight line of words. Dube’s act of cutting the letters is significant, pointing ahead to her performance at Khoj later that summer, in which she formed words out of pieces of meat, displayed them on cheesecloth laid on slabs of ice, and then invited an audience to brainstorm L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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figure 78 Anita Dube, Serenissima (journey on a red sea), 2005, ceramic and enamel eyes, dimensions variable (photo courtesy of the artist and Bose Pacia Gallery).

associations. Documentation of the performance includes photographs of the phrase, “about ethics,” and a brainstorming sheet including references to idioms, literature, and problematics around meat, the body, and language. Dube’s summary of her approach to the meat performance—“The question I am asking is how you can give body to things by experimenting with materials and embodying words”—applies equally well to Serenissima (journey on the red sea). Dube’s work in this period placed language and materiality in direct relationship to one another—indeed, she should be seen as a critical voice in thinking through the exclusion of language and discourse from ideas of art. Raqs Media Collective’s work for iCon placed the issue of language at its center. Consisting of a loosely connected set of videos and sound pieces, A Measure of Anacoustic Reason (2005) considered the problem of listening, of hearing and understanding (figure 79). The videos were shot in California at a kind of junkyard for airplanes, and so they capture images of abandoned planes in fields of wildflowers.61 The text pieces all feature Narula’s voice, and they concern themselves with the act of communication. One piece, Hearing and Understanding, includes a series of statements of disavowal—small explanations for not answering a question, for disengaging.

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figure 79 Raqs Media Collective, A Measure of Anacoustic Reason, 2005, five videos, four audio dialogues, lecterns, designed furniture. First presented at India Contemporary, Collateral project, Venice Biennale, 2005. Installation view, Kunstsammlung K21, Dusseldorf, 2018 (photo courtesy of the artists).

I did not hear what was said. I wasn’t paying attention. Not at that time. It was out of earshot. I can’t remember.62

This work circles around the questions of evidence that animated Kanwar’s work but are not rooted in any political or historical context. Each of the sound pieces comes just up to the point where the hearer begins to sketch out a plausible narrative, but then stops short. Just as their work is about “a city like Delhi” but not only Delhi itself, this work is about problems of communication that are individual and vital, but inescapably general too. iCon presented, in miniature, the breadth of formal concerns that had developed among Indian artists in the previous ten years: the movement of painting into three dimensions, materiality and its relationship to meaning, and the roles played by new

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media and more discursively driven practices. This assessment of the formal agenda of Indian art is mirrored in the themes of this book. That is not coincidental, given the influence of the team that sponsored the show, especially Peter Nagy and Bose Pacia, on the development of art in this period, and on generating collector support for experimental art practice. In this exhibition, language is not excluded from the category of art, as it might have been just a few years earlier. But it remains a problem for artists, one of many formal issues to be solved. NO ALTERNATIVE

In a conversation with ArtAsiaPacific that coincided with the Sarai 09 exhibition and reader project, Jeebesh Bagchi recalls that Raqs was determined to “create their own context for their work,” one drawn from a wide array of disciplines in which they play the role of well-read outsider—someone familiar with the discourse but not limited by its boundaries.63 To ArtAsiaPacific editor H. G. Masters, their context is primarily discursive, because “Raqs’ real medium is dialogue and discourse—a torrent of words and ideas that form a vast intertextual, cross-disciplinary conversation.” But Raqs Media Collective and, in somewhat different ways, Amar Kanwar and Shilpa Gupta, were just as creative in their creation of institutional contexts for their work. All three artists began by working at an oblique angle to the contemporary art world, initially through platforms and modes of financing outside of the commercial art market. By the middle of the decade, not only had the conceptual distinctions that might classify their work as outside the mainstream broken down, but so had the institutional separation between non- and for-profit art venues. Part of this had to do with the lack of institutional diversity in India. Speaking to Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2008, Shilpa Gupta explained: Internationally, I find myself working with state, non-profit institutions or with individuals, rather than with galleries. It’s really the structure that matters, of people coming together with overlapping ideas of what they think this thing called art can be. But locally in Asia we don’t have such an institutional structure and there’s little possibility for anybody to do anything independently. As a result the market dominates.64 Although Gupta gave few solo shows in commercial galleries until after 2006, she regularly participated in thematic group shows and used galleries to produce some of her public projects. Neither Kanwar nor Raqs had relationships to Indian commercial galleries in this period. Although they were later represented by an Indian commercial gallery, Raqs Media Collective showed their artistic work outside of India in large group shows and biennials for a number of years, even as they actively participated in the broader art and intellectual scene in Delhi through Sarai.65 Kanwar continued to show on the film-festival circuit in India while developing many of 154

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his projects through art-world institutions in Europe and North America. The institutional distinctions persisted for these artists much longer than those working in painting, sculpture, or installation, primarily because of the lack of direct market support for new media art. That said, the typical emphasis on lack of patronage for video in India obscures the development of complex institutional forms designed to channel private money into projects with little explicit market support. The funding basis for these projects is distinct from the NGO-like spaces, like Khoj and Sarai. By comparison, these projects involve a much more complex interpenetration of nonprofit and commercial infrastructural channels. The iCON project is an unusually complex but also transparent example of this. Initiated by a conversation between gallerist Peter Nagy, painter Julie Evans, and curator Gordon Knox at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the pavilion project hinged upon Knox’s move from the Italian Civitella residency program to the Montalvo Arts Center in Silicon Valley. Civitella had hosted several Indian artists, including Dodiya and Malani, some through the UNESCO Aschberg Bursaries for Artists program, which sponsors artists from underrepresented countries.66 Knox was asked by the Montalvo residency program to internationalize its attendees. Since the institution had just added new facilities for video, he proposed bringing three video artists to create works that could serve as the core of the iCON pavilion. Particularly for Kaleka, this led to his making work at a larger and more complex scale. While the collaboration with Montalvo solved the problem of how to finance production of new work, that was a small fraction of the logistical work necessary to mount a Venice Biennale pavilion. The organizers formed a foundation for the project, financed largely by Arani and Shumita Bose of Bose Pacia Gallery, with contributions from other US-based collectors and gallerists. As Nagy recounts, the foundation acquired the works created at Montalvo, hired consultants familiar with the logistics of the Venice Biennale, solicited the rest of the work, and then, after the 2004 elections put India’s centrist Congress Party back in power, sought the endorsement of the Indian state.67 For whatever reason, they were unsuccessful in gaining that endorsement, and so the exhibition was classified as a collateral event.68 This is a far more expensive category of participation, so they held the show for only half the run of the biennale. Participation in the Venice Biennale is most often framed as an abstract achievement for Indian art. In a representative take, Ranjit Hoskote wrote that a true national pavilion would be a “triumphal note of arrival both for the Indian art world and for the Indian nation-state.” Writing after the collapse of his own 2009 Venice project in the wake of the global financial crisis, Hoskote argues that Indian cultural institutions have not demonstrated the “self-critical maturity” necessary for a successful project. Noting that previous international ventures have led either to “acrimony” or “an appalling mess with no shape or direction,” He self-laceratingly bemoans India’s inability to compete with China’s impressive deployments of “soft power” and questions the use of the national framework at all, calling it a “played-out theme.”69 L A N G U A G E , T H E D O C U M E N TA R Y, A N D A R T

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Hoskote recalls this column in the catalog for the 2011 pavilion, which he curated at the behest of the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s national Academy of Fine Arts.70 The exhibition, Everyone agrees: It’s about to explode, included Zarina Hashmi, Desire Machine Collective, Praneet Soi, and Gigi Scaria. Working from places outside the Mumbai-Delhi corridor that formed the central spine of the Indian art world, the artists he chose push, he writes, at the territorial fixity of national identity toward a more “global space of the imagination” that takes the “form of arguments, dreams, memories and visions.”71 Vital art, he argues, is equivalent to the “non-sequitur,” or “an unprecedented suggestion that overturns the fixities of an existing language game.” In his writing, he emphasizes the conceptual ground of works of art that all, one way or another, dealt with the materialities of lived experience. Once again, discourse—the non sequitur that spurs “arguments, dreams, memories and vision”—is framed as the antithesis of art. But in this case Hoskote means art’s “machinery of validation,” rather than its distinctive visuality. He positions his 2011 pavilion directly against the art market, which he calls “only the loudest circle of speech within a much larger conversation” that constitutes the art world. Indeed, Hoskote’s pavilion is explicitly framed against the 2005 iCon show, with one of his main selection criteria being the artists’ “resist[ance to] being neutralized by the system’s embrace.” While he searched for an alternative to the art market in residencies, workshops, and other institutional forms, the materials presented in this volume suggest that such a network was not actually separate from a larger infrastructure driven by speculative investment and/or transnational capital. What sticks out is the timing: the 2011 pavilion was planned entirely after the Great Recession caused a collapse in the flow of capital into the art world. So Hoskote’s reliance upon state structures was, in part, a product of need but also a profound reconsideration of the past decade’s excesses, and a broader reorientation of practice away from its single-minded pursuit of scale, visibility, and global parity that the boom has come to signify within the Indian contemporary art world.

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5 INFRASTRUCTURE, COLLABORATION, AND THE CUT

V

The Great Indian Bazaar (1997–99) collects photographs of Delhi’s informal market in discarded goods, packaged in ways that imitate their format: two photos are enlarged and mounted in lightboxes placed in tin trunks, while the rest are printed in a standard commercial size and framed in cheap, brightly painted aluminum. The framed pictures are arranged in unstable-looking towers, about six feet (2 m) in height, that show off the brilliant colors of the frames, and in a neat circular pile of 400–1200 images. In some showings, Sundaram invited viewers to rifle through the photographic spill, just as they might handle goods at the market, and choose some to buy at a cost of one hundred rupees each (figure 80). That sum, nominal in the context of a commercial gallery, would likely exceed the daily wage for the laborers who collect and sell recycled materials. This disjuncture was reinforced by the final element of the installation, which was a series of quotations regarding economic inequality by Left economist Prabhat Patnaik, silk-screened on used offset printing plates. IVAN SUNDARAM’S

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figure 80 Vivan Sundaram, The Great Indian Bazaar (detail), 1997, installation with 400–1200 postcard-size photographs in metal frames heaped in a circle, stacked in a 2 m column, two Translites in tin boxes, five silk screens on used offset printing plates, 3 ⁹/₁₆ × 5 ¹/₈ in. (9 × 13 cm) each frame, overall dimensions variable. As installed at the Second Johannesburg Biennale (photo courtesy of the artist).

Created for the Second Johannesburg Biennale, Great Indian Bazaar was the first in a long series of Sundaram’s projects that engaged with the practice of ragpicking, in which people glean usable goods from trash heaps. Reused goods circulate largely invisibly along a network of people who work by hand, in an absence of investment in the kind of technological fixes applied to other infrastructures, including those for the removal of waste, writ large.1 The artist chooses a precisely human measurement for his work, building towers of two meters, using common household items, and inviting viewers of the photo spill to collapse the distance between themselves and the work. The project’s vernacular aesthetic contrasted with the spectacle associated with biennials, though it had that in common with much of the work in Alternating Currents, the central exhibition Okwui Enwezor curated in Johannesburg, which was held inside an abandoned power station.2 Sundaram exhibited this project among other work preoccupied with circulation, in a biennial keen to articulate the terms of globality for art from a location outside of the 158

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West. The signifying power of material culture was a predominant concern of the biennial, exemplified by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s The Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlor (1996–97), a formal living room wallpapered and upholstered in the Dutchproduced Vlisco textiles that have become closely associated with Africa. Shonibare’s interior, like his other works of this period, exposes the colonial history of an icon of locality. But while Sundaram’s work shares Shonibare’s interest in markets, it avoids questions of culture. It has more in common with contemporary African movements exploring materials at hand, like récuperation in Senegal, which was represented in the previous edition of the Johannesburg Biennale through the work of artist Moustapha Dimé (1952–98).3 Like Dimé’s sculpture, The Great Indian Bazaar pushes toward an emergent aesthetic of material improvisation that critiques the role of infrastructural insufficiency in discourses of modernity.4 Sundaram returned to waste as material after a gap of several years with living it. out. in. delhi (2005), an exhibition of photography, video works, and installations made in collaboration with ragpicking workers associated with the rights-seeking NGO Chintan (figure 81). He included some of these works in his multicity exhibition Trash (2008– 9), which toured galleries in India and the United States in the same year he undertook an action in which a raft constructed from discarded plastic bottles was guided down the pollution-black waters of Delhi’s Yamuna River, documented in a video called Flotage (2008–9). Soon after, he extended this body of work for Gagawaka: Making Strange (2011), a series of garments made from recycled materials. Throughout this long series, Sundaram explored the capacities of discarded things as art, using various forms of assemblage, photography, video, and installation in collaboration with a range of other actors. Chaitanya Sambrani describes the series as a “sequenced elaboration of the dual concerns of activist art and post-conceptualist formal development.”5 All of this work is made possible by the infrastructure for waste disposal in Delhi. Like many of the artists discussed in chapter 3, Sundaram finds his artistic material in the open market. He simply chooses a different stage in consumption than someone like Subodh Gupta, who mostly buys new, and at wholesale. Similarly, just as Gupta borrows from the meanings attached to the household utensils he uses in his sculpture, Sundaram’s work takes some of its meaning from trash. It benefits from the freight attached to waste in a city like Delhi, whose notoriously insufficient and socially fractious system of waste disposal is tied to a specter of postcolonial failure. Indeed, as representation, this inefficiency occupies a space in the postcolonial imagination analogous to the spectacle of infrastructural efficiency in the colonial and modernist developmental one. Just as with the railways, roads, and power stations that punctuate and, to apologists, justify the historical record of colonial rule and the excesses of postcolonial states, in contemporary discourse the “clean city” remains a key marker of modernity. Yet the representational status of waste is arguably less fundamental to Sundaram’s series of projects than the infrastructure of waste disposal itself. Underlying all of the INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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figure 81 Vivan Sundaram, Master Plan, 2005–8, digital print, 56½ × 198 in. (143.5 × 502.9 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

projects is Sundaram’s interest in the system: the manner in which gathering, evaluating, separating, and redisposing of waste depends on the embrace of the capitalist logic of obsolescence by one section of society and the degradation of the labor of another. In each project, recycled materials are a node through which the waste infrastructural network can be made to intersect with the art infrastructural network. That intersection, inaugurated by the Great Indian Bazaar, remains constant throughout the series, even as later works layer on other formal structures in which waste figures metonymically, from the disciplinary site of the hospital, to the city plan and riverine system, to the supply chain that underlies fashion. Though improvisational in nature, Sundaram’s series of works is grounded in an awareness of how material things circulate through various networks and infrastructural forms. Individual bodies of work are assemblages that expose the dependencies of such infrastructures upon interactions between material and immaterial, human and nonhuman elements. This is heightened by Sundaram’s increasing reliance upon studio assistants to realize his work, an extension of his own labor that is both made possible and made necessary by the acceleration of the art market. Sundaram’s work with trash has been discussed primarily through the framework of the city, as an exposure of the “buried” “subTerrain” of Delhi’s rapid growth.6 This makes sense, because waste removal is one of the most visible structures of urban 160

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everyday life.7 Urban frameworks were also more generally important for the development of art of this period, as this book has already explored. But because Sundaram’s work deals with an infrastructure of circulation as well as the urban site, other potentialities of the work can be explored by juxtaposing his projects with a series of other engagements with infrastructure. The productivity of this framework is clearer as we consider how the broader art discourse became increasingly engaged with issues of infrastructure and networked authorship. This is particularly true of the gap between the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale and Sundaram’s return to trash in 2005. During this interim period, artists began to pursue projects that brought attention to the relationship between art infrastructures and the more generalized infrastructures of everyday life. This chapter considers what critical purchase is achieved by this tactic, especially when combined with the changes in infrastructure and form discussed in earlier chapters. The projects discussed here often begin in infrastructural forms discussed earlier in the text that become significantly more complex as they are nested within larger network systems: conversation at a Khoj workshop spurred the Aar-Paar project, a series of three cross-border exchanges of the work of Indian and Pakistani artists (2000–2004); Navjot Altaf’s meeting with the leader of an art center in Bastar grew, eventually, into the Nalpar (pump) project undertaken by a group that was later called the Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (Navjot Altaf, Rajkumar INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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Korram, Shantibai, Gessuram, especially from 2000 on). Sundaram’s work with Trash transformed from a biennial-based project to one including a Delhi NGO, before eventually taking its place alongside other artistic engagements with the notoriously polluted River Yamuna (2007–9) that also began with a program sponsored by Khoj. WHEN DOES INFRASTRUCTURE “QUALIFY FOR ATTENTION”?

This book has considered infrastructure primarily as a network or, more precisely, as an assemblage through which other assemblages circulate. The fractal nature of infrastructure, in which infrastructures themselves are connected to and built out of other infrastructures, means that even its most squarely material forms are assemblages of material and immaterial elements. Each of this book’s chapters takes on a key assemblage of and for art, demonstrating how the coming together of frameworks of thought, organizational structures, and shifts in either art infrastructure, the broader infrastructure, or both, are productive of new forms of artistic work. Those works of art, once made, take their place within that assemblage and circulate along those networks. Here I acknowledge how aware artists and other art-world actors—themselves key actants in a series of interconnected networks—were of the relationship between infrastructural changes and the new directions they took in their work. That can be seen in a series of projects in which artists brought that awareness to bear on infrastructural systems themselves. As with Sundaram’s Trash, their projects engage with the representational logic of infrastructure, for artists have clearly understood how infrastructures operate on multiple levels beyond their narrow technical function, serving also to mediate forms of exchange and to instantiate and bind together the communities they address.8 But the projects highlighted here take on the formal properties of infrastructures in themselves, treating them as constraints akin to artistic media. They engage directly with the network constituted by each infrastructure, usually in order to press at its limits, in a form of critique. It is worth noting that the timeline of Sundaram’s Trash is roughly simultaneous with the development of network theory itself.9 This is not to say that he was prompted by these writings, but rather that Sundaram’s work, like network theory and other theories of hybridity, emerged as a response to what anthropologist Marilyn Strathern describes as “anxieties” regarding the breakdown in the face of technology of the categorical distinctions that had organized life.10 As she writes, “Network imagery offers a vision of a social analysis that will treat social and technological items alike; any entity or material can qualify for attention.”11 Carefully linking network theory to the emergence of particular technologies, Strathern frames it as a response to the growing insufficiency of the “old categorical distinctions,” like the human and nonhuman.12 Writing in 1996, Strathern’s intervention is methodological: she advocates what she calls “cutting the network,” meaning identifying the manner in which social forms place boundaries on networks’ limitlessness. For Strathern, these cuts are not to be 162

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resisted, because they are prerequisite to interpretation, which “must hold objects of reflection stable long enough to be of use.”13 Often, limits are themselves interpretive procedures. She uses the examples of patents, which name and value subsets of the networks that constitute scientific-material inventions, and patterns of kinship, which elevate particular biological-social relationships over others. Strathern’s intervention was directed toward her field of anthropology and had nothing in particular to do with artistic practice. She also qualifies her observation of technologically driven anxiety as limited to the West. But her choice of language—the idea that network theory was produced by a historical shift that made it possible for any “material to qualify for attention”—resonates very strongly with the shifts in medium that occurred in Indian art of the same period. As the previous chapters have discussed, the prevailing sense of what could be done within artistic work shifted across the 1990s to embrace a variety of assemblages and network forms. Like network theorists spurred by the growing inability to ignore the hybridity of objects, Sundaram and the other artists discussed in this chapter may have suddenly seen infrastructure as “qualif(ied) for attention” precisely because of its mixture of material and immaterial actants. These projects found in water, waste, and mail systems the capacity to question the spatial imaginary of the frictionless network. They make meaning either by establishing or by examining a “cut” in the network—a social-political-aesthetic-natural boundary that is, itself, an assemblage. Aar-Paar, Dialogue Interactive Artists Association, and the Yamuna project, like Sundaram’s Trash, all therefore serve a politics focused, both analytically and as a set of concrete claims, upon the limits of infrastructural networks. WORKING THE CUT: AAR-PAAR

When Pakistani artist Huma Mulji attended the 1999 Khoj workshop, she hit it off extremely well with Indian artist Shilpa Gupta.14 “We understood each other’s jokes,” Gupta told me in a recent interview.15 Mulji’s father emigrated to Pakistan from Bombay (now Mumbai) shortly after the 1947 Partition. She had visited the city several times as a child, but the workshop was the first time she had been to India alone. Both artists were young enough, as Mulji put it, to retain the art-school habit of being open to collaboration. Gupta remembers riding back to Delhi from the workshop site in Modinagar in a Maruti Omni van, talking with Mulji about how to keep their friendship alive. The impulse to keep working together was sharpened by the political context. The Khoj workshop was held in a particularly fraught period, a few months after the Kargil War, the first major conflict between India and Pakistan after both countries had acquired nuclear weapons. Mulji’s ability to travel to the Khoj workshop was conditional upon her ability to secure a visa. For South Asians wishing to travel among the countries in the region, obtaining a visa typically necessitates a combination of bureaucratic connections and pure luck. Particularly for families like Mulji’s, who are separated from their erstwhile home cities or INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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ancestral lands, the arbitrary and insecure visa regime is a constant reminder of how the act of Partition separated India from Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. Speaking of the similar network of social, economic, and familial relationships that cross the border partitioning the island of Cyprus, anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin writes, citing Strathern, “in this case, it is sovereignty that does the ‘cutting.’ ”16 As Navaro-Yashin writes, after the border was drawn, not only subjects, but spaces—objects and homes— took on a pervasive sense of loss. What she describes as a melancholy affect is lodged in things, even as it is felt by subjects; her insight is that what was thought to be strictly psychological is both internal and external to the self. Navaro-Yashin’s description of a pervasive sense of loss attached to spaces and objects alike—and the uncanny separation of this melancholy affect from subjectivity— is familiar to the South Asian experience. Amar Kanwar’s meditation on the border, A Season Outside (1997), focuses on this phenomenon in its opening scene, in which identically dressed porters bring goods to a border between India and Pakistan that only objects can cross. No truck, and even no porter can make the trip made by those sacks, which are transported with absurd inefficiency and physical effort. Building on this phenomenon and hoping to maintain the connection formed by the workshop, Gupta and Mulji decided to organize a cross-border public art project that would use the mail to send art across the border. Even if, as they understood, it was likely easier for works of art to cross the cut in the South Asian network than artists, those objects would be marked by melancholy affect. Gupta and Mulji sought to connect the artist communities of Karachi and Mumbai, two port cities that had been connected by strong trade and migration routes before the division of colonial India into sovereign nations. In their plan, works by five artists from India and five artists from Pakistan would be sent across the border to be shown simultaneously in small shops in markets in Karachi and Mumbai in April and May of 2000. Indian artists were drawn from the Khoj workshop list, while in Pakistan they asked artists associated with the Karachi organization in the Triangle Network, Vasl, to participate. Vasl artist Asma Mundrawala suggested the name Aar-Paar, which means “this side and that side,” but also “[pierced] through and through.” It was the title of a 1954 Guru Dutt film. “On a variety of levels,” Chaitanya Sambrani writes, “the name of the project serves to evoke culturally specific meanings in Hindustani and Urdu, common spoken tongues in both countries.”17 The project was addressed to the larger, vernacular public sphere, rather than the typically more elite art audience, in an extension of Gupta’s interventions on the streets and local trains of Mumbai. They placed maps of the shops displaying works in art galleries, but the artists deliberately made art-world viewers travel to unfamiliar places. Sambrani describes Aar-Paar as a brief glimpse into contemporary art’s “transcendental, redemptive power,” prizing the subversion of jingoistic nationalism in the cross-border collaboration among Indian and Pakistani artists.18 That heady sense of purpose does characterize the organizers’ memories of the project, in particular in 164

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figure 82 Bharti Kher, Silver Midas, 2000, sequins on wood, 8 × 11 × 4 in. (20.3 × 27.9 × 10.2 cm). As installed in Nursery Market, Karachi (photo by Huma Mulji, courtesy of the artist).

how they speak of the enduring friendships between participating artists. But the organizers also emphasize the immanent, infrastructural barriers to realizing the project. The initial edition involved sending A4-sized works of art across the border through the mail system, which worried the artists. Postal service between the two countries was notoriously unreliable, and packages, when they arrived, were often opened and rifled through. All but one work arrived in Karachi and Mumbai intact. But in each city, one work out of five proved to be challenging to show. Indian artist Bharti Kher sent a sequin-covered mask to Karachi, which many shops refused to show for fear of being accused of idolatry (figure 82). Eventually an Ismaili-owned shop agreed. Pakistani artist Roohi Ahmed’s graphic work used a map of South Asia in which India was labeled with the Urdu character he, for Hindu, and Pakistan with the Urdu character meem, for Muslim, two letters that together spell hum, or we. The background is text from a dictionary listing words that begin with hum, most of which refer to commonality. Roohi’s work was never shown in Mumbai because shopkeepers saw that the map did not reflect the official Indian border for the disputed territory of Kashmir and worried that police would object. Further, the guest books that were included with each work were filled with vitriolic comments about Kashmir, taking a tone that Mulji likened to the comment section on an online article. While these troubles might have been discouraging, the artists were happy with the placement of art in public places. The success of this aspect of the project prompted a second edition, in 2002. But the infrastructural constraints they had experienced prompted Mulji and Gupta to rethink its format. Instead of sending artworks through the mail, they decided to send images over the internet—“invisibly,” in Mulji’s words— and thereby bypass the difficulties posed by a physical exchange of artwork. They convened a larger group of artists, ten per city, and asked each to design a one-color poster suitable for offset printing. They collected Rs. 1000 from each artist and printed one INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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figure 83 Posters by Shezad Dawood, Shilpa Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, and Asma Mundrawala as installed in Sindhi Muslim Society, Karachi, for Aar-Paar, 2002 (photo courtesy of Huma Mulji).

thousand versions of each poster, which were posted, guerilla-style, on city walls on August twelfth, just a few days before the fifty-fifth anniversary of Partition. Some of the posters borrowed from commercial aesthetics, including an EnglishUrdu version of Shilpa Gupta’s Blame faux-advertising campaign, discussed in the previous chapter, or Shezad Dawood’s ironic “Stronger Together”, which combined that slogan with images of nuclear missiles coded with national symbols (figure 83). Others were more visually complex, like Rashid Rana’s digitally altered photographic selfportrait, in which he cradles himself in the posture associated with the pietà, or Huma Mulji’s pattern-laden, partially blurred image in which houselike shapes surround a grenade (figure 84). Gupta’s piece and Rana’s piece refer to their own larger works, then in progress, while Dawood’s and Mulji’s are quite distinct from their typical practice. Taken together, the Aar-Paar posters were formally similar to advertising, yet distinct enough to sit discordantly in public space. There was a significant public reaction, some in the form of harassment. Some of the young men Mulji hired to put up the posters were chased by police in Karachi. Mumbai police came to Gupta’s apartment in the night, threatening charges under India’s draconian anti-terror law, POTA, in reaction to Quddus Mirza’s work, which included an image of a gun. Lawyers from the High Court refused to eat at the Samovar Restaurant in Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery on placemats that had a map of 166

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figure 84 Huma Mulji, Mera Ghar (My House), off-set printed poster for Aar-Paar, 2002 (photo courtesy of the artist).

Karachi eateries with names referring to places in India, which were the work of Mariam Suhail, Adnan Madani, Ayesha Adil, and Fauzia Hussain. Nevertheless, both Mulji and Gupta were extremely pleased with the 2002 edition of the project, both because the graphic medium proved very effective and because the artist community found that most of the public’s more casual interactions with the images were positive. The final edition of Aar-Paar called for submissions of short videos to Gupta in Mumbai and Mulji in Lahore, where she had moved to teach. Though higher-tech, this edition moved back into the exchange of physical media. Mulji remembers the awkward process of juggling several different video formats. The project also addressed a INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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somewhat different public, showing the videos in universities and film clubs, although Gupta also projected the videos in her Carter Road neighborhood in Mumbai. Both Gupta and Mulji concede that the shift to video was premature, as few artists were working in the medium at that time. In this case, then, the biggest infrastructural challenge was in the realm of art practice, rather than in the mechanisms for circulation, and it proved difficult to overcome. When Mulji and Gupta narrate Aar-Paar, they separate stories of materiality, including logistical failures and successes as well as the works of art themselves, from the immaterial, cross-border network of artist friends. That network, they both note, has been enduring, and they consider it a major achievement of the project. When I spoke with her, Gupta still seemed amazed at the “generosity” of participating artists, showing a kind of collaborative spirit that is precious and rare. In part, this is a reflection on the few years before and after 2000, which is widely remembered as a crucial period just before the scale of the South Asian art world shifted, after which art and artists became much more professionalized and fast-paced. But it is also an artifact of the desire to distinguish the human networks that support the circulation of art, to reestablish the categorical distinction that is threatened by the very technologies that allow for exchange without contact.19 And yet, as a project, Aar-Paar was very much a matter of infrastructure. A significant portion of the project’s success was a result of Mulji and Gupta’s nimble handling of the details of art production and circulation. That allowed the difficulty of moving objects across national borders, as well as the codes governing the display of art publicly in working-class spaces in Karachi and Mumbai, to shape the form of each of the project’s editions, as well as its subsequent narration. Those infrastructural constraints—the conditions of the postal service and street-level shop, of the internet and police surveillance, and the difficulties of transporting and projecting video— function as so many artistic media, shaping what the form of art can be. The emphasis in Aar-Paar on the cuts in the network is common to artistic work that engages with and builds upon infrastructural forms. Moments of failure or constraint provide a useful and critical tension, a sense of resistance the creates the conditions of possibility for making meaning. INFRASTRUCTURE AS BRICOLAGE: NALPAR

If, in Aar-Paar, infrastructure shapes the form of art and the possibilities for collaboration among artists, in the Nalpar project the mechanisms for artistic collaboration were enlisted to shape the form of infrastructure itself. In 2000, artists Rajkumar Korram, Shantibai, Gessuram, and Gangadevi, all adivasis (indigenous people) from Bastar, and artist Navjot Altaf, from Mumbai, collaborated to design and build four water pumps out of poured concrete in Kondagaon. Shilpi Gram, the cooperative studio where the artists lived and worked, lies inside the village, which lacks the infrastructure for delivering running water to houses. As in much of rural India, daily life 168

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figure 85 Dialogue International Artists Association, Nalpar structure, 2001, cast cement and pump, Bandapara neighborhood, Kondagaon, Bastar (photo courtesy of the artists).

for women and children is organized around trips to pumps in areas of the village to fill water vessels, which are then carried home. The Nalpar projects were designed after extensive conversations among the group of artists, and with community members and municipality officials. These conversations elicited a set of problems with the typical design that the new pumps might be able to solve. Those included the pooling of runoff water, which provides a breeding ground for insects and attracts thirsty livestock, and the exposure of women’s bodies to view as they work. The Nalpar design includes a large concrete pad with channels to direct runoff away from the pump, for use by livestock. Circular enclosures block unwanted gazes and provide platforms to allow women to reposition water vessels as they lift them to their heads. The enclosure on one of the original four pumps, the Bandapara Nalpar (2001) uses a zigzag pattern used by adivasi artists, deliberately combining local aesthetics with poured concrete, the material most closely associated with contemporary architecture (figure 85).20 With its careful combination of modes of knowledge and materials, the Nalpar project is best understood as a form of bricolage: a recombination of existing infrastructural systems for access to water and for construction. INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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To call the Nalpar project bricolage is not to undermine its creativity but rather to acknowledge the manner in which it recognizes and capitalizes on intersections in networks that would often be assumed to be dissimilar.21 As with all network assemblages, the Nalpar project combines immaterial actants—forms of indigenous knowledge, ideas about hygiene, feminist practice, social organization—with material actants ranging from the properties of water to concrete construction techniques. The manner in which the Nalpar project recombined these elements is genuinely new, changing the balance between factors and offering new openings for the conduct of everyday life. To borrow a term from Christopher Pinney, this is “hot” bricolage: a “politically charged” practice in which “citation will always be creative and unpredictable.”22 The project also recombined existing infrastructures for the production and circulation of art. The Nalpar project was an outcome of a collaboration between Navjot Altaf and adivasi artists in Bastar that was initially exclusively oriented toward art practice. Navjot first came to Kondagaon to learn about the woodcarving practice found in that area, as an extension of her 1996 exhibition, Images Re-drawn, at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery, for which she made a series of massive wooden sculptures based on her research into “primitive cultures and representation of women.”23 Navjot’s sculptures of this period are grounded in assertions of the exceptional status of indigeneity in art familiar from debates around the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, but also informed by contemporary feminist scholarship, including Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha’s landmark Women’s Writing in India. Texts from that book, with others, became part of assemblages that Navjot showed alongside the sculptures, which were made in collaboration with Mumbai-based sculptor A. Siddiqui and lacquered in blue and red paint.24 While motivated by a desire to explore alternative representational strategies, Navjot’s trip to Kondagaon was made possible by points of intersection between the networks for contemporary art and for craft.25 She was invited by Jaidev Baghel, a bellmetal sculptor, after they saw each other at a show of his work at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, which was at that moment the largest and most eminent public space for exhibiting art. They had first met during a similar exhibition of Baghel’s work in 1973, when Navjot was just beginning her career as an artist and political activist.26 Baghel cofounded Shilpi Gram in Kondagaon as a nonprofit collective for the development and promotion of adivasi art practices in 1981, the year he first entered his work for consideration in India’s fine art competition, through the state-run Lalit Kala Akademi.27 In the intervening fifteen years, Shilpi Gram had become an important node in the private and public networks of patronage for adivasi art as handicraft, by bringing together artists from around the Bastar region, developing their skills through relationships with master craftsmen, and facilitating meetings with middlemen and other patrons.28 Simultaneously, Baghel deepened his practical critique of the distinction between art and craft; his Jehangir Art Gallery exhibition was a hard-won sign that his work could circulate in the exhibitionary networks for contemporary art. 170

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figure 86 Navjot Altaf, Rajkumar Korram, Shantibai, Gessuram, Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of World-Making (installation view), 1997, wood, rubber tubes, pigment, cushion, 307× 492 × 197 in. (780 × 1250 × 500 cm). Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (photograph by Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, courtesy of the artists).

From the beginning, then, a sense that the networks for art and craft were separate and unequal was central to Navjot’s discussions with adivasi artists at Shilpi Gram. After her initial visit, she applied for a grant from the Bengaluru-based India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) to live for a period at Shilpi Gram, working alongside woodcarvers Raituram, his wife, Shantibai, and Rajkumar, as well as two colleagues from Mumbai, her studio assistant S. Raju Mewada and art historian Bhanumati Narayan (later Padamsee). With three from the village and three from the city, the group sought IFA funding to gain enough time, as they write, to “closely examine individual preconceptions and appreciate one another’s social and aesthetic concerns.” The resulting body of work, Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of World Making (1997), juxtaposes Navjot’s first installation work, Links Destroyed and Rediscovered (1994)—an installation of bricks, plastic tubing, and televisions playing documentary footage addressing antiMuslim violence in Bombay—with the wooden sculptures of female forms she made with Siddiqui, memorial pillars made by Kondagaon sculptors, and works on paper drawn by Navjot and painted by village children (figure 86). As the title suggests, this collection of works points outward to different ways of apprehending the world. Modes of Parallel Practice was shown in the First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 1999. Curators framed the project as an instance of relational aesthetics, a form of art INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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in which artists stage participatory actions. In this reading, Navjot is the agent who constructs a situation that enlists indigenous craftsmen into an activity. As Triennale curator Ushiroshoji Masahiro writes, this act has specific connotations in Asia, where artisanal practices have been “relegated to a low rung.” In text that precludes consideration of the choices made by her adivasi collaborators, Ushiroshoji lauds Navjot’s work as an “act of reviving [craft] as art.”29 Curator Roobina Karode’s subtly different text describes the memorial pillars by Shantibai and Rajkumar as works that step outside of typical craft practice to tell stories of adi manav (original man) and his establishment of the community. More attendant to form, Karode finds in the use of earth colors and wood, as well as industrial tubing and televisions, “attempts [at] collaboration, while acknowledging difference.”30 Unlike Ushiroshoji, who only addresses the works exhibited, Karode considers the project’s overall process, finding that the workshops and outreach make “non-art activities the source of its subversive and transformative power,” even as the exhibition fails to “escape the commodification” of art.31 Indeed, the work was acquired by Fukuoka Asian Art Museum for its collection. That museum acquisition, itself a product of the extended circulation of Indian art into other Asian sites in the late 1990s, further opened up contemporary art networks to participation from artists associated with Kondagaon. Rajkumar Korram participated in the 2001 Khoj international workshop, where, as described in detail in chapter 3, several of the works incorporated collaboration with local craftspeople. Rajkumar’s work was included in an exhibition being planned at that time, Edge of Desire (2003–5), along with two other artists associated with Shilpi Gram: woodcarver Gangadevi (Bhatt) and iron craftsman Sonadhar Viswakarma. Curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, the exhibition began in New York, split between the Asia Society and Queens Museum, before traveling to several venues in Australia.32 Edge of Desire captured some of Indian contemporary art’s most sophisticated currents of thought, including a critique of the distinction between art and craft and an articulate sense of the political in art. In Bastar, the Fukuoka sale also led to a pivotal shift within the collaboration, when the group chose to use some of the acquisition funds to create the first Nalpar tap and a space for children’s play, called a Pilla Gudi. The group invested a significant amount of time in the process of design, considering the workshops and meetings as part of the artistic work. While not necessarily objecting to the product, Jaidev Baghel found that these projects, as conceived, had moved outside of the framework of what was supportable by Shilpi Gram, as a node in a network for the production and circulation of adivasi art. He asked Navjot and the project to move out.33 It took nearly three years before they were able to build a structure to host their group and its activities. Formally renamed the Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA), its membership has included Navjot, Shantibai, Rajkumar Korram, Gessuram, S. Kumar, and Gangadevi as key players, with other, shorter-term interactions with children, adult residents, municipal officials, and scholars and artists who travel from the city. 172

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The two most prominent accounts of these events, by Nancy Adajania and Grant Kester, were based on research conducted between around 2003 and 2007.34 Each critic worked extensively (and individually) with Navjot. Mumbai-based critic and curator Adajania produced key accounts of Navjot’s solo and collaborative work by tracing the artist’s adaptation of her earlier Leftist political activism to incorporate feminist thought and then collaborative practices.35 A noted champion of participatory art based in the United States, Kester included DIAA’s work in an exhibition, Ground Works, which he curated just after publishing his book Conversation Pieces, which dealt with dialogue in and as art in the West.36 The two critics traveled with Navjot to Kondagaon in 2007 for the first formal Samvad, a session of dialogue involving the core group and visitors from outside. While their interpretive frameworks differ, both authors use the language of empowerment to describe the group’s infrastructural projects, arguing that the pumps use design to encourage politically significant changes in behavior. Adajania argues that the pumps serve as “a prompt to new social behaviors, new attitudes and ultimately a new sense of dignity.” Kester agrees, noting how each Nalpar pump appropriates space by and for women’s work. “Its efficacy,” he writes, “resides precisely in the claiming of space and power to limit access (via social norms) to women, in a context in which that power is systematically denied elsewhere.”37 Adajania is keen to distinguish DIAA’s practice from typical infrastructural projects, specifically arguing that “what Navjot and her colleagues have inserted into the village space is not a piece of developmental architecture.”38 She points to the power accrued to the project through its deliberate overlapping of artistic and developmental networks, not least through systems for the circulation of craft. But these overlaps have long existed. Navjot’s presence in that particular village in Bastar is made possible by Shilpi Gram, which is itself built upon a complex public-private system of artistic patronage, one that is formally congruent with the roles played by many sorts of NGOs in underserved rural areas. The Nalpar project necessitated work within the complex network of village, municipal, state, and developmental authorities that govern the provision of water in rural India. The manner in which the Dialogue collective has recombined these existing systems of knowledge and networks of patronage is what makes it “hot” bricolage. Its extension or joining of these networks was opposed through a reassertion of the categorical distinction between art and everyday life by Jaidev Baghel; their eviction from Shilpi Gram was a cut in the network, to use Strathern’s term. It is worth noting that foundations promoting infrastructural development in rural India have also encouraged growth in the craft sector, particularly among women artisans. DIAA’s work was funded, in part, by an International Fund for Agricultural Development grant that supported bell-metal sculpture workshops for women artists.39 In the case of international funding organizations like the Ford Foundation, patronage extended to fine art, as well.40 In other words, DIAA seized upon this intersection rather than creating it. Its intervention is not only to forefront the importance of design in infrastructure projects, as do the Nalpar pumps, but also to explicitly INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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include deliberative processes in their planning. They attempt to extend the definition of infrastructure networks to include the modes of decision making by which they are produced.41 Both of those interventions constitute critique of infrastructural development as it is typically carried out. Across ten years, then, the project that became DIAA went a considerable distance from its starting point. What had begun as an attempt by an urban contemporary artist of already established stature, Navjot, to critique appropriation by engaging seriously with adivasi art and artists, changed as it circulated internationally, amplified and reframed by a series of curators. But its more fundamental transformation came when the collective began to engage with infrastructure, violating the assumptions that underwrote Shilpi Gram. DIAA’s emphasis on deliberation and design, as well as its choice of a small scale, have allowed the Nalpar project to function well as an artistic intervention. The terms of evaluation are clear in both Adajania’s and Kester’s texts, which shift attention away from the infrastructural objects themselves and toward the process and its meaning. What, then, is the significance of the choice of infrastructure as an object for this artist collective? Is the Nalpar project a utopian conceit, imagining an alternative set of possibilities for the provision of essential services, one fully engaged with issues of representation? Or should its interpretation include its instrumental effects? As far as I am aware, even as this project absorbed funding from developmental groups and made constructive improvements through design and collective modes of decision making, there is no record of the pumps being judged according to developmental criteria, like scalability or measurable social effect. Even as the Nalpar project changed the everyday experiences of Kondagaon village, the pumps themselves were static forms. Documentation of DIAA’s work has circulated widely within the interpretive network of contemporary art, however. The main portion of the Nalpar project, which occurred from 2000 to 2005, coincided with rapid growth in the Indian art market. We have already seen how the nonprofit sector of the art world grew alongside market-based institutions, as a complex reaction to that atmosphere of speculation. Indeed, DIAA’s success in funding its work within the nonprofit and foundation sector is a testament to the organization’s nimbleness, as well as to the growing tendency of organizations to support crossovers between the arts and development. In its focus on dialogue and collaboration, as well as its privileging of the needs of the women and children who go to the pump each day, the Nalpar project was fundamentally disruptive of the typical processes by which infrastructures are built, as well as the categorical distinctions that make art meaningful. MATERIAL FOR PLAY: LIVING IT. OUT. IN. DELHI AND TRASH

In 2005, Vivan Sundaram partnered with the Delhi-based NGO Chintan (est. 2002), which organizes and advocates for ragpickers and their children. As Sundaram explained to me in an interview, his interest in the issues surrounding the sociology of 174

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waste grew out of casual interactions with ragpickers or recycling workers in his own neighborhood, in the context of consistent state attempts to evict and resettle them.42 It was only after a year of attending twice-monthly meetings of the NGO that he began to ask for the sacks and sacks of waste that he needed for his project.43 Sorting through the materials with the Chintan workers, they created a six-inch (15 cm) mud base on which to work, and finally built a sixty-by-twenty-foot (18 × 6 m) installation of recycling that reflected, if inexactly, an expanding city that looked something like Delhi. The body of work based in this large installation is among the artist’s most playful. Though tied to the material life of the city and its social divisions, it has a ludic tone grounded in the project’s distinctly loose, improvisational process. Art historian Saloni Mathur recounts Sundaram’s open-studio day in 2005 when she saw the “garbage city.” She writes, “Dozens of playful vignettes could be detected at the micro level, for instance a football match of toothpaste-tube players being cheered on by a group of onlooking recyclables. At the macro level, the impression was that of ordered chaos, with separate but distinct zones of patterned materials.”44 Sundaram photographed this huge landscape from conventional points of view—the aerial shot, the view from the “street,” etc.—and, shortly thereafter, the garbage city was destroyed.45 Images of the garbage city featured in a 2005 exhibition, living it. out. in. delhi, and then, in digitally reworked and more lavishly printed versions, in the 2008–9 exhibition, Trash. While the initial photographs are more transparently connected to the installation itself, the later digital collages play with histories of abstraction and city planning, while exploring the capacities of contemporary photographic practice. Viewers of living it. out. in. delhi entered the Rabindra Bhavan Gallery, one of Delhi’s least restrictive public exhibition sites for contemporary art, through a “café” set up from furniture made from recycled material, and a large installation of piles of waste, some encased in a towerlike steel frame.46 Divided among the main gallery spaces were photographs of the garbage city, including the gigantic, twenty-three-by-six-foot (7 × 2 m) analog version of Master Plan (2005, figures 81 and 87), and The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain (2005), a video work that dramatizes his studio assistant’s movement from a sleeping position nestled amidst a pile of waste into vertical flight (figure 88). This video emerged organically out of the Chintan ragpicker’s work in his studio, Sundaram reports, and the artist was surprised and delighted by the young man’s natural bearing in front of the camera. The result is delicately beautiful, but also underscores the degradation at the heart of ragpicking as a form of work. For Indian viewers of the exhibition, the association of waste collection and disposal to caste-derived labor and discrimination would have been clear. Even as Chintan describes itself as an environmentally engaged organization, it also organizes workers whose precarious status is underscored by caste. The implications of this were explored, if subtly, in a mezzanine space focused on Chintan, which featured a wall of photographs of individual workers, a large map recording site locations, and a participatory drawing project, Cash and Carry (2005). These projects record the time INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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figure 87 E Vivan Sundaram, Master Plan (detail), 2005–8, digital print, 56½ × 198 in. (143.5 × 502.9 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist. figure 88F Vivan Sundaram, The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain (video still), 2005, single-projection video, 2:20 min (photo courtesy of the artist).

that Sundaram spent with the organization. Nevertheless, the manner in which the exhibition separated Sundaram’s artistic work and the work of the NGO marks a key difference between this collaboration and Navjot’s approach in Bastar, particularly after the establishment of the Dialogue collective, DIAA. In its Nalpar project, DIAA takes on the two tasks associated with contemporary nongovernmental organizations, which are to make claims on the state and to replace some the state’s delivery-ofservice functions. Chintan also does both of these things: it agitates for better conditions for waste workers and it organizes those workers in order to improve waste removal services. But the functions of the NGO were always meant to remain separate from Sundaram’s intervention, which was one of five projects that Chintan sponsored as part of a “Knowledge Power” initiative that built upon art’s “role in provoking public thinking.”47 While the DIAA project emerged from a collapse in the categorical

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distinction between art and social life, Sundaram’s work with Chintan was intended to force a limited intersection between two networks of circulation, with their distinct discursive aims and attendant publics. The re-presentation of many of these works in Sundaram’s 2008–9 Trash, without the Chintan material, served to separate these networks of circulation, largely severing the ties between the artistic work and the infrastructures of waste disposal that facilitated the gathering of materials. The 2005 installation 12 Bed Ward, which uses the soles of shoes to create beds, is less tied to the processes of salvaging those materials than to the bodily logic of discipline associated with the hospital ward that the installation resembles. More modestly produced photographs, including the pieced-together version of Master Plan that featured in the 2005 exhibition, were replaced with more lavishly produced digital prints of collages in which the play with scale, color, and repetition in the images was more clearly visible. In the 2008–9 exhibition, then, these works were presented in a way that allowed their references to long-term aesthetic discourses dealing with the intersection of waste, urban space, and modern life to dominate. This interpretive nexus has been skillfully unpacked by art historian Rakhee Balaram, who builds upon the writing of curator and critic Deepak Ananth to contextualize Sundaram’s use of waste within the meditations on modernity of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. The ragpicker, Balaram notes, is the urban equivalent of Jean-Francois Millet’s Gleaners, “which depicts the bent, hunched-over rural poor who sift through and collect leftover grains after harvest.”48 Balaram might have connected Sundaram’s work to Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), a deep dive into the worlds of those who live off food and goods discarded by others that the filmmaker self-reflexively likens to the practice of art. The reference is appropriate, because Sundaram grounds his use of waste both in the contemporary move to embrace new materials and a longer history of avant-garde film, contemporary art, and radical politics. He routinely cites experiences in London between 1966 and 1968, and in Paris during the student protests, as galvanizing in the development of his artistic and political practice. This gesture is clearest in the artist’s series of digital collages, Barricade (2008), the title of which refers to systems of control, but also the evolving grammar of protest (figure 89). This series of thirteen images combine and rescale photographs of the garbage city into imaginative landscapes that mimic urban space. They play with scale and focus to liken things that have been thrown away—paper tubes, aluminum cans, plastic cups that once held drinking water, children’s toys—to elements of city architecture—towers, apartment blocks, roads, airports, etc. Even in the most visually complex collages, the pieces of waste remain recognizable for what they are, while taking on new functions in combination. In other words, the operation at play here is again bricolage. But in this 2008 series, the materials in use are only images. The project effectively cuts its ties to the infrastructural network in which

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figure 89 Vivan Sundaram, Barricade (with two drains), 2008, digital print, 39½ × 86½ in. (100.3 × 219.7 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

Chintan operates, solidifying its interpretive space as the discursive infrastructure of art, with its attachment to authorship and the autonomy enjoyed by art objects. Sundaram’s move to untether the Barricade series both from the NGO and from the direct references to the politics of global inequality that he made in The Great Indian Bazaar frees the images and allows for more unpredictable recombinations. As art, the last series of photographs is somewhat “hotter” bricolage than the earlier stages in the project, in the sense that its points of reference are more expansive. But as an exhibition that circulated between five commercial galleries in Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, and Chicago, it is relatively “cool,” functioning fairly predictably within art’s discursive boundaries. Acknowledging the commercial context of the Trash exhibition in contrast to The Great Indian Bazaar and living it. out. in. delhi first allows for recognition of the precise moment these waste-related works reenter the market, albeit at a different point from which the materials they represent came. It also disturbs the notion that the main patrons of artist engagements with infrastructure were NGOs, foundations, and other nonprofit art institutions. There was also enthusiastic support from the commercial end of the art market for this work of Sundaram’s.49 Indeed, given the partnership of five galleries to present this body of work, it is clear that the keenest watchers of the market were very sure of its attractiveness to private collectors, independent of its implicit critique of income inequality and the wastefulness of consumer capitalism. RIVERINE NETWORKS, LIVING OR DEAD: THE YAMUNA PROJECT

In one of the videos included in Sundaram’s Trash exhibition, Flotage (2008), a raft constructed from pink-capped water bottles is piloted down the Yamuna river before 178

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figure 90 Vivan Sundaram, Flotage (still), 2008, singleprojection video, 8 min (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 91 Vivan Sundaram, Flotage (still), 2008, single-projection video, 8 min (photo courtesy of the artist).

being quickly disassembled into its plastic parts (figures 90 and 91). The raft is beautiful; the river is not. The video footage alternates between the pristine grid of the plastic raft and the river’s water and garbage-strewn banks. Indeed, it seems impossible that anyone would voluntarily walk the banks of a river so choked with effluent that it resembles a sewer drain. Astonishingly, the Yamuna remains Delhi’s largest supplier of potable water, which is collected just upstream of the city and processed before being distributed unevenly, with planned areas receiving more than ten times the per capita amount of water given to the denser, unplanned areas at the city’s outskirts. Despite its near-death status, the river remains a key part of the city’s water system, one of the most vexed and irreducibly complex of India’s infrastructural networks. Sundaram’s Flotage is a record of an action staged as part of 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (2008), a twelve-day international public art festival directed by Pooja Sood, of Khoj. Several years in the making, the festival took as its title a temperature just one degree warmer than the then-record high, as a suggestion of how near the city was to a fullblown climate crisis.50 It adapted the Khoj workshop format to invite Indian and international artists to engage with ideas of public good, accessibility, and land.51 The city was then in the throes of extraordinary growth, driven by the simultaneous remaking of key central-city neighborhoods in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games and an expansion on the outskirts made feasible by the Metro, or elevated commuter train. By following Metro routes and exposing the social rules governing public spaces, the 48°C festival as a whole was attuned to questions of infrastructure, either exploiting or exposing the failings of the systems that support life in the city. A subset of these works dealt with the Yamuna, an unprecedented moment of attention to an unappreciated river.52 INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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This broader artistic engagement with the river grew out of the work of several Delhi artists, including Ravi Agarwal and Atul Bhalla, who collaborated on a 2007 twoperson Khoj residency called The Yamuna Project.53 Agarwal and Bhalla used the residency to add to their existing individual bodies of work dealing with the river while engaging audiences through site-specific installations and participatory actions. The immediacy of the site-specific elements allowed for the articulation of an approach to ecology within art that proved important to the development of larger-scale projects like the 48°C festival. Working with a loose group of collaborators, Agarwal and Bhalla’s post-2007 engagement with ecology built upon a mature sense of how to force productive intersections among artistic, sociopolitical or civil society, and knowledge networks. Taking the organizational lead, Agarwal pursued further international collaborations, including two Indo-German collaborations, the Yamuna-Elbe Project (2010) and Embrace Our Rivers (2018), an eco-art program in Chennai.54 But the bodies of work Agarwal and Bhalla began during the 2007 residency were also deeply significant in themselves, leading to substantial individual book publications and longterm engagements. An established documentary photographer, Agarwal was also an engineer and founder of the NGO Toxics Link, which was established in 1994 to engage broadly with issues of pollution and waste. His 1990s artistic work extended the tradition of documentary street photography and included a collaborative project with Dutch sociologist Jan Bremer that focused on labor.55 A selection of his work was shown at documenta XI in 2002, as exemplary of the new circulation of discursive and documentary-based work through art-world infrastructures discussed in chapter 4.56 Shortly thereafter, Agarwal undertook Alien Waters (2004–6), a series of photographs that document both the river’s extraordinary pollution and the precarious forms of life on its banks, as people farm, wash clothes, and do other sorts of work. In his writing about the project, Agarwal emphasizes the experience of visiting the river and his efforts to record the heady mixture of human resiliency and environmental degradation that characterized this period of rapid development in Delhi. For his Khoj residency project, Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? (2007, figure 92), Agarwal moved upstream. He sought out a much cleaner part of the river, where marigolds are farmed in the rich soil of the flood plain for sale in the Old Delhi market. Using documentary photographic techniques, Agarwal records the cycle of growth, harvest, sale and use of the flowers, including ritual uses by which they are returned to the riverbank. Alongside these works, Agarwal adopted a series of other methods that were newer to his practice, including the production of short videos, a participatory project mediated by the internet, and a series of site-specific installations at the river. Viewed by invitees on an open studio day, Agarwal’s installations drew attention to the development of the riverbank in service of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, which were used to fast-track building and slum demolition projects over both environmental and land rights–based objections. Tracing out grids with string, the installations mimicked the treatment of land by 180

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figure 92 Ravi Agarwal, Have You Seen the Flowers on the River, 2007, inkjet print, 11 × 16 in. (27.9 × 40.6 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

developers. In one, the sandy bank is then pierced with dozens of steel knives (figure 93), while in another, the grid was filled with steel rebar. The participatory project, by contrast, was meant to remind viewers of their impact on the river even as they remained at home. Viewers submitted a photograph of a sink in their home and received a poster with a link to his blog in return. Agarwal’s intention was to emphasize the fact that “while flowers flow from the river to the city, wastewater flows from the city to the river.”57 Agarwal continued to focus on circulation as he documented the practice of farming and selling marigolds in a project sustained through 2012. His photographs present marigold production as a model of small-scale sustainability that involves everyday acts of ingenuity and bricolage, based in the need to “make do.” His installation and participatory projects were more temporary, although it is possible to see echoes of Agarwal’s approaches in curatorial projects that followed. Particularly proximate is the work of Haubitz + Zoche, The Yamuna Blues (2008), presented in the 48°C festival the following year. They built a forty-foot (12 m) water tower, made from the ubiquitous bamboo-scaffold material used in urban construction, supporting a circular video projection. The footage shows how the river changes character moving from its pristine mountain source across its littered and lived-in length. Just as in Agarwal’s shorterterm, more improvisational works, their more polished installation imitated construction in its materials while using images to trace the river as a network. INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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figure 93 Ravi Agarwal, River Bank I, 2007, archival inkjet print, 42 × 60 in. (106.7 × 152.4 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

A few years before the residency, Bhalla had begun to investigate water’s rich set of meanings in a series of works that moved between performance, photography, and sculpture/installation. A distillation of his approach came in I was not waving but drowning II (2005), a series of fourteen profile self-portraits made as Bhalla slowly immersed himself in the river (figure 94). The images refer to a ritual act associated with high-caste Hindu communities, cut through with viewers’ more secular knowledge of the river’s filth. These arresting images—still and concentrated—exemplify what Kavita Singh describes as the “reticence of his presence,” or the sense that, as Bhalla performs, he does not seek or return the viewer’s glance, but rather invites us to watch him experience something.58 The displacement of attention is even more fundamental to works in which Bhalla’s experience is recorded indirectly. In 2007, he began to document infrastructural systems through a combination of performance and photography, as he visited and recorded water systems. In a solo show that year, he showed a series of twenty-eight images of hand pumps; another of twenty-eight images of Mayur Jugs—thermos-style containers that people place along the street to offer water to passersby; and another of twenty-five images of MCD Taps, or faucets installed and maintained by the city of Delhi. All three series calmly document the ways that people have adapted public infrastructure for the provision of water. Together, these works also document the artist’s attentiveness to these boring and basic details about the provision of life. 182

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figure 94 Atul Bhalla, I was not waving but drowning—II, 2005, one in a series of fourteen prints, digital print on archival paper, each 12 × 18 in. (30.5 × 45.7 cm) (photo courtesy of the artist).

While much of this work is based in his home city of Delhi, Bhalla created Mumbai Walk for a residency in the same year, which recorded his passage through that city through images of storm drains. For his 2007 Khoj residency, Bhalla combined his attentiveness to water infrastructure with the layered meanings attached to the river. A quiet endurance work, Yamuna Walk (2007) involved four days of walking along the river bank, covering a distance of about thirty-five miles (56 km). While walking, the artist made 234 photographs of the changing landscape and condition of the river and the people who live along it. The walk begins on the northern edge of the city, where heavy equipment digs out the rich riverbank, presumably for use in the production of concrete. We know this about INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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Delhi, but we aren’t explicitly told. The framing text, a diary entry marked 23 January 2007, simply lists words that document, as do the photographs, what the artist saw. He is not immune to sentiment: on that first day, he sees fishermen small boat little catch large hearts and broad smiles

But this is unusual. His spare text for the next day, as he walks south to and through Delhi, records how he is forced off the riverbank, as the river becomes inaccessible or where the bank is covered in detritus. The photographs begin to document the city’s destructive advance on the river, recording advertisements for real estate projects and other evidence of development. The water begins to take on an inky blackness that looks too viscous for water. In one double spread in the book, its surface is covered in suspicious bubbles, but also the reflections of women washing their clothes. But there is a careful balance struck here between the landscape’s hostility to his presence and its accommodation of it. And while the work was decidedly difficult to perform, Bhalla neither attracts nor accepts the viewer’s focus, which is turned toward the fraught relationship between people and the land. The photographs are even-handed in their attention, paying no more mind to one sort of subject—a bridge, drying clothes, a small temple—than another. The river joins these people and things together in a line—a network, one that is cut across, physically, by roads and bridges, and temporally, by developments abandoned and still to come (figure 95). But it also refuses, as does Bhalla, the distinctions that are often the prerequisite for understanding: between organic and inorganic, natural and manmade, good and evil, pure and polluted, sacred and profane, and so on. In a curatorial and critical discourse that often looks to art’s interventions in public discourse as evidence of politics, the two artists share the goal of directing attention toward human impact on the environment, especially as wrought by the privatization of natural resources in the name of development. Bhalla’s performances emphasize conceptual development and formal innovation, while Agarwal’s less introspective and more declarative work traces the connections between his artistic production, curatorial work, activism, and collaborations with journalists and academics. Agarwal’s art practice reads as knowledge production by other means. Unlike Bhalla, he is deeply committed to the gesture of demystification: just as Alien Waters documented unseen aspects of life on the river, his activist focus on toxicity draws attention to environmental harms that might otherwise escape notice. The 2007 Khoj residency combined Agarwal’s demystifying gesture of the photographic tracing of flowers to 184

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figure 95 Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (through 22kms), 2007, performance with photography, installation completed as part of the Khoj International Artists Association Eco + Art Residency (photo courtesy of the artist).

Old Delhi market with more participatory actions that attempted to make legible, through artistic means, networks for the provision of water and impacts on the riverbank of extractive construction and development. By contrast, Bhalla’s focus is much more on the experience of space, and on the relationship between human experience and the infrastructures that make it possible. Like Aar-Paar, Bhalla’s Yamuna Walk treats the formal properties of the river landscape as medium-like constraints. His act of walking draws together, into a line, the various networks in which the river functions, and how it is therefore connected to everyday life far from its banks. It also makes clear, if indirectly and subtly, what its exploitation in turn does to the bodily experience of those who live on the river and depend on it for life. Bhalla’s work, from I was not waving but drowning II forward, builds upon viewers’ haptic responses in ways that are similar to the work of Sheela Gowda, Subodh Gupta, and Anita Dube, discussed in chapter 3. Indeed, while Bhalla’s work operates in tandem with historical, cultural, and ecological forms of knowledge, it carves out a space for itself that is stubbornly irreducible to those sets of ideas. Both Agarwal and Bhalla presented projects that are remarkably self-assured and multiply pronged, and that participate in infrastructural systems even as they make their affordances and insufficiencies visible. In so doing, they build upon formal gestures and art infrastructures that were established over the previous decade, in INFRASTRUCTURE, COLL ABORATION, AND THE CUT

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projects outlined in this and previous chapters. Both the Khoj residency form and the discursive expectations established by Sarai allow Agarwal and Bhalla to work together to advance art-knowledge practices that layer network upon network. These strategies were more visible within the art scene after the onset of the global financial crisis, which had an immediate corrective effect on the art market but left the extraordinary rate of development in Delhi undisturbed. After the withdrawal of privately funded exhibition projects like Sundaram’s Trash, projects like The Yamuna Project and Agarwal and Bhalla’s later collaborations found their home in the remaining grant-based, nonprofit forms of patronage, with supplemental, financially modest support from publications and institutional collecting. INFRASTRUCTURE AND FORM

This chapter has traced a decade of artistic engagements with infrastructure, noting the manner in which infrastructural networks at once seized the imagination of artists and came to shape the form of their work. In different ways, each of the artists discussed used their engagement with infrastructure to deliberately blur the boundaries of the art object. This ranges from a satisfying doubling of form and material, as in Sundaram’s initial 1997 spill of photographs in Great Indian Bazaar, which both represented and imitated spills of recycled goods at informal market, to a more complicated sense of the manner in which both rural and urban infrastructures for the circulation of water quite literally shape the bodies of the artists and their communities. Nalpar taps affected the bodily experience of DIAA members just as sharply as the modes of building along the Yamuna constrained Bhalla’s ability to trace its distance on foot. Like Bhalla’s Yamuna Walk and Agarwal’s engagement with marigold farming, artist projects that made use of infrastructures of circulation found meaning in the cuts in the network. The Indian and Pakistani artists involved in Aar-Paar explored the productivity of friction, including in their (in)ability to move art objects across borders, and to display them (or not) in city spaces. While the Aar-Paar project stopped in 2004, the Triangle Network organizations that originally brought Shilpa Gupta and Huma Mulji together continued to move artists across the border for residencies and workshops. The 2005 exhibition Beyond Borders of Pakistani art in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, discussed in chapter 2, led a number of Pakistani artists’ work to circulate within the Indian scene through gallery exhibitions. One of the largest collections of Indian contemporary art, Anupam and Lekha Poddar’s Devi Art Foundation, began to collect Pakistani art very seriously. Their collecting activities required significant engagement with the bureaucratic processes that slow movement across the border and encouraged the meeting of artists and collectors in third spaces in Europe and the Persian Gulf. Overall, while these artists were not uniquely exposed to the ways that changes in everyday life made the layering and intersections of networks visible, they chose to be particularly attuned to those changes. They understood how patterns of capital, of 186

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travel, of water distribution, of the resale of discarded goods, of shipping, of the sale of artistic work, and of thought were not just analogous systems of circulation but were themselves mutually constitutive elements in a broader assemblage. While the works discussed in this chapter are very different from one another, they do share two main gestures: one, they make the invisible structures that condition everyday life more visible to viewers; and, two, they do so by pinpointing and exploring the formal symmetries and contiguities between different infrastructural networks. This is perhaps most visible in Sundaram’s Master Plan, a city mapped from waste that represented, in parodic but also materially congruent miniature, the changes seen in Delhi streets at the time. It captures beautifully the manner in which Delhi’s massive infrastructural project of the decade—the Metro elevated train—at once radically transformed movement across the city and led to the twinned spectacles of riverbanks excavated for materials to produce concrete and massive piles of rubble and detritus all over the city. Infrastructure became a point of meeting for these artists across a decade of profoundly destabilizing change, as a shared device for linking the changing horizons of artistic work to those of everyday life.

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CONCLUSION Infrastructure Is Not (Only) a Metaphor

has been whirring in the background of this account, facilitating all manner of changes in the infrastructure and form of art. Growth in the market for Indian contemporary art began after the liberalization of India’s economy eased the flows of money and goods in and out of the country. The greatest acceleration in prices for art came between 2003 and 2008, when the global recession caused a serious contraction. In the immediate aftermath, the hottest portion of the market for contemporary Indian art lost about one-third of its value.1 The market in modern Indian painting rebounded relatively quickly, but the contemporary market rebuilt itself much more slowly. Its capacity to support new artists was greatly diminished, so with some important exceptions market support solidified largely around the group of artists that had established their practices by then. While a complex network of institutions continues to support growth in contemporary art, the speed of transformation has slowed. In the midst of the boom, the artists, gallerists, writers, and collectors involved in the Indian art market complained about

THE ART MARKET

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alternating feelings of euphoria and unease. One Mumbai gallerist said that she and her colleagues working in the market would be genuinely grateful if my research could explain what was happening. In 2012, when I conducted a set of interviews assessing the effects of the market crash, another gallerist told me in confidence that he was secretly relieved when it happened, because he had found it so difficult to know how to make decisions in the context of so much risk. Such feelings of insecurity drive a desire in the art community for the demystification of the market and motivate talk about the relationship between market and aesthetic value. Questions of value are immediate for these actors, but they are arguably just as important for emergent scholarship on contemporary Indian art. In 2010, art historian Kavita Singh issued a provocative warning in the pages of Art India, the magazine most frequently read by Indian art insiders. In a piece nominally concerned with the desultory attitude to collecting displayed by New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, Singh writes: “In the absence of public institutions, it is the market that is producing the discourse, through web-resources, auction catalogues and books; it is the market that is re-writing our art history by conducting research and bringing old and new artists to new prominence; it is the market that is building the archive of modern and contemporary art.”2 While she avoids dismissing the art historical work done by commercial entities, noting that their efforts “seem to go well beyond the demands of self-interest,” Singh frames her account against a normative sense of the institutional structure for art historical knowledge in which art museums and universities, nonprofit and committed to the public trust, are in charge of collecting and archiving, while commercial galleries stick to the business of art. Singh’s normative argument—her call for the production of an archive disentangled from the art world—is certainly compelling. Singh saw the flux in private Indian art institutions as potentially dangerous, with many adopting the quick pace of the market and leaving state-led flagship museums lagging behind. This resonates with the work of scholars Lee Weng Choy and Peggy Wang, who discussed the process of writing about art during similarly rapid transformations in Singapore and China, respectively.3 Despite the value of these accounts, as well as these authors’ commitments to the analysis of artistic practice, they stop short of developing a method through which concerns about the art world can enter into accounts of works of art.4 In this volume, by contrast, I have attempted to demonstrate the advantages of eliminating that hard separation and considering the complicated relationship between the infrastructure that made it possible for art to be made, understood, and circulated, and that which constitutes its form. Both the anthropological literature on infrastructure and interdisciplinary studies of materiality provide tools for this account, for they fundamentally complicate commonsense distinctions between phenomena and epiphenomena. Particularly important are Deleuze and Guatttari’s idea of the assemblage and Bruno Latour’s notion of the actant, which find agency in both people and things, as well as 190

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in the material and the immaterial, therefore profoundly altering the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. As I conducted my research for this book, such fundamental categorical distinctions were continually muddied by the art I studied. In the works discussed here, the form of art is conditioned not just by the logics of medium but also by a series of factors that are commonly understood to facilitate artistic practice. Those include the emergence of new discourses of thought, new materials or communications technologies, or new conditions of exhibition, from well-funded biennial commissions and newly spacious art galleries to low-budget site-specific workshops. In this period, such infrastructural changes were so dramatic that it is harder than usual to ignore their causal effects on changes in art. But the truest account of these changes is subtle and dialogic: it requires acknowledgement of the odd and often counterintuitive assemblages that came together at that time to hasten, encompass, and then be affected by and participate in new modes of artistic expression. I was encouraged to think about infrastructure and form together because of my research method. When I began my work as a researcher in 1999, nearly all archival material was found exclusively in private collections. As a result, my method combines study of written sources and works of art with extensive interaction and interviews with the artists, gallerists, curators, critics, and collectors who are involved in the production and circulation of art.5 In response to the extraordinary openness of many of these people to collaboration, I began, even as a graduate student, to participate in Indian art world institutions first as a writer and then, for a short time, as a curator. In the process, my research was able to confirm a principle elucidated by Pierre Bourdieu, that the density of social interaction at the moment of a work of art’s production is key to its analysis. Historical accounts of art that find it too “difficult to conceive of the vast amount of information which is linked to membership of a field” take a serious risk, Bourdieu warns, because “ignorance” of such information “produces a derealization of works,” as they are “stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of their time.”6 In that “vast amount of information,” Bourdieu includes the talk that is “in the air” at the time of a work’s production. Art talk forms an everyday art historical archive that is as revealing as it is indiscriminate. It both forges the ties and lubricates the networks of friendship, discourse, and commonality that constitute art and its infrastructures. As Kristine Khouri found in her research on Arab modernism, there is a “parallel history, subtending the historical: a skein of friendships and betrayals, grudges and affairs, suicides and depressions that the researcher has to navigate. . . .”7 The question Khouri poses is to what degree those stories are relevant to the art historical record. I would argue that a careful study of such talk allows historians of contemporary art to unpack key questions of value, while a focus on the relationship of talk to particular works of art helps to maintain an analytical connection between social formations and artistic practice. CONCLUSION

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I qualify the study of art talk as “careful” because much of what is said is what Khouri calls “definitively un-verifiable speech,” or gossip. Defined as speech that is personal, possibly untrue, and about other people, gossip is certainly a recognizable component of art talk. It is unreliable, but that does not mean it must fall outside the legitimate art historical archive. Working in feminist and queer frameworks, respectively, Irit Rogoff and Gavin Butt have shown how to use gossip, finding that certain forms of speech, like the accusation of homosexuality or the revelation of extramarital affairs, have strongly affected both the form of works of art and their reception.8 Using evidence found in letters, criticism, and other written records, their work suggests that gossip can shape art’s history. This account adds to theirs that such art talk is valuable, whether the subject is sex, friendship, or—as in India in this period—money. In art talk, the most salacious or unreliable statements are rarely isolated, but instead permeate a form of conversation in which interlocutors test each other’s knowledge by carefully mixing what they say with what they expect is known, and by declining to separate personal lives from professional practices. In the context of the Indian market boom, a great deal of talk revolved around the influx of market logic into the work and everyday lives of artists. Indeed, one way of marking one’s membership in what is called in India, without irony, the “art fraternity,” was to share in ambivalence about the expanding market, which at once provided a welcome escape for artists from financial precarity and presented a threat to accepted modes of work and aesthetic evaluation. In its overlapping rhetorical forms, art talk served in India in this period as a clearinghouse for thoughts about the art market and its impact on artist’s lives and work. “MITHU OWNS SENSEX”

Let us consider an unusually clever example of art talk as preserved and made accessible through social media. On February 8, 2010, New Delhi–based artist Mithu Sen posted Art History, a 2004 print by Paris-based Serbian artist Vuk Vidor, on her Facebook timeline. The print consists of a list of statements, like “Mondrian owns geometry/Pollock owns drippings/Hockney owns California/Beuys owns felt . . .,” that pithily boil down each canonical artist’s work to a single recognizable attribute, usually a signature subject, medium or technique. At first it wasn’t clear where Sen had found the image, but two Mumbai-based artists quickly captioned the print, having seen it recently in a local gallery. It didn’t take long for someone to suggest making an Indian version, and lists were quickly drawn up, with some entries contested and others left to stand. The main contributors were two gallerists and a critic, all prominent, consummate insiders to the Mumbai scene. Other comments came from artists, writers, and collectors, until together what emerged was a kind of shorthand guide to Indian art. The lighthearted banter about who “owns” what may have required intimate knowledge of artists’ work to write, but it was directed toward maximum humor rather than subtle interpretation. The lists felt edgy, and contributors occasionally stopped to 192

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clarify in comments that no offense was meant and that it was all in good fun. The risk came in how much the jokes relied upon a keen sense of market logic, a determination not only of who deserved mention but which work was the most characteristic of each artist’s brand. That judgment included an acknowledgement that once an artist’s brand is established, no other artist can approach that characteristic without risk of being labeled “derivative.” This logic of brand, which overlaps substantially with but is not, of course, identical to ideas of artistic innovation and aesthetic value, is an aspect of contemporary art practice that is both utterly fundamental and rarely openly discussed. The parodic mode of the posts dropped only once, when one commenter bluntly wrote, “The market owns everything!” Mithu Sen herself posted “Mithu owns SenSex,” which is a pun on her name, the nickname for the Indian stock index, and her embrace of eroticism. As she noted on Facebook, it was an old joke made back in 2006—at the height of the boom in both the art market and the stock market—by the critic Girish Shahane. Shahane responded to Sen’s citation of his phrase by good-naturedly contributing a long list to the game. The February 2010 timing of the post is revealing, in hindsight, because it came just two weeks before Sen opened a solo exhibition, Black Candy: (iforgotmypenisathome), at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai. A meditation on male sexuality, the drawings in the Black Candy exhibition were risky in content, sitting on the edge of the erotic and the abject. The exhibition design was more immersive and multisensory than what might be expected from a gallery show of drawings. Viewers were able to slide works around, shifting their order, and their imagery was supplemented by a sound installation and by candies, which guests were invited to suck on as they viewed the work (figure 96). To those most intimately familiar with Sen’s work and thinking, her Facebook joke that “Mithu owns SenSex” was particularly funny, for it riffed on her longstanding combination of market popularity and rhetorical opposition to market-based influence on her work. In Black Candy, her rhetorical opposition to the market came in her strategic deployment of obscenity. One of her earlier gestures against the market was a participatory project she called Free Mithu (2007– ). Beginning in 2007, Sen invited each of her friends to forward her request for a “letter with love” to one of their contacts—being sure that it was someone she did not already know—with a promise that their letter would be met with a free artwork in return. Her website promised three “mega prizes” to the most interesting responses (figure 97). After two years of receiving letters and gifts from friends of friends, Sen staged an exchange at Khoj, during which gift givers could show up and receive their return gift, with instructions to look at it only later, in private. The tone of Sen’s project was playful, but it was animated by a sense of alienation from the marketdriven culture of contemporary art and the demands that it was placing upon her practice. She conceived of the project within the framework of “radical hospitality,” a long-term practice that Sen began to develop in this period. Sen stages relationships that, as she recently articulated to me, seek “a conducive hospitality that doesn’t CONCLUSION

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figure 96 Mithu Sen, Black Candy: “iforgotmypenisathome” (installation view), Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2010 (photo courtesy of the artist and Chemould Prescott Road).

indulge in itself, in which one can comfortably pursue dialogues and activities that can generate discomfort.”9 This often involves the disruption of conventional behavior. At the Khoj event, for instance, she inverted the expectations of her viewers by displaying the letters, while her works were hung on the wall, encased in frilly cloth bags (figure 98). Sen began the Free Mithu project near the height of the boom. Shahane described the intensity of market demands in a 2006 article that stands out as a candid statement about that period.10 The piece begins with reported speech (gossip, really), from “a friend” who explained why he had bought a painting by an older and very wellknown artist: “Somebody told me the guy is really ill, and once he pops it the prices will shoot up, so I invested.” Shahane describes himself as “exasperated” with the auction house specialists, gallerists, and artists encouraging the kind of market in which “few buyers are purchasing for love,” and he predicted a crash within two years.11 Though it would likely be “triggered by global factors,” Shahane writes, “ . . . once the tipping point arrives, developments intrinsic to India will take over and probably make the correction deep and painful.” Shahane was proved absolutely right; the crash came eighteen months later and it was, indeed, devastating. In 2009, when Sen exhibited her gift project, the market she had wanted to step out of was in free fall, and her project’s critical tone was replaced by a sense of disorientation and loss. 194

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figure 97 E Mithu Sen, Free Mithu invitation for “Letters with Love,” 2007–present, www.mithusen.com (photo courtesy of the artist). figure 98 G Mithu Sen, Free Mithu gift exchange at Khoj Studios, New Delhi, February 19, 2009 (photo courtesy of the artist).

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By the next year, when Sen posted Vidor’s Art History on Facebook, the art market was less volatile, and insiders largely felt that control had been returned to the fraternity of art lovers. This community, eager to distinguish their more aesthetically driven definition of value, used the language of ownership lightly in their posts, in parody of those, like Shahane’s “friend,” who see art primarily as an investment. In her longterm exploration of radical hospitality, Mithu Sen extends the boundaries of the artistic community by eliciting viewers’ affective responses, and then considers these exchanges to be part of her artistic practice. The acts of speech she encouraged on Facebook, by contrast, conform to the classic anthropological view of gossip as a social practice that shores up the boundaries of community against those who violate its shared norms.12 Juxtaposed, these vignettes show how Sen worked critically within a period of market extremes. They also give a sense of what was perhaps underemphasized in Infrastructure and Form’s chapters but was certainly key to the book’s construction: the solid sense of community around art, the role that conversation plays in its maintenance, and the balance struck within art talk between a rhetoric of belonging and of self-conscious, rolling autocritique. It is crucial to maintain a sense that judgments about art’s value and its direction are driven by consensus. For art to circulate, it must be recognized as valuable by a whole host of human actors, even as nonhuman actants work to make its mobility possible. Its advocacy for the careful inclusion of gossip is this book’s final accommodation of the dialectic of materiality and mediation that was introduced in chapter 3. AFTER THE BOOM

One of infrastructure’s primary roles is to control the timing of circulation. With that in mind, it is important to note how strongly the contraction of capital that caused the Great Recession affected the sense of temporality within Indian art infrastructure. In the simplest of terms, things slowed down. There were fewer transactions in the market, less movement of works physically over space, and decisions were made more slowly and deliberately. As mentioned, for some of the artists, gallerists, and collectors who had been caught up in the market, there was a sense of relief mixed in with the sense of loss. There were some who had been badly overextended and lost significant parts of their business, and others who dropped out altogether after the end of the boom. Art talk at the time came to include stories of the closure of major galleries and liquidation of portions of collections, as well as the real suffering of artists who had not yet developed the cushion necessary to sustain their practices through the crisis. When the Indian art world picked itself up and began to reconstitute its local, national, and international networks, those networks reemerged in a somewhat different configuration.13 Of the changes brought on by the market crash, three stand out. The first was just before the crash, when collectors looking to explore less overheated parts of the market embraced art from other countries in South Asia, extending the 196

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figure 99 Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing II, December 11–14, 2007, Chatterjee and Lal, Mumbai (photo courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee and Lal).

process discussed with regard to Rashid Rana and Aar-Paar. Second, less capitalintensive forms of practice emerged as practical counterpoints to the more spectacular efforts of the boom era, sustaining the practices of performance artists like Nikhil Chopra (figure 99). Third and most counterintuitively, art professionals turned back to the state for patronage, rejuvenating older institutions and inventing new ones in the process. Much of the energy there came in the city of Mumbai, where two colonialera museums, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (the former Prince of Wales Museum) and the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, began to mount ambitious and sophisticated exhibition schedules featuring contemporary art. Along with these three changes in existing art infrastructure, the most significant new institutions included private museums of contemporary art, most importantly the establishment in 2010 of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi. Similar private institutions were founded in the New Delhi area and other metropolitan cities in India; each reflected the particular set of commitments of the individual collector. The KNMA has a particularly crucial role, however, because of the unparalleled ambition of its acquisition program and its work to sponsor exhibitions of its holdings in major museums outside of India. The KNMA has built a collection that combines key, now canonical works with deeper holdings from a wider range of artists; the exhibitions it mounts make credible claims to comprehensiveness. Through loans and CONCLUSION

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sponsorships, the KNMA has supported institutions in Europe and the United States as they began to develop expertise in South Asian modern and contemporary art and mount their own exhibitions. Such institutions have also begun to hire curators who could develop new exhibition and acquisition programs, first those who had cut their teeth in Australian institutions in the 1990s, and then a small group of talented curators and scholars of South Asian descent who had been trained in the period of the boom. But the KNMA collection has answered a common complaint of the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s: that the most formally ambitious works by Indian artists were more accessible to audiences abroad than at home.14 Alongside KNMA, the most significant post-recession institution is the KochiMuziris Biennale, which had its first edition in 2012.15 It was founded by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, two “Bombay Boys” of Malayali descent who returned to Kerala to develop the project. Drawing on a combination of Kerala state government and private financing, the biennial exhibits work in disused buildings associated with the spice trade in the island port of Kochi, as well as in a series of other colonial-era buildings, most of which are in walking distance of one another. Seeking to imbed itself in the region’s long history, the biennial refers to Muziris, a lost city that was buried in a massive fourteenth-century flood. After Bose and Komu curated the first exhibition, they brought in an impressive slate of artist-curators for later editions, maintaining a complex and layered program that is aimed at local, national, and international art audiences. Particularly compelling is its Students’ Biennale, which brings together work from a national network of art institutions and has become an opportunity for mentorship and professionalization for young artists, as well as a showcase for emerging talent. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an unusually self-conscious demonstration of art’s dependence on infrastructures of circulation. Its initial curatorial themes made direct reference to the city’s layered histories of trade and colonization and past and present cosmopolitanisms.16 Artists have routinely exploited the fact that the exhibition’s unair-conditioned spaces still smell of the spices they once warehoused. Other artists have struggled to adapt to insufficient electrical and audiovisual equipment, or with issues of worker strikes. Visitors to the exhibition’s many far-flung venues and collateral events make long treks through parts of town that are decisively not built for foot traffic and attend shows in every possible kind of neighborhood. Very unusually, Director Bose Krishnamachari can be found at the venue nearly every day, where he meets guests and solves problems, most often by calling upon his deep and rich social network. Calling itself “the People’s Biennale,” the exhibition is extremely popular, attended by all sorts of people from India and from outside, ranging from urban schoolchildren to farmers from the hinterland to backpacking tourists to the globetrotting art elite. Its energy and multilayered scope offer an extraordinary display of both the artistic tactics discussed in this book and the power of such work to engage wide audiences. Its success has attracted imitators, with different sorts of biennial198

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style exhibition projects emerging in several other cities in India, as well as in Pakistan and Bangladesh.17 In 2018, Anita Dube, the first female curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, constructed a deliberately feminist program that included a performance by the Guerilla Girls at the opening. In the midst of their performance emphasizing the structural sexism of the New York art world, protesters interrupted to draw attention to a set of accusations of sexual harassment that had been levied against prominent male artists by younger women. Associated with the global #MeToo movement and similar moves in India’s media, film, academic and arts sectors, women anonymously reported what they had experienced while working in various roles within the Indian art world through an Instagram “whistleblower” account. The accusations prompted extensive debate, particularly about the question of anonymity. While some of the accused artists experienced sanctions of various kinds, legal action was also brought against the operators of the Instagram account.18 The exposure of the art world to #MeToo-style actions is, first, a product of the expansion of social media–based activism. But the form taken by the accusations is also connected to the ways that silences are part of the community-building power of gossip. It is also possible to see the harassment itself, as well as the complaints about it, as a direct outgrowth of the changes in art infrastructure that had made the art world a site of professional opportunity in the previous decade. A new generation of art professionals emerged during and after the boom with expectations that art institutions would have workplace protections in place.19 In response to their complaints, some institutions did build new grievance procedures that were designed to channel and adjudicate accusations and offer some form of recompense.20 All told, both the harassment and the activist response were facilitated by art’s infrastructure, including its lubrication by art talk, the staging of protests at events or through social media channels, and the interactions between named accused/perpetrators and unnamed, but significantly less powerful, accusers/victims. The understanding of this scandal is therefore just as dependent upon network thinking—and cuts in the network—as anything else discussed in this book. Overall, the post-recession period saw meaningful changes in the infrastructure that supports contemporary art in and from India as it circulates and is exhibited around the world. Mature, well-capitalized, and exciting opportunities for artists began to take hold and lose their improvisational character. It became easier to see a wide array of formally adventurous, experimental art, and artists responded by calibrating their approaches to the different sorts of audiences who viewed their work. And yet, with the exception of the further development of performance art practices, there were many fewer important changes in the form of art in this period. The group of artists that emerged in these two decades continued to develop their practices in broadly experimental and highly imaginative ways, and the network of institutions described rose up to support those practices in ways that deepened their impact. CONCLUSION

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While many younger artists have emerged onto the scene, they have often worked in line with the logics discussed in this book. Some produced new assemblages of practice. But overall, the period after 2008 has been characterized by the deepening of the infrastructural and formal shifts made in the earlier period rather than a continuation of the rapid changes before 2008. THINKING THROUGH EFFLORESCENCE

In an interview about the Aar-Paar project, Pakistani artist Huma Mulji pointed out that what has registered as a period of efflorescence in contemporary art in Pakistan might actually have been the simultaneous apprehension of more than a decade of emergent practice.21 In other words, she wanted me to consider how much of the transformation I saw came in the practice of Pakistani artists and how much was a matter of its reception. Mulji’s cautionary comment has stayed with me as I wrote this book, prompting me to consider when and how the changes I sought to chronicle were generated. I adopted the deceptively simple premise that artists, like other social actors, experience a complex set of pushes and pulls on their life and work. My holistic approach to the interactions between art’s infrastructure and its form is founded on that principle and provides an example of art historical writing that gets at the complex roots of practice. All told, Infrastructure and Form argues that the period between the liberalization of India’s economy and the onset of the Great Recession was, in fact, one of exceptional growth in the contemporary art of India and other places like it. Artistic creativity responded to the combination of an unusually deep-rooted set of changes that restructured everyday life with the growth of opportunities to create and circulate art. One of the principles of studies of globalization and late capitalism is that there are moments in which a change in quantity—the amount of mobility, the scale of capital, the rate of urbanization, for instance—turns into a qualitative shift in the conduct of life. That is one way to understand the transformation detailed here. At a certain point, the scale of artistic work and the breadth of its scope, as well as that of the institutions that facilitated it, hit a kind of tipping point. At that point, the nature of what artists and the art world at large were doing changed. The overall goal of this account is to articulate both the nature of those changes and what made them possible. Against its exploration of assemblages and networks, this book finds a dialectical path through changes in infrastructure and form. Artists reacted to the loss of confidence in the modernist project brought on by the simultaneous crisis in Ayodhya and articulation of feminism by collaborating with arts groups to experiment with installation and performance. They found opportunities for circulation of their work across feminist networks in Australia, Africa, and the United Kingdom. The feminist critique of their painting spurred male artists already grappling with changes in visual media to respond with clever and insightful engagements with the image condition, which was then radically transformed by the internet. Simultaneously, other artists chose to look 200

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past the surface of the image toward the haptics of materials, reacting both to changes in everyday things and to the manner in which materiality spoke to audiences in appropriately differentiated ways. Others responded to the same demand for legibility by exploring language and discourse as immaterial but nevertheless substantive artistic media, in the process creating powerful cross-disciplinary platforms for new forms of thought. Meanwhile, throughout the whole period, artists reacted to the broader changes in infrastructure that underlay all of these formal shifts by making those systems the medium of their work. Like all such narratives, this dialectical procession provides a through line to an otherwise complex and peopled account of a crucially important period of India’s art history. This account does not aim to be comprehensive but rather to model the manner in which changes in art follow classical patterns of the progress of thought, even as they enlist as actants a range of elements: material and immaterial, human and nonhuman. The resulting account is indeed a story of efflorescence, or of a period of immense dynamism and creativity.

CONCLUSION

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Nada Raza provided an account of the form the installation of Sheela Gowda’s Behold took at Venice, as well as at its later installation in Tate Modern, which she oversaw as a curator. She supervised the Tate Modern acquisition of Sundaram’s Memorial, too. Personal communication, October 19, 2020. 2. This book uses Bombay in mentions of the city before its official name change to Mumbai in 1995. 3. On the expansion of the Indian art market, see Iain Robertson, Victoria Tseng, and Sonal Singh, “ ‘Chindia’ as Market Opportunity” in Understanding International Art Markets and Management, ed. Iain Robertson (London: Routledge, 2008), 82–96; Roman Kräussl and Robin Logher, “Emerging Art Markets,” Emerging Markets Review 11 (2010): 301–18, which quotes an 830 percent increase in the Indian art market between 1997 and 2008, with 42 percent geometric annual returns on investment in the art market in India between 2002 and 2008. Both of these accounts privilege auction house data. For a comparative view, see Naman Ahuja, “India: A Tale of Two Markets,” Art Newspaper 17 (September 2008): 59. 4. Kajri Jain, “Post-reform India’s Automotive-Iconic-Cement Assemblages: Uneven Globality, Territorial Spectacle and Iconic Exhibition Value,” Identities 23, no. 3 (2016): 327–44. See also her Gods in the Time of Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

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5. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 328 (2013): 327–43. See also his Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 6. See, for example, Nikhil Anand, “PRESSURE: The PoliTechnics of water supply in Mumbai,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 542–64, and Antina von Schnitzler, “Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa,” Journal of South African Studies 34, no. 4 (2008): 899–917. 7. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics,” 328. 8. Cf. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds., Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989 (Utrecht: BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), especially the sections on “understructures” and political economy. More historical accounts include Anneka Lenssen, “Material Support: On Arab Artists’ Unions and Solidarity,” in Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity, and Museums-in-Exile, ed. Kristine Khouri and Reem Salti (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 139–60. 9. See, for instance, Joan Kee, “What Scale Affords Us: Sizing the World Up through Scale,” Art Margins 3, no. 2 (2010): 3–30. 10. Pamela Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 4. Emphasis in the original. A few sentences later, Lee changes the stress to discuss “the work of art’s world,” and then, later again, to discuss the work of art’s “world” (p. 24). 11. Cf. AbdouMaliq Simone, “Passing Things Along: (In)completing Infrastructure,” New Diversities 17, no. 2 (2015): 151–62. 12. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 13. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also N. Katherine Hayles, “Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Autumn 2016): 32–55. 14. For an example of this sort of reading, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Guarantee of the Medium,” in Writing in Context: French Literature, Theory and the Avant Gardes / L’écriture en context: littérature, théorie et avant-gardes françaises au XXe siècle, ed. Tiina Arppe, Timo Kaitaro, and Kai Mikkonen (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2009), 139–45. This alternative approach to the art object borrows methods from visual studies; I am most closely influenced by the work of Kajri Jain. 15. Nicolas Bourrriaud, Relational Aesthetics, English ed. (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002), 27. Bourriaud issued a broad call to “write a history of art that is the history of this production of relations with the world, by naively raising the issue of the nature of the external relations ‘invented’ by artworks.” The curator famously coined the term relational aesthetics to describe art that champions its implication in social life, which he associated with performative events in which the artist acts as a catalyst for reconfiguring social relations. 16. David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 109–43. 17. Marilyn Strathern, “Cutting the Network,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 3 (September 1996): 517–35. 18. AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16, no 3 (2004): 407–29. 19. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 10. 20. “Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. . . . The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying 204

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21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities.” Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 15. Saloni Mathur, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Founded in 1996, Art India has been the most important press outlet for modern and contemporary art in India, as I discuss in chapter 2. Specialty magazines Galerie and Art & Deal were also important, along with art-based journalism printed in TimeOut Mumbai, Architectural Digest, and Vogue India. Across the region, Sydney and then Hong Kong–based ArtAsiaPacific has been the most important journal, with internet-based projects like Art Radar Asia having somewhat less impact. My writing has been substantially integrated within the Indian art world since the publication of The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art; Stories and Photographs from the Collection of Kekoo Gandhy (Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 2003) and Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy, “His Was the First Sell-Out Show!” interview by Karin Zitzewitz, crossing generations: diVERGE; Forty Years of Gallery Chemould, 65–81, catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition curated by Geeta Kapur and Chaitanya Sambrani at National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, December 2–14, 2003. The post-1989 framework that animates Hlavajova and Sheikh’s Former West and other Europecentered discussions is generally useful, but it can obscure non-European political-economic histories. For examples of how other authors have handled questions of periodization, please see Teh’s attention to the 1997–98 fiscal crisis in Thailand or Krista Thompson’s linking of the rise of “bling” aesthetics to Jamaica’s neoliberal policies from the 1980s forward in Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Similarly crucial is Reiko Tomii’s discussion of an earlier moment of felt temporal connection or “geohistoricity,” in her Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Rebecca M. Brown, Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 125. Brown, Displaying Time, 61. Representative texts are collected in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, eds. The Biennial Reader (Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunsthall; Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010); see also Charlotte Bydler, The Global ArtWorld, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2004). Critical ethnography of such exhibitions is found in Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory, and Art (London: Routledge, 2017) and in the work of Manuela Ciotti, including “The Artist Karl Marx and the Auctioned God: ‘Postpractice’ Ethnographies of the Art World, Impossible Collaborations, and Renewable Anthropologies,” Journal of Cultural Economy 13, no. 6 (2020): 725–42. Caroline A. Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), ix–x. Joanna Grabski, Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). Gerardo Mosquera, “Some Problems in Transcultural Curating,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press, 1994), 133–39, esp. 135. Hammad Nasar, “ ‘Art Histories of Excess’: Hammad Nasar in conversation with Karin Zitzewitz,” Art Journal 77, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 108–14. Important support for this alternative, coexisting narrative comes in the experiments of both Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram with painting in an expanded field in 1991. See NOTES

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Marcella Beccaria, ed., Nalini Malani: The Rebellion of the Dead. Retrospective 1969–2018, 2 vols. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017 and 2018) and, for Sundaram’s 1991 paintings, Mathur, Fragile Inheritance. 1. FEMINIST NETWORKS, NEW BIENNIALS, AND PERFORMANCE

1. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Video, Art, Medeamaterial,” in Nalini Malani: Medeaprojekt, ed. Kamala Kapoor and Amita Desai (Mumbai: Max Mueller Bhavan, 1997). 2. Exhibitions and discussions of Malani’s work point to her late 1960s experiments with photography and film as an important precedent for these changes in approach. See Sophie Duplaix, ed., Nalini Malani: Retrospective 1969–2018, vol. 1 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017) and Marcella Beccaria, ed., Nalini Malani: The Rebellion of the Dead; Retrospective 1969–2018, vol. 2 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2018). 3. See Truth Tales, 2 vols. (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986, 1990) and In Other Words (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992), along with Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). Sangari was also an editor of Journal of Arts and Ideas. A parallel project is Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, 2 vols. (New York: Feminist Press, 1991–93). 4. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 233–53. 5. Geeta Kapur, “Dismantling the Norm,” in Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia, ed. Apinan Poshyananda (New York: Asia Society, 1996), 60–69. 6. Kapur elaborated upon her claims in a series of essays, including “The Body as Gesture” and “Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi, 1937–1990,” in When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000). 7. Marta Jakimowicz, “The Self versus Self-Images and the Cliché,” in Pushpamala: Indian Lady, catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, April 7–May 15, 2004. 8. For accounts of the exhibition, see Bernd Scherer, “Johannesburg Biennale: Interview with Lorna Ferguson,” Third Text 9, no. 31 (1995): 83–88; Candice Breitz, “The First Johannesburg Biennale: Work in Progress,” Third Text 9, no. 31 (1995): 89–94; Thomas McEvilley, “Report from Johannesburg: Towards a World-Class City?” Art in America 83, no. 9 (1995): 45–49; John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 123–26. 9. Kapur refers to Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which Fried argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting went to great lengths to create self-enclosed worlds in which the viewer’s interaction was neither sought nor rewarded. In Fried’s “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2007): 495–526, he traces absorption into the contemporary context. Kapur refers to Fried along with many other critics to highlight how a great deal of contemporary art prizes viewer interaction. 10. See also Rakhee Balaram, “Exit Wounds: Practice and Politics of Performance Art in India,” in 20th Century Indian Art, ed. Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram (London: Thames & Hudson, forthcoming 2022), 424–43. 11. For the manner in which the commonalities among secular, bhakti, and sufi traditions are handled by these artists, see my writings on Gulammohammed Sheikh in Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London: Hurst Publishers, 2014), and “Past Futures of Old Media” in At Home in the World: The Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh, ed. Chaitanya Sambrani (Delhi: Tulika Books in association with Vadehra Art Gallery, 2019). 206

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12. Images of Mahadevi Akka also appear in a series of works made in 1999. Chaitanya Sambrani, “The Possibilities of Device: The Work of Nalini Malani and Nilima Sheikh,” in Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Woman, ed. Binghi Huangfu (Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery/Lasalle-Sia College of the Arts, 2000), 127–38. 13. Participants note the project’s emphasis on collective authorship and on constructions of gender through narrative. See Anuradha Kapur, Geetanjali Shree, and Vidya Rao, “In Their Own Voice,” interview by Lakshmi Subramanyam, in Muffled Voices: Women in Modern Indian Theatre, ed. Lakshmi Subramanyam (Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2002), 231–45. 14. For a description of this work, as well as several other theater-art collaborations, see Arun Katiyar and Nandita Sardana, “Fusing Two Forms: Art Works Set the Stage and Spur Theatrical Creativity,” India Today, April 30, 1994, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/art-works-set-stagespur-theatrical-creativity-in-bombay/1/293182.html. For discussions of Vivadi’s productions of Gora and Umrao, see Vasudha Dalmia, Poetics, Plays, and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 312–51. 15. Anuradha Kapur, “Director’s Note,” brochure for production of Umrao by Vivadi, 1993. 16. Roshan Shahani, “Muted Fires of Yearning,” in Nilima Sheikh: Songspace, n.p., catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition sponsored by Gallery Chemould and held in the Stuttgart Hall Foyer, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, 26 September–7 October, 1995. 17. See also Sonal Khullar’s account of how interactions between artists and writers in Bombay spilled up to Baroda, rather than the other way around: “ ‘We Were Looking for Our Violins’: The Bombay Painters and Poets, ca. 1965–76,” Archives of Asian Art 68, no. 2 (October 2018): 111–32. 18. Explored in detail in Zitzewitz, Art of Secularism. 19. Khakhar experienced deterioration in his eyesight beginning around this period, making images about cataracts in 1989. After he underwent cataract surgery, his approach to figuration changed. 20. Jan Hoet, “Documenta als Motor,” Kunstforum International, no. 119 (1992): 485. Full quote: “Very narrative painting. Earlier, Bhupen Khakhar painted kiosks. Now, he has combined reality and pictures: his pictures reconstruct the kiosk, making us feel that we can actually buy cigarettes there—of course, those from the West. Many people do not like this. I look at it as an opportunity to experience another world and, in doing so, to reflect on one’s own. Khakhar does not present his kiosk as an irrevocable statement, rather as a way to challenge our complacency. He forces us to ask whether or not we are right. His concept of the world differs from ours as his use of color differs from what we are used to seeing: as dots (flecks) of color resolving to create an image. Blue represents distance, applied on the top and bottom of the picture, creating a connecting circle.” Translated from German by Barbara Shaw Zitzewitz. 21. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Spilling Out,” Third Text 17, no. 1 (2003): 58. 22. Rajadhyaksha, “Spilling Out,” 58. 23. See also Priya Maholay Jaradi, “The Will to Assimilate,” Art India 10, no. 1 (2005): 68–70. 24. For a full description of the paintings, see Nalini Malani’s interview with Shanta Gokhale in Kapoor and Desai, Nalini Malani: Medeaprojekt, 47. 25. For details, see Chaitanya Sambrani, “Nalini Malani: The Medea Project and Beyond,” in Kapoor and Desai, Nalini Malani: Medeaprojekt, 16–22. 26. Peter A. Campbell, “Medea as Material: Heiner Müller, Myth, and Text,” Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 85–86. 27. Cited in Sambrani, “Nalini Malani,” 19. 28. The quote in context: “ . . . the two theatre productions Medeamaterial (1993) and The Job (1996 [sic]) changed my artistic profile completely. Following them, came my series of video plays and video/shadow plays. This gave me, much more than ever, the chance to speak to a larger NOTES

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29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

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audience in an engaging way.” Nalini Malani, interview by Abhay Sardesai, “ ‘When Images Collide,’ ” Art India 15, no. 3 (December 2010): 48–53. “Nalini Malani with Ann McCoy,” Brooklyn Rail, November 5, 2013, www.brooklynrail.org/2013/11 /art/nalini-malani-with-ann-mccoy. Murtaza Vali, “Her Cassandra Complex (Interview with Nalini Malani),” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 63 (May/June 2009), http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/63/HerCassandraComplexNaliniMalani. In her interview with Gokhale, Malani uses the term installation to describe her work with The Job. Kapoor and Desai, Nalini Malani: Medeaprojekt, 50. For the relationship between Kaprow’s “environments” (which closely resemble installations) and “happenings,” see Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), and for the relationship between site-specificity and viewer engagement in Serra’s work, see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Among other genealogies is the line drawn by Germano Celant from Italian and Russian futurism through the Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Duchamp before landing in 1970s France in his “A Visual Machine: Art Installation and Its Modern Archetypes,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (1982, repr. London: Routledge, 1996), 371–86. Julie Ewington, “In the Wild: Nature, Culture, Gender in Installation Art,” in Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, ed. Catriona Moore (St Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 228–48. Ewington, “In the Wild,” 229. Ewington, 242. Ewington, 242. Vivan Sundaram, artist statement (insert), exhibition catalog, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996), n.p. See also the entry on Carrier in the Asia Art Archive, accessed March 3, 2017, https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search /archive/geeta-kapur-and-vivan-sundaram-archive-carrier/. Nalini Malani, email communication with the author, February 8, 2021. See Chaitanya Sambrani, “N. N. Rimzon: A House for the Self,” in Second Asia-Pacific Triennial, 96. India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art, curated by Victoria Lynn, Art Gallery of New South Wales, April 1–May 9, 1993. Cocurated with Manjit Bawa (urban) and Haku Shah (rural), the exhibition included artists N. N. Rimzon, Ravinder Reddy, Nalini Malani, Bhupen Khakhar, and Arpita Singh, as well as Jangarh Singh Shyam, Teju Ben, Minakshi, and Jaedesh Vaghi Chitava, working in adivasi and craft traditions. For a detailed account, see Lisa Chandler, “ ‘Journey without Maps’: Unsettling Curatorship in Cross-cultural Contexts,” Museum and Society 7, no. 2 (July 2009): 74–91. Caroline Turner, “Present Encounters: Mirror of the Future,” Second Asia-Pacific Triennial, 11. Writing later, Turner notes that her team-based curatorial approach was at once a rejection of the “star” curator model and an acknowledgement that large-scale exhibitions are necessarily “based on teams. The issue is how much the team as a whole is given credit for the outcome.” See Caroline Turner, “Cultural Transformations in the Asia-Pacific: The Asia-Pacific Triennial and the Fukuoka Triennale Compared,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi, and T. K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006), 237. Turner, “Cultural Transformations,” 236. The geographic framework became a focus of critique, particularly at the end of the decade. For example, see Francis Maravillas, “Cartographies of the Future: The Asia-Pacific Triennials and the Curatorial Imaginary,” in Clark et al., Eye of the

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44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

Beholder, 244–70; and Melissa Chiu, “Rough Trade: Curating Cultural Exchange in Australia,” in Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media, and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, and Mandy Thomas (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000), 123–41. Chiu focuses on the reluctance shown by curators to classify Asian-Australian artists as Australian. Raiji Kuroda, “Practice of Exhibitions in Global Society by Asians, for Asians and Some Associated Problems,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, London, 1994), 140–51. Suhanya Raffel, “The Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002, an Introduction,” in APT2002: Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2002), 8–17. The triennial was reviewed by Melanie Eastburn, “A Decade of Challenges,” Asian Art News 12, no. 6 (November-December 2002): 72–75. This show exemplifies what Joan Kee calls the new, post-2000 focus on defining “the contemporary,” in “Field and Stream: The Terrain of Contemporary Asian Art,” in APT7: The 7th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2012), 70. Indeed, smaller, network-engaged projects often accompanied biennial-style exhibitions. For instance, Fire & Life, a 1996–97 India-Australia exchange project, ran concurrently with APT2 and was organized by Victoria Lynn, Julie Ewington, and Chaitanya Sambrani for Asialink, a nonprofit run by Alison Carroll. See Alison Carroll, “People and Partnership: An Australian Model for International Arts Exchanges—The Asialink Arts Program, 1990–2010,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, Asian Studies Series Monograph 6, ed. Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014), 199–218. Nora A. Taylor, “Have Performance, Will Travel: Contemporary Artistic Networks in Southeast Asia,” Asian Journal of Social Science 44, no. 6 (2016): 725–39. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 233–53. Each of the two works this section focuses on were included in a key traveling exhibition in the United Kingdom. Rummana Hussain’s Living on the Margins (1995) was included in Inside Out: Contemporary Women Artists of India, curated by Alison Lloyd with texts by Geeta Kapur, Kamala Kapoor, and Sutapa Biswas, Middlesbrough Art Gallery Touring Exhibition, 1995–96; and Pushpamala N.’s Phantom Lady, or Kismet (1996–98) was shown in Telling Tales: Of Self, Of Nation, Of Art, curated by Rasna Bhushan, Bath Festivals Trust touring exhibition, 1997. Also shown as Telling Times at the British Council, Delhi, in 1997. Although first shown under the exhibition title Living on the Margins, these works on Perspex were later included in Rummana’s installation Home/Nation (1996). That is how they are typically represented. For eyewitness accounts of the work, see Jyoti Dhar, “Prescient Provocateur: Rummana Hussain,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 90 (September/October 2014), www.artasiapacific.com/Magazine/90 /RummanaHussain. Kamala Kapoor, “Home/Nation: Photography in the Installations of Rummana Hussain,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 13 (1997): 91. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 152. Emphasis in the original. Jones frames Hannah Wilke’s work as a “narcissistic self-relation,” in which her whiteness, beauty, and health—attested to in photographs—are all undermined by her work. See especially Jones, Body Art, 185–95. This is the aspect of Jones’s argument that has the most potential for thinking through Rummana’s work, especially after her diagnosis with cancer. See Kamala NOTES

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55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 210

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Kapoor, “Rummana Hussain: A Space for Healing,” Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Jennifer Webb, Julie Walsh, and Robyn Ziebell, 52–53, and Geeta Kapur, “Public Address: Citing Installation and Performance Art,” lecture delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, March 31, 2014, accessed May 28, 2020, archived at www.jnu.ac.in/sss/archive-lectures. Pallabi Chakravorty, Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008); Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Arshiya Lokhandwala, who had just opened her groundbreaking Lakeeren Gallery, developed the curatorial frame for the project. Pushpamala worked with Rajat Kapoor and Meenal Agarwal to shoot four rolls of film. Then, the artist moved with her then husband, film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha, to Bengaluru, where she did postproduction and planned for an expanded version of the project, in part during a period in which she was recovering from a broken leg. She was able to return to Mumbai and complete the project because of production funds associated with the Telling Tales exhibition. In the midst of the series’ production, she went to Perth for an India-Australia artist exchange, Fire and Life, discussed more later in this chapter. For a full description of its making, see Pushpamala N., “The Phantom Lady Strikes! Adventures of the Artist as a Masked Subaltern Heroine in Bombay,” Thesis Eleven, 113, no. 1 (2012): 179. Anustup Basu, “The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships: Helen and Public Femininity in Hindi Film,” in Figurations in Indian Film, ed. Anustup Basu and Meheli Sen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 139–57. Zitzewitz, Art of Secularism, chap. 3. Kekee Manzil—the House of Art, documentary film, directed by Behroze Gandhy and Dilesh Korya, 2020. See also Karin Zitzewitz, The Perfect Frame: Presenting Modern Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 2003). Some scenes were shot at a dilapidated mansion next door, which was later bought and extensively renovated by film superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Basu, “The Face that Launched,” 140. Rosie Thomas, “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts,” in Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (Delhi: Sage, 2005), 36–69. Basu, “The Face that Launched,” 145–47. See also Jerry Pinto, Helen: The Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb (Delhi: Penguin, 2006). That includes her then husband, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, with whom she watched a few films a day as he was preparing, with Peter Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (Milton Park, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1999). Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 64–88. The work was made in response to Derek Kreckler’s video work BlindNed, as part of Fire and Life, the Australia-India exchange project discussed earlier. Their two-person show, Nadia & Ned, was shown at Gallery Chemould (curated by Shireen Gandhy) in 1996 and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (curated by Suhanya Raffel) in 1997. Chaitanya Sambrani, interview with the author, July 13, 2020. Pushpamala N., interview with the author, December 15, 2013. Prajna Desai, “Confused Combinations,” Art India 3, no. 3 (1998): 79. Sambrani, interview, July 13, 2020.

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71. Pushpamala N., “The Phantom Lady Strikes!,” 158; Beth Citron, “Bhupen Khakhar’s ‘Pop’ in India, 1970–72,” Art Journal 71, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 44–61. 72. She was in residence at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London on a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in 1992–93. 2. PAINTING AND THE IMAGE CONDITION AT THE MILLENNIUM

1. While the adoption of popular forms, including posters, was crucial to Bhupen Khakhar’s work, an important precedent for the quotation of other painters through imitation of their style in Indian painting is Gulammohammed Sheikh. See Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London: Hurst Publishers, 2014), chap. 4. 2. This self-confidence may have been more obvious in even very near hindsight than at the time. Ranjit Hoskote writes that in 1995 Dodiya was still “described condescendingly as a promising younger artist.” See Ranjit Hoskote, “Atul Dodiya: The Possibilities of Political Art,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 33 (2002): 39. 3. See “Jitish Kallat in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” in Jitish Kallat, ed. Natasha Ginwala (London: Prestel, 2018), 15. 4. Many of these symbols are discussed in Girish Shahane, “The Intriguing Image,” Art India 3, no. 2 (1998): 58–60. 5. Alan Greenspan’s phrase to describe the technology-fueled bubble market was reused by economist Robert J. Shiller in Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6. As Hoskote summarized the situation in 2002, “Dodiya conceded that, on the one hand, while the formal artist’s prerogatives of representation and reflection have been usurped by new artforms [sic] such as video and assemblage, on the other hand they have also been seized by the mediatic structures of 24-hour satellite television and the internet.” See Hoskote, “Atul Dodiya,” 39–40. For earlier assessments, see Girish Shahane, “High Resolve, Low Resolution,” Art India 4, no. 3 (July–September 1999): 32–36, and Geeta Kapur, “Spectres of the Real,” Art India 4, no. 3 (July–September 1999): 54–57. The most important essays on new media art in India are by Nancy Adajania, particularly “Net Culture: Between the Fast Lane and the Slow,” Art India 7, no. 1 (2002): 26–33, and “New Media Overtures before New Media Practice in India,” in Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857–2007, ed. Gayatri Sinha (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009), 266–81. 7. See Nancy Adajania, “The Mutable Aesthetic of New Mediatic Realism,” Art India 10, no. 4 (2005): 34–42. “Bombay Boys” comes from an exhibition curated by Bose Krishnamachari at the Palette Art Gallery in Delhi in 2004. 8. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 208–27. 9. For an appropriately skeptical account of the liberal elite’s treatment of these events, but one that for our purposes inappropriately isolates cinema as a form of public visuality, see William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 10. The party also skillfully deployed Thackeray’s own image, his totemic tiger symbol, and the name and image of the eighteenth-century King Shivaji in neighborhoods across the city, in ways that tied visual spectacle and a recoded spatial imaginary to the sporadic or everyday forms of violence that facilitated the Shiv Sena’s hold on power. A valuable account of Shiv Sena’s spectacular politics is Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 11. See Zitzewitz, Art of Secularism, chap. 3. NOTES

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12. For a detailed case study, see William Mazzarella’s discussion of advertisers’ use of the phrase “very Bombay” in Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 175–80. 13. This point is most closely associated with Appadurai in his Modernity at Large, but also with his “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes from Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 627–51. 14. In Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), she focuses on the trade in small paintings on glass from China in the late eighteenth century, a technique that was quickly adopted in southern and western India but particularly in Tanjore (now Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu). The movement of artists to new centers of patronage accompanied the circulation of image forms, as did a crucial innovation in which images began to anticipate demand, rather than be commissioned by individual patrons. These shifts in the social structures of art making existed before the technological shifts that made mass reproduction possible. 15. By “vernacular consumers,” Jain means those who participated in a sphere of trade shot through with noncolonial modes of social organization. See both Gods in the Bazaar and Gods in the Time of Democracy. See also Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 16. Amit Rai, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 84–85. 17. Rai, drawing on the work of Vamsee Juluri, in Untimely Bollywood, 85–86. 18. See Girish Shahane, “Jitish Kallat: The Early Years,” in Ginwala, Jitish Kallat, 103–19. 19. Jitish Kallat, interview with the author, Seoul, Korea, April 5, 2017. 20. Peter Nagy, untitled catalog essay, Jitish Kallat: Private Limited—I (New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 1999), n.p. 21. Nagy’s writing of this period is in harmony with that of Holland Cotter, an art critic at the New York Times whose long-term interest in Indian art has led him to write astute criticism for American audiences. Of Kallat’s show, Cotter writes, “Mr. Kallat’s work has affinities with many elements in Indian culture, from film and political posters to the contemporary paintings of Atul Dodiya. The tart palette slightly resembles Andy Warhol’s, and the grainy, low-resolution visual texture smacks of digital imagery, though Mr. Kallat’s pictures are too personal to qualify as Pop and are executed almost entirely by hand, with only spot use of photo-transfer processes.” Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Jitish Kallat—‘Private Limited-I,’ ” New York Times, November 12, 1999. 22. Nagy, Jitish Kallat, n.p. 23. Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Bombay/Mumbai, 1992–2001,” in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, ed. Iwona Blazwick (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), 33. 24. I develop an alternate interpretation for these paintings in Art of Secularism, chap. 5, where I also note that Dodiya was among the artists most convinced by Kapur’s interpretation of Khakhar’s late work as narcissistic and apolitical. 25. Kapur and Rajadhyaksha, “Bombay/Mumbai,” 32–33. 26. Kapur and Rajadhyaksha, 33. Kapur rarely lays the accusation of narcissism at the feet of female artists, whether or not they use the self-portrait. 27. Kapur and Rajadhyaksha, 38. For more on Kapur’s critique of postmodernism in this period, see Karin Zitzewitz, “Turning to the Goddess: Anachronism, Secularity, and the ‘Late Style’ of Tyeb Mehta and K. G. Subramanyan,” ARTMargins Journal 3, no. 3 (October 2014): 45–67. In implicit response to this charge, in 2002, Nancy Adajania described Dahiwale’s politics as based in his neo-Buddhist/Dalit caste identity: “not just born of an internationally legislated stance of 212

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

political correctness, but . . . attributed more appropriately to his own subaltern background (neo-Buddhist) combined with his attraction to the universal language of humanism disseminated by rock and metal bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana and legendary musicians like Bob Marley.” See her “Paintings in Parentheses: Four Dialogues with an Absent Presence,” for the Debt exhibition (Anant Joshi, T. V. Santhosh, Justin Ponmany, and Riyas Komu), Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, April 2002, www.guildindia.com/SHOWS/Debt/Press-Release.htm. See Cathrine Bublatzky, Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition (Delhi: Routledge, 2019). Manuela Ciotti, “Post-colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness’, Contemporary Art and the Market in the Age of Neoliberal Capital,” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2012): 637–55. For comparison with a slightly earlier moment in this process, see Rebecca M. Brown, “The Contemporary, at a Distance,” in Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 124–52. See Karin Zitzewitz, “The Moral Economy of the Street: The Bombay Paintings of Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan,” Third Text 23, no. 2 (March 2009): 153–65. Atul Dodiya’s pre-1994 painting is squarely in the Patel-Patwardhan tradition. Ranjit Hoskote, Clicking into Place, exhibition catalog (New York: Japan Foundation; Mumbai: Sakshi Gallery, 2002), n.p. Ranjit Hoskote, “The Pictorial Declarative: Reflections on Jitish Kallat’s Recent Works, 2002– 2005,” reprinted in Jitish Kallat: Here after Here, 1992–2017 (New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2017), 30. See also his “Citizen Urban: Always in Transit,” Art India 6, no 4 (2002): 36–38. As Kallat wrote to me in an email of May 3, 2017, “my interest [is] in the correlation between the self and the outside world, and how the “two” (which, when you are able to occasionally shed the illusion, are indeed one) remain interfaced and interlocked in the formation of one’s world view, one’s ontology and one’s aesthetic choices.” Destroyed following its exhibition, the work of text on found panels can be seen at https:// jitishkallat.com/works/anger-at-the-speed-of-fright/. Jitish Kallat, email communication with the author, May 3, 2017. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (Delhi: Roli Books, 2021). Kallat’s later invocations of Gandhi eschew both the image and easy irony. In Public Notice 2 (2007), Gandhi’s speech just before the Dandi Salt March is displayed in text fashioned from sculpted bones, and in Covering Letter (2012), Gandhi’s 1939 letter imploring Hitler not to go to war is projected on a curtain of fog. These experiments continued, as Ramaswamy explores in her Gandhi in the Gallery, which is organized by image tropes. Dodiya’s work features in nearly every chapter; the historian effectively stages a dialogue with the artist across three decades of practice. David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). In a recent online interview, Dodiya discussed his choice of the medium of watercolor, saying, “If I want to do a series on Gandhi, it has to be watercolor. The paper is thin, little pigment and water, you have to be very careful. The medium of watercolor has a spiritual quality, and is minimal. Oil is more materials. For Gandhi, you need the minimal medium.” Atul Dodiya, “Gandhi and Me: A Conversation with Atul Dodiya,” webinar hosted by the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, October 2, 2020. See Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), and William Mazzarella, “Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2010): 1–39. Alter, Gandhi’s Body, 52. NOTES

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43. Ranjit Hoskote, “Re-Imagining Bapu: A Response to Atul Dodiya’s ‘An Artist of Non-Violence,’ ” in Atul Dodiya: An Artist of Non-Violence (Mumbai: Gallery Chemould, 1999), 24. 44. Those discussions were shaped by the protection of Gandhi’s image under the Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act of 1950 and the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act of 1971. 45. Mazzarella, “Branding the Mahatma,” 16. 46. Mazzarella, 28. 47. See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). In India, this position is occupied by Bhupen Khakhar, as I argued in Art of Secularism, chap. 5. 48. Dodiya complicates his appropriation of Beuys and other postwar German artists in his German Measles series (1999). In one painting, Obedient Boys, he juxtaposes Beuys’s Fat Chair with an image of a boy spinning thread, an act closely associated with Gandhi. See also Ranjit Hoskote, “Atul Dodiya: The Encyclopaedist’s Desire for the World,” in Atul Dodiya, ed. Ranjit Hoskote (New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2013), 12–87. 49. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “The Wretched of the Nation,” Third Text 31, no. 2–3 (2017), 213–37. 50. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “An Interview with Gerhard Richter (1986),” in Gerhard Richter (The OCTOBER Files 8), ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 9. Emphasis in the original. 51. Gayatri Sinha, “Introduction: New Persuasions in Contemporary Indian Art,” in Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, ed. Gayatri Sinha (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010), 8. The essays on Atul Dodiya (by Ranjit Hoskote), Sudharshan Shetty (by Vyjayanti Rao), and especially Bose Krishnamachari (by Arshiya Lokhandwala) cover this territory well. 52. Take, for instance, an exchange in which Buchloh complains about the devaluation of Kurt Schwitters in the postwar German art world, which meant that Richter found Schwitters through American art. Richter replies, “Yes, but I don’t think it’s that bad. And I don’t regard Schwitters as the innovator and Rauschenberg as the exploiter.” To which Buchloh replies, “That’s not the point. The point is whether it means anything” (p. 4). 53. Quoted in Rosemary Hacker, “Idiom Post-medium: Richter Painting Photography,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 265. 54. Hacker, “Idiom Post-medium,” 273. She works with ideas from Michel Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” in Photogenic Painting: Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gerard Fromanger, ed. Sarah Wilson (London: Black Dog, 1999). Full quotation: “Foucault’s point would be that such an image is at once both photograph and painting, which is not to say that it is a combination of the two, which would be to incorporate images through photographing or painting them. Rather, the image lies at the intersection of the rhetorical trajectories of each medium. Photography and painting are apprehended at once and in the same place, that is, in the image. . . . Richter and Struth [have] opened up the space between the two media that allows the image its place.” 55. Adajania uses “new mediatic realism” to discuss Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Baiju Parthan, Shibu Natesan, Riyas Komu, and T. V. Santhosh, as well as Abir Karmarkar and Prajakta Palav. Adajania, “Mutable Aesthetic,” 34–42. 56. Chaitime.com hired art critic Girish Shahane to write content when it opened a Mumbai office. Shahane described how Chaitime.com’s enthusiasm about India as a potential market had to overcome the real technical problems Indian websites faced at that time. Principally, the bandwith sufficient to load even the simplest websites was rarely available in India, even to the offices of the companies themselves. Girish Shahane, personal communication, March 28, 2017. 57. Adajania, “Paintings in Parentheses.”

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58. See Hoskote, “The Critical Image: Annotations to ‘Clicking into Place,’ ” in Clicking into Place, catalog published in conjunction with Clicking into Place exhibition, Sakshi Gallery/Japan Foundation, February 9–28, 2002. The exhibition was part of “Under Construction,” a larger curatorial project organized across eight Asian sites by the Japan Foundation. Building upon research Hoskote undertook in the Philippines, the exhibition includes Filipino artist Alfredo Esquillo, and the catalog contains an essay by artist/curator Patrick Flores. It is worth noting that Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery was then the largest exhibition venue in the city, but it was also the only commercial gallery to host one of the events. 59. Marta Jakimowicz, “Intimately, Also about the Impersonal,” in Riyas Komu, K. P. Reiji, Justin Ponmany, T. V. Santhosh, exhibition catalog (Bangalore: Sakshi Gallery, May 7–21, 2003), n.p. 60. Saffronart.com has been remarkably transparent about their business practices in a field known for secrecy. Management scholar Mukti Khaire has written several papers based on their data, including, with R. D. Wadhwani, “Saffronart.com: Bidding for Success,” Harvard Business School Case no. 808027 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007, rev. 2010). 61. The site’s unusually transparent user interface allows easy tracking of the acceleration of the market, including so-called flipping of artworks through the site: a painting by Kallat sold in 2003 for around US $4,000 was resold on the site in 2010 for $27,000; a painting by Bose that sold in 2001 for around $1000 was resold on the site in 2006 for $10,000; a painting by Santhosh sold in 2004 for $3500 was resold in 2008 for $140,000. Sellers could just as easily have made similar gains (or losses) by switching between auction houses. In 2006, the firm held two contemporary-only sales, with expanded lists of artists that included a wider set of styles of painting, as well as some sculpture. But the artists discussed in this section remained at the core of the sales throughout this period. 62. See Ranjit Hoskote, “Transfigurations at the Margin of Blur: Recent Paintings by T. V. Santhosh,” in T. V. Santhosh: One Hand Clapping/Siren (Mumbai: The Guild Gallery, 2003), n.p. 63. Both versions of the image are visible on Saffronart.com by doing a search on the artist’s name. Last accessed April 14, 2021. 64. Santhosh S., “A Copy without an Original,” in Blood and Spit/Living with a Wound/A Room to Pray/ Countdown (Mumbai: Guild Art Gallery; New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2009), 129–36. 65. He writes, “A number of interesting writers and critics mainly from the Indian subcontinent have examined Santhosh’s work with varying degrees of platitudes, in an attempt to fix and investigate his recurring use of solarisation and the meaning of the original mediatic sources, which he further digitally mediates.” Shaheen Merali, “The Chimera War (Effects),” in Blood and Spit, 44. 66. Signs of overproduction are visible on the CVs of many Indian artists, with T. V. Santhosh’s trajectory only a bit more exaggerated than most. In addition to at least once yearly solo exhibitions in his commercial galleries, Santhosh participated in an average of seven group exhibitions a year between 2002 and 2007, before participating in a whopping twenty-six group shows in 2009. The vast majority of these exhibitions were held in commercial galleries. 67. For a discussion of how Kaleka’s practice finds a balance between image and concept, signaling “a more democratic relationship between forms,” see Kapur, “Spectres of the Real,” 57. 68. Ranbir Kaleka, artist’s proposal for Crossings, published on the artist’s website and accessed on August 4, 2017. Completed as part of a residency at Montalvo Arts Center near San Jose, California, the work was included in iCon: Indian Contemporary, the 2005 collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which is discussed at length in chapter 4. More images of the work are available at https://rkaleka.com/video-works/crossings/. 69. Adnan Madani, “Thinking Inside the Box: 6 Notes on Rashid Rana,” in Rashid Rana, ed. Quddus Mirza (Mumbai: Chatterjee + Lal and Chemould Prescott Road, 2010), 14.

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70. See also Rana’s A Day in the Life of Landscapes (2004), which riffs on the Punjabi school of landscape painting. 71. Works included were Rana’s Veil series (2004) and All Eyes Skyward during the National Parade (2004). Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan, cocurated by Quddus Mirza and Salima Hashmi, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, February 17–March 17, 2005. Reviews include Nancy Adajania, “Art, beyond Borders,” The Hindu, April 10, 2005, www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2005/04/10 /stories/2005041000580700.htm; Stephen Wright, “Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan,” Parachute, no. 20 (Oct.–Dec. 2005), 7. 3. MATERIALITY, EPHEMERALITY, HAPTICS

1. Artists included Vivan Sundaram, N. N. Rimzon, Nand Katyal, Akiko Fujita, Chisen Furukawa, Hella Berent, Timm Ulrichs, Sheela Gowda, Balan Nambiar, Ved Nayar, Gogi Saroj Pal, Shuvaprasanna, Arpana Caur, Valsan Kolleri, and Yusuf. The project was the subject of issue 42 of Lalit Kala Contemporary (1996). 2. Geeta Kapur, “What’s New in Indian Art: Canons, Commodification, Artists on the Edge,” in 2000: Reflections on the Arts of India, ed. Pratapaditya Pal (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2000), 7, https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/fedora_extracted/10876.pdf. 3. Gowda notes its site specificity in Victoria Lynn, “Sensuality and Violence in the Art of Sheela Gowda,” ArtAsiaPacific 3, no. 4 (1996): 81. 4. See the reading of Mortar Line (1996) in Ann Huber-Sigwart, “Between the Lines: Some Thoughts on Sheela Gowda’s Works,” n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, vol. 29, Trans-Asia (Jan. 2012): 8. Note about son from Sheela Gowda, interview with the author, Bengaluru, January 6, 2017. 5. In particular, see McKim Marriott, “Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,” in Village India: Studies in the Little Community, ed. McKim Marriott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 199–200, on Govardhan Puja, in which a model of Krishna lying down is typically made out of cow dung. Gupta’s performance is resonant with this practice. 6. Folding issues of materiality into her larger argument about the medium of installation, or what she calls “a poetics of displaced objects,” Kapur associated this sort of work with metonymic rather than metaphorical signs. See Geeta Kapur, “Dismantling the Norm,” in Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions, ed. Apinan Poshyananda (New York: Asia Society, 1996), 66, and, in a reworking of the ideas in that text, “Dismantled Norms: Apropos Other Avantgardes,” in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), 65. Kapur writes, “Given that Asian/Indian art has been so dominated by the metaphorical—the metaphors heavy with civilisational values—the assembly and installation of objects in foregrounding metonymic meanings perform a crucial function. The processes of condensation are eased and the artist is able to introduce both the poetics and politics of displacement. The installation form, presenting a phenomenological encounter based precisely on the act of displacement—of found and sited objects, concrete and ephemeral ideas— produces propitious results for Asian art. It raises questions on the notion of the artist’s proper domain; her/his entry into public spaces and the discourse emanating therefrom. It reflects on the equation between the citizen–subject, the artist and art work in the imaginary (evolutionary) public sphere.” She also developed this idea with reference to Gowda’s work and the medium of installation in “Framing/Unframing,” Art India 4, no. 4 (2000), 70–73. 7. Lynn, “Sensuality and Violence,” 83. 8. Art historical considerations of materiality have included the literature focused on the agency of images or objects, associated with authors like W. J. T. Mitchell, David Freedberg, and Hans Belting; a series of movements across the twentieth century in which the recalcitrance of mat216

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9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

ter became crucially important to artists, including those associated with art informel and Gutai; and the literature on visual technologies referred to by Bill Brown. Arjun Appadurai, “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity,” Public Culture 27, no. 2 (2015): 221. Indeed, like art historians keen to explore how new studies of materiality sit within their discipline, Appadurai begins by disentangling the concerns of nonanthropological studies of materiality from more continuous innovations in the anthropology of religion, in which various forms of thing-based magic have been central objects of study from the discipline’s inception. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), xvi. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3. The key words here—active, not-quite-human, and vitality—link through shorthand her work to Latour, Haraway, and what she calls the “tradition of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze,” xiii. Bennett notes Latour’s recognition of the “slight surprise of action” that attends to the limits of intention in actions and ascribes surprise to both human and nonhuman actants. Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 281, cited in Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 27. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4. Appadurai, “Mediants,” 224. His ire was provoked by essays like Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key, or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, ed. Paul M. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 10–21. Brown attributes the transdisciplinary “material turn” in academic writing to the rise of digital technology. His first publication addressing things came in 1998, just as internet technologies were beginning to make a wider impact in the United States. This was also the year that satellite television was introduced in India. See Bill Brown, “How to Do Things with Things (a Toy Story),” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 935–64. Bill Brown, “Materiality,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 52. Ajay Sinha, “Envisioning the Seventies and the Eighties,” in Contemporary Art in Baroda, ed. Gulammohammed Sheikh (Delhi: Tulika Press, 1997). See also Rustom Bharucha, “On Bones and Brooms: Re-Materialising the Imaginary of the Future,” Third Text 23, no. 5 (September 2009): 633–41. Alex Potts’s writing on 1960s sculpture usefully summarizes the contrast between materiality and medium. See Alex Potts, “Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s,” Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 282–304. Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings, coproduced by Iniva and Beaconsfield, in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibition was held at Beaconsfield, London, October 7–29, 2000, before it traveled to Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, in 2001. Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings: Sheela Gowda, N.S. Harsha, Nasreen Mohamedi (London: Iniva, 2000), 20. In a March 2000 interview with curator Suman Gopinath, Pushpamala N. points out that when Gowda installed her work in Drawing Space, she drew “squarish forms on the wall, echoing the forms of the [Nasreen Mohamedi] drawings. It was quite different from the way she had put up the work in Tokyo in the Japan Foundation show, where she used huge dramatic curving loops and swirls, going from ceiling to floor.” Gopinath and Watson’s description of the work conforms, then, to its earlier presentation. See Suman Gopinath, “ ‘Three is Company’: Pushpamala N. Interviews Suman Gopinath,” March 2000, http://npushpamala.blogspot.de/2000/03/saffronart-art-cafei-interview-with.html. NOTES

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23. Rasna Bhushan and Jane Connarty, Telling Tales: Of Self, of Nation, of Art, exhibition brochure (Bath, UK: Bath Festivals Trust, 1997), n.p. 24. Kamala Kapoor, “Sieve-o-Physis: An Interview with Anita Dube,” Anita Dube: Illegal, exhibition catalog (New Delhi: Nature Morte; New York: Bose Pacia), n.p. 25. Slide collection, iniva archives, London. 26. Ayisha Abraham, “A Certain Language,” in Sheela Gowda (Berlin: Steidl; New York: Bose Pacia, 2007), 145. 27. Trevor Smith, “A Conversation with Sheela Gowda, Bangalore, July 2006,” in Sheela Gowda, 139. 28. Abraham, “Certain Language,” 145. 29. The Walker Art Center–based curatorial team of Philippe Vergne, Douglas Fogle, and Olukemi Ilesanmi was advised by a curatorial think tank of experts representing each of the seven “latitudes” or art centers covered by the show: Brazil, Japan, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States. The India expert was the Asia Society’s Vishakha Desai. The committee advised and oriented the curators but did not direct their choice of artists, in a departure from the Australian and Japanese exhibitions discussed in chapter 1. 30. Philippe Vergne, “Globalization from the Rear: ‘Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?’ ” in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, ed. Philippe Vergne, Vasif Kortun, and Hou Hanru (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 21. 31. Vergne, “Globalization from the Rear,” 22. 32. Philippe Vergne, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, and Aimee Chang, “Just How Did Latitudes Become Forms?” roundtable discussion, in Vergne et al., How Latitudes Become Forms, 131 and 135, respectively. 33. Douglas Fogle writes, “The organic qualities of Shettar’s work might be profitably read in the art-historical context of Arte Povera, artist Marisa Merz, postminimalist sculptors of the same period such as Eva Hesse, Brazilian Neo-concrete artist Lygia Clark, or Argentinian artist Gego. Like these precursors, Shettar uses industrial materials at odds with the biomorphic qualities of her work, setting up a dichotomy between the man-made and the natural,” Vergne et al., How Latitudes Become Forms, 232. 34. Trevor Smith, “The Specific Labour of Sheela Gowda,” Afterall, no. 22 (Winter 2009): 37. 35. Smith, “Specific Labour,” 37. 36. Smith, 43. 37. Potts, “Tactility,” 286. Potts describes Claes Oldenburg’s soft simulations of everyday things, Eva Hesse’s latex sculptures, and Jannis Kounellis’s lumps of coal as so many positions in a field measured by relative tactility and structure. 38. Briony Fer, “The Work of Salvage: Eva Hesse’s Latex Works,” in Eva Hesse, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2002), 81–82. 39. Potts, “Tactility,” 199. Of the two, Potts is more apt to follow Frederic Jameson’s cue on late capitalism and postmodernism, but both he and Fer place a range of artistic engagements with materiality at the edge of modernist concerns with medium. 40. See Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: Smart Art Museum, 2000). 41. Philippe Vergne, “Just How Did Latitudes Become Forms?” roundtable discussion, 138. 42. For a detailed account of Khoj activities, see Pooja Sood, ed., The Khoj Book, 1997–2007: Contemporary Art Practice in India (Noida: HarperCollins, 2010). See also Anjali Sircar, “Expressions of Hidden Power,” The Hindu, September 17, 2000, www.thehindu.com/2000/09/17 /stories/1317007h.htm. 43. See Anita Dube, “Artist Statement,” 1997, http://khojworkshop.org/programme/khoj-1997- modinagar/.

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44. Karin Zitzewitz, “Signature and the Secularity of Artistic Subjectivity,” in The SAHMAT Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989, ed. Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman (Chicago: Smart Art Museum/University of Chicago Press, 2013). 45. For details, see the artist’s website at www.cfjohn.in/installations.htm and the installation section of Raghavendra Rao K.V.’s website, https://raghuraokv.wordpress.com/, both accessed December 13, 2017. Of those involved, Raghavendra Rao K.V. was the artist who had the most contact with Triangle Network later on, including participating in the 2003 Khoj workshop in Bengaluru. 46. For an overview of activities, see Mitch Albert, Alessio Antoniolli, Lorna Fray, Robert Loder, eds., Triangle: Variety of Experience around Artists’ Workshops and Residencies (London: Triangle Arts Trust, 2007). Assessments of Triangle’s impact in Africa include John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), especially pp. 129–71, and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 47. Robert Loder as quoted in Abishek Hazra, Index of Debt, 2008, single-channel video, 14:56 min, http://abhishekhazra.net/Index-of-Debt. 48. See “Funders’ Perspectives,” in Albert et al., Triangle, 218–30. 49. Alessio Antoniolli, interview with the author, London, June 6, 2016. 50. Sood writes that invitees for the initial Khoj workshops were found through an international network of arts organizations, including the Asia-Pacific Triennale, Australia; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and Shisha, in the United Kingdom. See Pooja Sood, ed., SANA: South Asia Network for the Arts (New York: Ford Foundation, 2014), 57. 51. See http://www.r-a-i-n.net/ and www.rijksakademie.nl/ENG/kunstenaars/rain/, both accessed October 9, 2020. 52. Writing in 2001, Joag says that the central concern was over the “confusions that [cultural hegemonies] . . . create in a “globalised” situation about assertion of identities.” Tushar Joag, unpublished concept note for study circles on economic reforms, email communication with the author, November 10, 2017. 53. Tushar Joag, “Open Circle, India,” Critical Collective, www.criticalcollective.in/ArtistGInner2 .aspx?Aid = 227&Eid = 202. 54. Sharmila Samant was the fourth Indian to have a residency at Gasworks in London; Kausik Mukhopadhyay, a close associate of Open Circle, was the fifth, in 2001 and 2002, respectively. 55. Joag, email communication, November 10, 2017. 56. See “Pabellón Cuba,” Universes in Universe, 2003, page 7, accessed October 9, 2020, http:// universes-in-universe.de/car/habana/bien8/pab-cuba/e-tour-06.htm. 57. “Pabellón Cuba,” page 4, http://universes-in-universe.de/car/habana/bien8/cabana/e-tour- 03.htm. 58. See Karin Zitzewitz, “Subodh Gupta,” review of solo exhibition at Nature Morte, New Delhi, ArtAsiaPacific, no. 41 (Summer 2004): 81, and Meera Menezes, “The Home and the World,” Art India 9, no. 1 (January 2004): 78–79. 59. Dube, “Artist Statement.” 60. Sharma repeated the basic idea he had at Khoj to different ends in his Freedom Bus or A View from the 6th Standard (2001–4), in which the bus windows were filled with key figures from India’s anticolonial freedom movement (Gandhi is in the driver’s seat), which was included in the landmark Edge of Desire exhibition. 61. Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: Some Clarifications,” Soziale Welt, no. 47 (1996): 372. 62. They rented a space beginning in 2000 through a grant from the Dutch development NGO Hivos.

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63. Representatives of Triangle Network’s South Asian affiliates who did Gasworks residencies include Naiza Khan and Asma Mudrawala (Vasl, 2002) and Tayeba Begum Lipi and Mahbubur Rahman (Britto, 2005). Artists associated with other Indian platforms for experimental art were also invited, including Sharmila Samant and Kausik Mukhopadhyay (Open Circle, 2001, 2002); Suresh Jayaram (1. Shanthi Road, 2004); Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP, 2008); Shreyas Karle (CONA, 2013); and Desire Machine Collective (2015). 64. There is some evidence that residencies were the favored form for facilitating artists’ movement across the world in this period. One crucial driver of this was the UNESCO Aschberg Bursaries for Artists. Established in 1994, the program promoted mobility for young artists through partnerships with residencies around the world, including Gasworks in London. In 2014, the program was briefly stopped before reopening in 2015, using the Creative Cities network as its organizing infrastructure. That network, which was established in 2004, does not support contemporary art, except perhaps as it fits within its initiatives in Crafts & Folk Art, Design, and Media Arts. Despite its stated emphasis on the Global South, the majority of the cities are in Europe. The region of South Asia has only four partner cities: Jaipur and Bamiyan (Afghanistan) for Craft & Folk Art, and Chennai and Varanasi for Music. See UNESCO document 197/ EX11, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002342/234211E.pdf and the UNESCO Creative Cities website, https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/home. 65. Described in detail in Karin Zitzewitz, “Infrastructure as Form: Cross-Border Networks and the Materialities of ‘South Asia’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text 31, no. 2–3 (Autumn 2017): 341–58. 66. An account of the rape and Shanbaug’s prolonged suffering was published five years before Sen’s project. See Pinki Virani, Aruna’s Story: The True Account of a Rape and Its Aftermath (Delhi: Viking, 1998). 67. Bharti Kher, “The Hybrids,” Seminar 659 (2014), accessed December 15, 2017, www.indiaseminar.com/2014/659/659_bharti_kher.htm. 68. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10, xvi. 69. Pooja Sood, comments on panel, “Not-working: Challenges to Networks,” at Networked: Dialogue and Exchange in the Global Art Ecology conference, Bloomberg, London, November 26–27, 2011, www.gasworks.org.uk/triangle-network/blog/networked-conference-conference-videos2011#Session%209. 70. See Bharti Kher, “The Way Home: Khattas as Navigation Aids,” Sarai Reader 03, 247–48. 71. Bharti Kher, “When Soak Becomes Spill,” Subodh Gupta: The Way Home, n.p., catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, August 23– September 10, 1999. 72. S. Kalidas, “Of Capacities and Containment: Poetry and Politics in the Art of Subodh Gupta,” in Subodh Gupta: Gandhi’s Three Monkeys (New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2008), 80. 73. Held in the Francois Pinault collection, Very Hungry God (2006) was made for La Nuit Blanche, an event curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans in Paris on October 7, 2006, for which it was shown in the Eglise Saint-Bernard. It was exhibited by Pinault along the Grand Canal in Venice outside of the Palazzo Grassi in 2007. 74. The work was commissioned for Lille 3000 Bombaysers de Lille, an arts festival focusing on the city of Mumbai held in the fall of 2006. It was acquired by the city in 2009. 75. One measure of Gupta’s investment in shininess is his paintings of vessels, in which the focus is on the glint of light off the surface. See the untitled series of 2004 paintings published in Subodh Gupta: Gandhi’s Three Monkeys, 283–86. 76. Chris Sharp, “Report from Paris,” artnet, November 15, 2006, www.artnet.com/magazineus /reviews/sharp/sharp11–15–06.asp. 77. Michael Taussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 2 (May 1991): 148. 220

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78. Taussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” 150. 79. Nicolas Bourriaud has articulated Gupta’s claim to this genealogy best, most explicitly by including his work in the exhibition Post Production, Sampling, Programming & Displaying (Galleria Continua, San Gimigiano, Italy) in 2001, which preceded the book he wrote of the same name. Bourriaud worked with Gupta in several other exhibitions, including La Nuit Blanche, which he cocurated with Jerome Sans. 80. This reading of Gupta’s work resonates with Krista Thompson’s tracing of “bling and its surface aesthetics” into the contemporary art practice of Kehinde Wiley, eventually asking if his work points to “what might be considered the material value of light.” See Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 237, 256. 81. Brown, “Materiality.” 82. For instance, the French art production company, c.H-D Atelier, which installed the 1000 kg Very Hungry God in both its Parisian and Venetian venues, boasts of the feat on its website, www.chd-art-production.fr/projets/very-hungry-god-2/. 83. Peter Nagy, “Subodh Gupta,” in Kapital und Karma: Aktuelle Positionen Indischer Kunst/Capital and Karma: Recent Positions in Indian Art (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2002), 142. 84. Zehra Jumabhoy, “The ‘New’ Indian Sculpture,” in The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for Art, 2011), 22–24. 85. Tara Kilachand, “The Economics of Being Subodh Gupta,” LiveMint.com, September 6, 2008, www.livemint.com/Leisure/59hIdUeSIhrXKlYPaKsTON/The-economics-of-being-SubodhGupta.html. 4. LANGUAGE, THE DOCUMENTARY, AND ART IN A DISCURSIVE MODE

1. For the intimate relationship between artists and literary communities, see Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015) and Sonal Khullar, “ ‘We Were Looking for Our Violins’: The Bombay Painters and Poets, ca. 1965–76,” Archives of Asian Art 68, no. 2 (October 2018): 111–32. Among the significant modern works that played with language is M. F. Husain’s Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956), which uses letters but is illegible and is discussed in the above texts by Khullar, as well as in Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London: Hurst Publishers, 2014). For another important experiment with the linguistic sign, see the sections on K. C. S. Paniker in Rebecca M. Brown, Art for Modern India, 1947–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 2. See, for example, “Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Raqs Media Collective,” in Raqs Media Collective: Casebook (Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 2012), 133–43; H. G. Masters, “Talking Cure: Raqs Media Collective,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 64 (July/August 2009), http:// artasiapacific.com/Magazine/64/TalkingCureRaqsMediaCollective; and Raqs Media Collective, “On Triangles, Infinity and Learning Where to Stop,” interview with Himali Singh Soin, The Fuschia Tree, no. 16, January 2013, www.thefuschiatree.com/307/fullview. 3. Agarwal’s work was likely viewed at his solo exhibition of photography, Down and Out, Labouring under Global Capitalism, at the India Habitat Gallery in Delhi in 2000. His work is discussed in detail in chapter 5. 4. They later pointed out that they had, in fact, been participating in art exhibitions since 1998. See “Raqs Media Collective: Interview with Johan Pijnappel,” iCon: India Contemporary, exhibition catalog, collateral event at Venice Biennale (New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 2005), 49. 5. This argument is made most convincingly in Nancy Adajania, ed., Shilpa Gupta (New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery; Munich: Prestel, 2009). NOTES

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6. Geeta Kapur, “A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 30–59. 7. Bill Brown, “Materiality,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 49–63. 8. Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” Documenta XI, Platform 5: Exhibition (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 42. 9. As Anthony Downey puts it, “In censuring the tendency in exhibitions to perpetuate the ontological distinctiveness of art, Documenta XI sought to develop a non-totalising topos of representation that allowed for a form of mediation between the formal context of art as a politically engaged practice and, conversely, the institutional tendency to propose it as a separate, privileged, and therefore autonomous, apolitical discipline.” See Anthony Downey, “The Spectacular Difference of Documenta XI,” Third Text 17, no. 1 (2003): 88. 10. Crucial texts, all by intellectuals then living and working in Delhi, include Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 1998) and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). That was preceded by Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), which included an essay by psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, later extended into Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Delhi intellectuals would also have been aware of preliminary research on Partition memory by Gyanendra Pandey, which was published as Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This was a major reorientation of debates about Partition, which had focused primarily on elite politics and the precise events that led to the decision to divide colonial India as a prerequisite to decolonization. 11. Nancy Adajania and Meera Menezes, “Of Memory and Healing,” Art India 6, no. 3 (2002): 21–23. 12. Nancy Adajania, “Rival Aesthetics of Solidarity: Indian Artists and Their Public Sphere,” Springerin, no. 4, 2002, www.springerin.at/en/2002/4/rivalisierende-asthetiken-der-solidaritat/. All Adajania quotations in the following two paragraphs are from this unpaginated text. 13. Often this had to do with suspicion of diasporic positions. For instance, of “Chilean-born, New York–based artist Alfredo Jaar,” who was there to discuss his documentation of the Rwandan genocide, Adajania writes, “Many . . . were amazed and outraged at Jaar’s uncritical admiration for NGOs active in the Third World, and his refusal to accept that many of them are compromised by their co-option into the dominant political apparatus,” Adajania and Menezes, “Of Memory and Healing,” 23. 14. Downey, “Spectacular Difference,” 91. 15. Laura Rascaroli, “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 49, no. 2 (2008): 25. Fellow filmmaker Paromita Vohra describes Kanwar’s works as essay films to distinguish her own authorial voice from his, in “Dotting the I: The Politics of Self-lessness in Indian Documentary Practice,” South Asian Popular Culture 9, no. 1 (2011): 43–53. 16. See also Jyotsna Kapur, “Why the Personal Is Still Political—Some Lessons from Contemporary Indian Documentary,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 46 (2003): n.p. 17. Paul Arthur, “Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore,” Film Comment 39, no. 1 (2003): 59. 18. The poetic function of language is often defined, after Roman Jakobson, as the foregrounding of the qualities of the signifiers in themselves. This categorization typically invites formalist analysis, but here I focus on what could be described as the sonic materialities of language. 222

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19. This may have something to do with the influence of lyric Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the North Indian, Hindi-Urdu-speaking Left. See Aamir Mufti, “Towards a Lyric History of India,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 245–72. Most of the poets included in A Night of Prophecy come from very different poetic traditions, however, in which the lyric form is less important. 20. All quotations in these two paragraphs were transcribed from the recording of Amar Kanwar’s artist talk at Frieze London in 2010, accessed February 19, 2018, https://frieze.com/fair-programme/listen-amar-kanwar. For a similar account just after filming, see his artist talk at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, January 12, 2003, https://vimeo.com/16823718. He repeats much of this in more prosaic language in an interview for the 2012 Kochi Biennale, www .youtube.com/watch?v=Pu1SGrgB5z4. 21. Kanwar’s talk maps the prose/poetry distinction onto Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. If the rolling catastrophe ensnaring India corresponds to the Angel of History with rubble building at his feet, then to Kanwar poetry offers the possibility of Jetztzeit, or the eruption of the past into the present. If it could “be possible to understand the passage of time though poetry,” Benjamin goes on to ask, then “would I be able to see the future?” 22. Prakash Jadhav, “Under Dadar Bridge,” trans. Shanta Gokhale and Nissim Ezekiel, in Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Poetry, ed. Arjun Dangle (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 1992), 56–59. 23. The full poem, “After Reading ‘Wounded Knee’,” was published in Easterine Kire Iralu, The Windhover Collection (Pune: Steven Herlekar, 2001). 24. Anne Rutherford, “ ‘Not Firing Arrows’: Multiplicity, Heterogeneity and the Future of Documentary: Interview with Amar Kanwar,” Asian Cinema (Spring/Summer 2005): 120. 25. Rajiv Mehrotra, foreword to Double Take: Looking at the Documentary (New Delhi: Foundation for University Responsibility with Public Service Broadcasting Trust, 2000), 5. 26. The intervew was conducted at the opening of the Sarai New Media Centre in Delhi, February 25–27, 2001. Lovink has made the raw recording of it available on his website under a Creative Commons license. It includes one clip with Monica Narula alone and a group discussion with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravikant, Jeebesh Bagchi, and others. See “Sarai: A New Media Center Opened in Delhi,” audio file, February 13, 2010, https://archive.org/details/ SaraiANewMediaCenterOpenedInDelhi_406. 27. Initial funding came from the Cultural Economic Development Program of the Netherlands and the Montreal-based Daniel Langlois Foundation, which specialized in art, science, and media-based projects. Later funding came from Hivos, as well as the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and other organizations closely associated with development and civil society. 28. Adajania and Menezes, “Of Memory and Healing,” 23. See also Raminder Kaur and Parul DaveMukherji’s warning against the NGO-ization of art practice in their Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 12. 29. In the Lovink “Sarai” interview in 2001, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta mention that their retreat from documentary film had also to do with the constraints posed by financing. 30. See Pamela Lee, who connects their collaborative practice more to the history of collectivity in (post-)modernist art, in “How to Be a Collective in the Age of the Consumer Sovereign,” Artforum (October 2009): 184–89. 31. In the Lovink “Sarai” interview in 2001, founding members of Sarai were extremely critical of NGOs, which they described as motivated by guilt and focused on poverty, infrastructure, and uplift. “Sarai does not even want to be rhetorical about poverty,” one founding member said, to general agreement. NOTES

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32. Originally published in the documenta catalog, Raqs Media Collective’s “A Concise Lexicon of/ for the Digital Commons” was republished in Sarai Reader: Shaping Technologies (2003), 357–65, accessed January 15, 2021, https://sarai.net/sarai-reader-03-shaping-technologies/. 33. Raqs Media Collective, “Concise Lexicon,” 361–62. 34. Lovink “Sarai” interview. 35. Raqs Media Collective, “Concise Lexicon,” 363. A similar, more sustained project, pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), was launched in 2008 by five nonprofit organizations/ NGOs: CAMP, Majlis, and Point of View in Mumbai, Alternative Law Forum in Bengaluru, and Oil21 in Berlin. 36. Pamela Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 182. 37. In an email to Steve Dietz, published in his “A Lexical FAQ of/for Raqs Media Collective,” in Raqs Media Collective, The Imposter in the Waiting Room, exhibition catalog (New York: Bose Pacia, 2004), www.yproductions.com/writing/archives/000766.html. 38. Raqs Media Collective, “Digressions from the Memory of a Minor Encounter,” The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, ed. Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (Brussels: Roomade; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 90. 39. Historical accounts of the Ford Foundation’s relationship to Cold War ideology offer a longer view of this set of issues. See Nicole Sackley. “Foundation in the Field: The Ford Foundation New Delhi Office and the Construction of Development Knowledge, 1951–1970,” in American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the Twentieth Century, ed. Ulrich Herbert and Jörn Leonhard (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 232–60. 40. See, for instance, Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 41. Roy refers to this as the “NGO-ization of resistance.” See Arundhati Roy, “Tide? or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire,” speech given in San Francisco, August 16, 2004, www .democracynow.org/2004/8/23/public_power_in_the_age_of. 42. Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 15. 43. Alexander Keefe, “What Did the Fish See?,” in Raqs Media Collective: Casebook (Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 2014), 161. For a more contemporary account of its activities, see Nancy Adajania, “Net Culture: Between the Fast Lane and the Slow,” Art India 7, no. 1 (2002): 26–33. 44. Much of this work occurred during the period of her association with Open Circle (1999–2004), the arts organization led by Sharmila Samant and Tushar Joag discussed in chapter 3. 45. The relative uniqueness of Gupta’s political stance is made clear by Abhay Sardesai in “Holding onto Her Conscience,” Art India 10, no. 1 (2005): 72–74. 46. Johan Pijnappel, “Interrogating Colonialism, Consumerism,” Art India 8, no. 1 (2003): 14. 47. Shilpa Gupta, http://shilpagupta.com/pages/earlyworks/02kidney4.htm, accessed February 27, 2018. 48. Nancy Adajania, “Experiments with Truth,” in Adajania, Shilpa Gupta, 139. This is one of a series of essays Adajania wrote on the artist beginning in 1999. 49. The work was included in her solo exhibition, Altered Altar, at Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai, August 1998. 50. Shilpa Gupta, interview with the author, January 2017. 51. On the context of late capitalism for the development of conceptual art in the United States, as well as its implication in the art market, see Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 52. Behind the scenes, Gupta uses instructions to assist institutions in the installation of her work, producing detailed booklets that make it possible for her to exhibit in several exhibition venues 224

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53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

at once, without always traveling. Her installation manuals are quite similar to her early works in their clarity and spare style, as well as their combination of text with infographics. Indeed, the 2005–6 work points forward to a series of public art projects in neon that offer similar thoughts on the sky, encouraging empathy among viewing crowds in Bandra, Gupta’s suburb of Mumbai, along the shore. Among those works is We Change Each Other (2018), in which that phrase is displayed in English, Hindi, and Urdu. Artist note on Untitled, motion flapboard, 2008–9. See further images on http://shilpagupta .com/flapboard/. Shanay Jhaveri, “To See Again and Again,” in Adajania, Shilpa Gupta, 46–47. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews, vol. 2, ed. Charles Arsenne-Henry, Shumon Basar, and Karen Marta (Milan: Charta, 2010), 856. These first two works are Valley (2003–14), in the collection of Amrita Jhaveri, and Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams 2 (2003–14), collection of Nitin Bhayana. The title of the series comes from Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight.” In Avijit Mukul Kishore’s film on Nilima Sheikh, The Garden of Forgotten Snow (2017), she says, “I had a plan to work on Kashmir, and I had many ideas of what I wanted to do, and then the [Gujarat] riots happened. Suddenly everything seemed impermanent around, and my sense of locale was questioned, and so it all seemed too ambitious to do—too difficult to do. At that time I had been reading a lot of Agha Shahid Ali, and in a way this became a route through which I could begin to talk about Kashmir.” This series was included in documenta XII (2007), which retained a measure of the global reach of the previous show but sought to recapture sensuality, in an implicit critique of Enwezor’s approach. The pavilion was privately sponsored and curated by a team that included gallery owners Arani Bose and Peter Nagy; Gordon Knox, who had just become artistic director of the residency program at the nonprofit Montalvo Arts Center; and New York–based painter Julie Evans. Peter Nagy, “Floating towards Venice,” Asia Art Archive Research Notes, July 1, 2005, https:// aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/floating-towards-venice. In addition to documentation, I viewed portions of this work as part of Raqs Media Collective, Everything Else Is Ordinary, K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf, 2018, and Twilight Language, The Whitworth, Manchester, 2017. Raqs Media Collective, A Measure of Anacoustic Reason, text provided by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, email communication with the author, March 12, 2018. Masters, “Talking Cure,” n.p., which Monica Narula remembers as linked to the publication of Raqs Media Collective, Seepage (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), as well as two major works by their Sarai collaborators: Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (Delhi: Routledge, 2009), and Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black, 2010). Narula, email communication with the author, December 15, 2020. Arsenne-Henry et al., Hans Ulrich Obrist, 861–62. Raqs Media Collective showed in Bose Pacia Gallery in New York in 2004 and then developed relationships with Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi from 2006 and with Project 88 Gallery in Mumbai from 2009. Kanwar took the longest to obtain gallery representation, though he chose to work with one of the world’s most important galleries, Marian Goodman, from 2008. See chapter 3 for the role residencies played in the development of artistic networks in this period. Nagy, “Floating towards Venice.” While organizers suspected the US-led curatorial team was to blame, there may have been other factors. India has only presented one official pavilion, in 2011, which is discussed later in this NOTES

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chapter. The 2015 Indo-Pak pavilion, My East is Your West, with Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana, was a collateral event, like iCon, sponsored by the Gujral Foundation. 69. Ranjit Hoskote, “Patriotism and the Art Pavilion,” Times of India, August 9, 2009, https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Patriotism-and-the-art-pavilion/articleshow/4872381 .cms. 70. Ranjit Hoskote, “Everyone Agrees: It’s about to Explode,” Seminar 659, 2014, accessed March 18, 2018, www.india-seminar.com/2014/659/659_ranjit_hoskote.htm. All references in the following paragraph are to this text. 71. See also Khullar’s reading of the exhibition in Worldly Affiliations, 1–5. 5. INFRASTRUCTURE, COLLABORATION, AND THE CUT

1. See AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407–29. 2. Bisi Silva, “An ‘Other’ Stop on the Global Art Trail: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 8 (Spring/Summer 1998): 46–51. 3. Ousmane Sow Huchard, “Contemporary Art in Senegal,” in Africus: Johannesburg Biennale (Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council, 1995), 200–201. 4. See Joanna Grabski, Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 135–63. Grabski argues against curatorial frameworks that view récuperation as an ingenious response to a poverty of materials, noting that the artists involved were trained in the tradition of the beaux arts and cosmopolitan in their outlook. In her view, these works instead use the materials of everyday urban life to critique the globallocal relationship. 5. Chaitanya Sambrani,”Tracking Trash” in Trash, exhibition catalog (Mumbai: Chemould; Chicago: Walsh Gallery/Sepia International, 2008), 8. 6. References here are to Sambrani, “Tracking Trash,” and Geeta Kapur, “subTerrain,” essay for exhibition at House of World Cultures, Berlin, reprinted in Third Text 21, no. 3 (May 2007): 277–96. See also Tania Roy, “Non-Renewable Resources: The Poetics and Politics of Vivan Sundaram’s Trash,” Theory, Culture, and Society 30, no. 7/8 (2013): 265–76, and Saloni Mathur, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 129–59. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze,” Economic and Political Weekly 27, no. 10/11 (1992): 541–47; Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (January 1997): 83–113. 8. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 335. 9. Sundaram’s Trash (1997–2008) follows closely upon the publication of Bruno Latour’s major texts on actor-network theory, We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10. Marilyn Strathern, “Cutting the Network,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 3 (September 1996): 517–35. This should be aligned with the simultaneous impulse to spatialize networks, as in Arjun Appadurai’s Deleuzian idea of “scapes” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), or Ulf Hannerz’s idea of “flows,” in Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996). 11. Strathern, “Cutting the Network,” 522–23. 12. Strathern, 519. 13. Strathern, 522. 14. All statements from Huma Mulji in this section come from an interview with the author via Skype, September 1, 2016. 226

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15. All statements from Shilpa Gupta in this section come from an interview with the author via FaceTime, November 16, 2016. 16. Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, no. 15 (2009): 9. 17. Chaitanya Sambrani, “Home and Away,” in Contemporary Art in Asia: A Reader, ed. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 170. 18. Sambrani, “Home and Away,” 168. 19. That principle was crucial to the Triangle Network organization that initially prompted AarPaar. In between the first and second editions of the cross-border artistic project, Khoj and Vasl, along with Britto (Dhaka, Bangladesh), Sutra (Kathmandu, Nepal) and Theertha (Colombo, Sri Lanka), came together in Delhi to plan the South Asia Network for the Arts, or SANA. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation from 2004 to 2011, SANA sponsored a mobility fund for artists to travel to countries within the region. For more on this process, see Karin Zitzewitz, “Infrastructure as Form: Cross-Border Networks and the Materialities of ‘South Asia’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text 31, no. 2–3 (Autumn 2017): 341–58. 20. See artist statement, “Nalpar,” DIAA Dialogue Bastar, 2001–13, accessed July 25, 2019, www .dialoguebastar.com/nalpar.html. 21. Christopher Pinney, “Gandhi, Camera, Action! India’s ‘August Spring,’ ” in The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond, ed. Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, 177–92 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press; Karachi: Aga Khan University, 2014). 22. Pinney, “Gandhi, Camera, Action!” 190. 23. See Navjot Altaf ’s artist statement, accessed July 25, 2019, www.navjotaltaf.com/images- re-drawn.php. 24. A contemporary review by critic Anahite Contractor emphasizes the artist’s feminist and Marxist emancipatory agenda, as well as the “archetypal” form of the sculptures, which are “almost reminiscent of the frontal Kushan or African style.” Anahite Contractor, “Women Redrawn,” Sunday Observer, February 18, 1996. For a contrasting view, see Anjali Sircar, “Images of Women,” The Hindu Magazine, March 10, 1996. 25. In a 2005 interview with Grant Kester, Navjot enumerates those points of intersection from the point of view of contemporary art: www.dialoguebastar.com/correspondence-betweengrant-kester-and-navjot-2008.html, accessed May 29, 2018. 26. Rosalind D’Mello, “Navjot Altaf: An Iconic Journey,” Open, October 14, 2016, www .openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/navjot-altaf-an-iconic-journey. 27. Baghel was awarded the crucial All India National Award for Master Craftsman in 1977, but he began soon after to submit his work to competitions held by India’s Lalit Kala Akademi in the section for fine art. His first submission, in 1981, was seen by Jagdish Swaminathan, who was in the midst of his influential Bharat Bhavan project, which involved research in and patronage of adivasi art practices in regions that included Bastar. 28. Formally the Paramparik Bastar Shilpi Pariwar, or Traditional Artisan Families of Bastar. See Katherine Hacker, “Dismantling or Rehabilitating the Cult of the Craftsman Paradigm: Some Reflections on Jaidev Baghel’s Practice,” Journal of Modern Craft 9, no. 2 (2016): 139–59. 29. Ushiroshoji Masahiro, “Communication/Community/Collaboration,” in Fukuoka Triennale, exhibition catalog (Fukuoka, Japan: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1999), 22. 30. Roobina Karode, “Navjot Altaf,” in Fukuoka Triennale, 232. 31. Karode, “Navjot Altaf,” 233. 32. Chaitanya Sambrani, ed., Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India (New York: Asia Society Museum, 2004). NOTES

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33. Navjot recounts this process in her 2005 interview with Grant Kester on DIAA Dialogue Bastar. 34. See Nancy Adajania, “Dialogues on Representation,” The Hindu, February 16, 2003, as well as her The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (Mumbai: Guild Art Gallery, 2016). See Grant Kester, Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art, exhibition catalog (Pittsburgh: Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005), and Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 35. This culminated not only in the 2016 monograph, but also a retrospective of the artist’s work at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, in 2018–19. That exhibition, The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out; Navjot Altaf: A Life in Art, focused primarily on Navjot’s early political activism and individual artistic work, with smaller sections documenting her collective work in Bastar. 36. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 37. Kester, One and the Many, 83. 38. Adajania, Thirteenth Place, 245. 39. See Adajania, “Dialogues on Representation.” 40. This patronage is also discussed in chapters 3 and 4. The Ford Foundation, which has funded development projects and arts projects in India since the 1950s, provided a $500,000 seed endowment for the IFA, but the IFA’s grant-making frameworks are independent of Ford Foundation oversight. 41. As Kester put it in his 2005 interview with Navjot, “the artist helps to craft an interface: between the contingencies of place and the abstractions of space, between the needs of inhabitants and the survival of complex eco-systems, and between the agency of man and the autonomy of nature.” 42. Vivan Sundaram, interview with the author, February 2, 2014. 43. See also Shoma Chaudhury, “ ‘Filth Is Something We All Like to Put Our Hands In,” Tehelka, September 6, 2008, www.shomachaudhury.com/filth-is-something-we-all-like-to-put-ourhands-in/. 44. Mathur, Fragile Inheritance, 134. 45. As Mathur points out, this destruction was recorded in the video Turning (2008). See Mathur, Fragile Inheritance, 136. 46. Records of the exhibition are on Asia Art Archive. See Vivan Sundaram, Living it. out. in. delhi, Rabindra Bhavan Galleries, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2005, accessed July 25, 2019, https:// aaa.org.hk/en/collection/event-database/living-it-out-in-delhi. 47. www.chintan-india.org/initiatives_knowledge_power.htm, accessed October 1, 2014. This initiative primarily stemmed from the personal interest in contemporary art of the NGO’s founder and director, Bharati Chaturvedi. 48. Rakhee Balaram, “Strange Making: Vivan Sundaram’s Trash, Gagawaka, and Postmortem,” in Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem, ed. Saloni Mathur and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum, UCLA, 2015), 146–47, citing Deepak Ananth, “Seams,” in Gagawaka: Making Strange (Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road, 2012), 10–27. 49. See Chaudhury, “ ‘Filth Is Something,” in which Sundaram presents his move away from painting as a bid for freedom from the increasing demands of the art market after his first Sotheby’s auction, in 1989. The timing of this interview is crucial, since September 2008 could be considered the height of anxieties around the sharp contraction of the market in Indian contemporary art after the onset of the Great Recession. 50. The summer temperature in Delhi reached the 48°C threshold in June 2019. 51. See Christiane Brosius, “Emplacing and Excavating the City: Art, Ecology, and Public Space in New Delhi,” Journal of Transcultural Studies, no. 1 (2015): 75–125. 228

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52. In addition to Sundaram’s Flotage and work by Atul Bhalla and Ravi Agarwal, Sheba Chhachhi’s The Water Diviner (2008) unearthed and projected visual records of the uses put to waterways under Mughal and British regimes onto images of the Yamuna’s polluted present, thereby highlighting the unrealized possibilities for ecological thinking that are secreted within the city’s layered history. Several other water-based works were installed at Kashmere Gate, including Subodh Gupta’s monumental Stainless Steel Bucket (2008) and (Sabine) Haubitz + (Stefanie) Zoche, The Yamuna Blues (2008), discussed later in this section. 53. Inder Salim’s 2002 performance, Dialogue with Power Plant, Shrill across a Dead River,” is referred to in his “Blood in the River,” Open, September 22, 2009, https://openthemagazine.com/essays/ true-life/blood-in-the-river/. 54. This ambitious public art project was not realized because the city did not ultimately issue permits. But a public program called DAMned ART was staged at the Goethe Institut in Chennai, and Agarwal and his cocurator, Florian Matzner, coedited a catalog with Helmut Schippert, Embrace Our Rivers: Public Art and Ecology in India (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2018). 55. See Jan Breman, Arvind N. Das, and Ravi Agarwal, Down and Out: Labouring under Global Capitalism 1997–2000 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 56. Agarwal has worked very productively in the para-academic space staked out by Sarai, publishing essays in the third and fifth Sarai Readers, along with other essays that could be described as public scholarship. 57. Ravi Agarwal, Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? exhibition catalog (Delhi: Khoj International Artists Association, 2009), 20. 58. Kavita Singh, “Atul Bhalla,” Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia, August 12– November 6, 2011, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, www.portrait.gov.au/content /atul-bhalla/. CONCLUSION

1. Nataliya Komarova, “The Meanings of Discounts in Contemporary Art Markets: The Case of India,” Cultural Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015): 567–82. 2. Kavita Singh, “A History of Now,” Art India 11, no. 1 (June 2010): 26–33. 3. Lee Weng Choy, ‘The Assumption of Love: Friendship and the Search for Discursive Density,’ in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, ed. Nora A. Taylor and Boreth Ly (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asian Program Publications, 2012), 189–210; Peggy Wang, “Art Critics as Middlemen: Navigating State and Market in Contemporary Chinese Art, 1980s-1990s,” Art Journal (Spring 2013): 6–19. 4. For a contextualized critique of this issue, see Karin Zitzewitz and Manuela Ciotti, eds., “Art and Anthropology: Twenty-Five Years of The Traffic in Culture,” special issue, Journal of Material Culture 27, no. 1 (March 2022), with additional contributions from Ruth B. Phillips, Nora A. Taylor, and Traffic editors Fred R. Myers and George M. Marcus. 5. See Nora A. Taylor, “The Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer?” Third Text 25, no. 4 (2011): 475–88. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 31–32. 7. All statements from Kristine Khouri come from “Definitively Non-verifiable Speech Girls,” in TL; DR, Some Medium Stories, a publication edited by Michael Vasquez for Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum 6: “The Medium of Media,” in 2012. Quotes were transcribed from “Some Medium Stories (Part II) - Global Art Forum 6,” July 19, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC_ ZAbWJrP8. NOTES

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8. Irit Rogoff, “Gossip as Testimony—A Postmodern Signature,” Women’s Art Magazine (Nov.–Dec. 1995), 6–9; Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 9. Mithu Sen and Karin Zitzewitz, “ ‘We have entered a stage of overproduction’: The Weight of (Un)hospitality and the Performative Self,” Critical Times 4, no. 1 (2021), 174–85. 10. The piece was published in Time Out Mumbai in late September or early October 2006, but is now inaccessible. Shahane quoted the piece in full on his Facebook timeline on October 12, 2016, accessed October 13, 2020, www.facebook.com/girishshahane. He also quoted a portion of it on his blog, “The Indian Art Market’s Double Dip,” June 2011, accessed October 13, 2020, http://girishshahane.blogspot.com/2011/06/indian-art-markets-double-dip.html. 11. For a similar ethnographic account, see Olga Sooudi, “Art Patron as ‘Taste Scapegoat’? Complicity and Disavowal in Mumbai’s Contemporary Art World,” Etnofoor 24, no. 2 (2012): 123–43. 12. Max Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4 (1963): 307–16; Anjan Ghosh, “Symbolic Speech: Towards an Anthropology of Gossip,” Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society 31 (1996): 251–56. 13. See Filip Vermeylen, “The India Art Fair and the Market for Visual Arts in the Global South,” in Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art, ed. Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 31–54; Stefano Baia Curioni, Laura Forti, and Ludovic Leone, “Making Visible: Artists and Galleries in the Global Art System,” in Velthuis and Curioni, Cosmopolitan Canvases, 55–77. 14. Although this was more often a feature of art talk, thoughtful versions of this position were articulated by Ranjit Hoskote in “The Anxiety of Influence,” Art India 4, no. 2 (April 1999): 32–35; and Girish Shahane, “The Usual Suspects,” Art India 4, no. 2 (April 1999): 36–37; with a response in a letter to the editor by Gulammohammed Sheikh in the next issue, Art India 4, no. 3 (July 1999): 4–5. 15. The biennial is sponsored by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, which was established by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu in 2010. 16. Manuela Ciotti, “Art Voyages: Rethinking Biennales with Vasco Da Gama,” Global-e 10 (2017): 49, www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/july-2017/art-voyages-rethinking-biennales-vasco-da-gama. 17. This diverse set of projects includes the Pune Biennale (2013– ), the Srinagar Biennial (2018), the Chennai Photo Biennale (2016– ), the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa (2016– ), the Lahore Biennale (2018– ), the Karachi Biennale (2017– ), and the weeklong intensive biennial Dhaka Art Summit (2012– ). 18. The controversy is summarized well in Apoorva Mandhani, “What Artist Subodh Gupta’s Case against Anonymous #MeToo Posts Achieved—and Didn’t,” ThePrint, India, February 21, 2020, https://theprint.in/india/what-artist-subodh-guptas-case-against-anonymous-metoo-postsachieved-and-didnt/368411/. 19. I found, through extensive informal discussion with older women artists and art-world workers, that the kind of behavior classified as harassment was thought of as being wrong but also had been more or less accepted as routine up until this moment. Such a generational disjuncture is a common feature across the global #MeToo movement. 20. See the set of protections announced by Khoj in the wake of these allegations at https:// khojworkshop.org/khoj-is-a-safe-space/. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale also set up an Internal Complaints Committee to field accusations of sexual harassment. See www.kochimuzirisbiennale .org/internal-complaints-committee-icc/. 21. Huma Mulji, interview with the author via Skype, September 1, 2016.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Sheela Gowda, Behold, 2009  /  2 Sheela Gowda, Behold (detail), 2009  /  2 Vivan Sundaram, installation view of Memorial, 1993  /  4 Vivan Sundaram, Iron Pyre, 1993  /  4 Nalini Malani, Alleyway of Lohar Chawl, 1991  /  5 Rummana Hussain, Dissected Projection, 1993  /  6 Nalini Malani, Medeamaterial, 1993  /  18 Sheba Chhachhi, Urvashi—Staged Portrait, 1990  /  20 Nilima Sheikh, Meghdoot/Savan 2, side 1, 1995  /  22 Sheela Gowda, Untitled (Triptych), 1992–93  /  23 Pushpamala N., Excavations (detail), 1994  /  24 Nilima Sheikh with S. Badrinarayan, performance still, Vivadi production of Umrao, 1993  /  27 Nilima Sheikh with S. Badrinarayan, drawing, structural manual for set design of Umrao, 1993  /  27 Bhupen Khakhar, Paan Beedi Shop, 1992  /  28 Nalini Malani, Medeamaterial, 1993  /  30 Nalini Malani, Medeamaterial, 1993  /  30 Nalini Malani, The Job, 1997  /  32 Nalini Malani, The Sacred and the Profane, 1998  /  33 Nilima Sheikh, Shamiana, 1996  /  36 Nilima Sheikh, Shamiana (close-up), 1996  /  36 Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (performance still), 1995  /  39 Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (detail), 1996  /  39 245

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 246

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Pushpamala N., Phantom Lady, or Kismet #9, 1996–98  /  43 Pushpamala N., Phantom Lady, or Kismet #20, 1996–98  /  43 Atul Dodiya, The Bombay Buccaneer, 1994  /  50 Jitish Kallat, When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw, 1995  /  52 Jitish Kallat, 1. Ordinary Recipe 2. Heading from My Old City Book, Mailing the Same to Good God’s 57 Cook, 1998  / �� Atul Dodiya, Missing III (Atul), 2001  /  59 Installation view of Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, Tate Modern, London, 2001  /  60 Installation view of Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, Tate Modern, 2001  /  61 Installation view of Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, Tate Modern, 2001  /  62 Jitish Kallat, 22,000 Sunsets, 2001  /  63 Jitish Kallat, Anger at the Speed of Fright, 2002  /  64 Atul Dodiya, 2nd October, 1993  / �� 65 Atul Dodiya, Broken Branches, 2002  /  66 Atul Dodiya, Sea-Bath (Before Breaking the Salt Law), 1998  /  68 Atul Dodiya, Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974, 1998  / �� 70 Atul Dodiya, Dadagiri, 1998  / �� 72 Baiju Parthan, Diary of the Inner Cyborg (installation view), 2001–3  /  76 T. V. Santhosh, Blood and Spit, 2009  /  80 T. V. Santhosh, Better Lessons—II, 2009  /  81 Ranbir Kaleka, Crossings: Two Stories, 2005  /  83 Sheela Gowda, untitled (site-specific installation at Buddha Jayanti Park, New Delhi), 1995  /  86 Sheela Gowda, untitled (close-up of site-specific installation at Buddha Jayanti Park), 1995  /  86 Subodh Gupta, My Mother and Me, 1997  / �� 88 Subodh Gupta, Pure, 1999  / �� 88 Subodh Gupta, Bihari, 1999  /  89 Sheela Gowda, And Tell Him of My Pain, 1998/2001  /  93 Rummana Hussain, The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal, 1997  /  94 Anita Dube, Silence (Blood Wedding), 1997  /  95 Anita Dube, Silence (Blood Wedding) (close-up), 1997  / �� 96 Ranjani Shettar, Thousand Room House, 2000  / �� 98 Anita Dube, The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters, 2003  / �� 99 Anita Dube, untitled (tree wrapped in thread), 1998  / ��� 103 Pushpamala N., Sunhere Sapne #10, 1998  / ��� 106 Tania Bruguera, Made in India, 1998  / ��� 107 Bharti Kher, Chocolate Muffin (Hybrids series), 2004  /  110 Bani Abidi, The News, 2001  / ��� 111 Subodh Gupta, The Way Home, 1998–99  / ��� 113 Subodh Gupta, Very Hungry God, 2006  / ��� 114 Subodh Gupta, God Hungry, 2006  / ��� 115 Amar Kanwar, A Season Outside (video still), 1997  /  121 Raqs Media Collective, Location(n), 2002  / ��� 121 Shilpa Gupta, Blame (detail), 2002–4  / ��� 122 Amar Kanwar, A Season Outside (installation view), 1997  /  128 Amar Kanwar, A Night of Prophecy (still), 2002  /  130 Amar Kanwar, A Night of Prophecy (still), 2002  / ��� 130 Raqs Media Collective, OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification), 2002  / ��� 136 Shilpa Gupta, Your Kidney Supermarket (exterior view), 2002–3  /  138

ILLUSTRATIONS

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70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Shilpa Gupta, Your Kidney Supermarket (interior view), 2002–3  /  139 Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2003  /  140 Raqs Media Collective, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, or, 28°28′ N/77°15′ E: 2001/2002, 2002  /  142 Raqs Media Collective, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, or, 28°28′ N / 77°15′ E: 2001/2002 (installation view), 2002  /  144 Shilpa Gupta, There Is No Border Here, 2005–6  /  144 Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2008–9  / ��� 145 Atul Dodiya, Antler Anthology II, 2003  / ��� 148 Jitish Kallat, Public Notice I, 2003  / ��� 150 Anita Dube, Serenissima (journey on a red sea), 2005  /  152 Raqs Media Collective, A Measure of Anacoustic Reason, 2005  /  153 Vivan Sundaram, The Great Indian Bazaar (detail), 1997  /  158 Vivan Sundaram, Master Plan, 2005–8  /  160 Bharti Kher, Silver Midas, 2000  /  165 Posters by Shezad Dawood, Shilpa Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, and Asma Mundrawala, 2002  /  166 Huma Mulji, Mera Ghar (My House), 2002  /  167 Dialogue International Artists Association, Nalpar structure, 2001  /  169 Navjot Altaf, Rajkumar Korram, Shantibai, Gessuram, Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of World-Making (installation view), 1997  /  171 Vivan Sundaram, Master Plan (detail), 2005–8  /  176 Vivan Sundaram, The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain (video still), 2005  /  176 Vivan Sundaram, Barricade (with two drains), 2008  / ��� 178 Vivan Sundaram, Flotage (still), 2008  /  179 Vivan Sundaram, Flotage (still), 2008  /  179 Ravi Agarwal, Have You Seen the Flowers on the River, 2007  /  181 Ravi Agarwal, River Bank I, 2007  /  182 Atul Bhalla, I was not waving but drowning—II, 2005  /  183 Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (through 22kms), 2007  /  185 Mithu Sen, Black Candy: “iforgotmypenisathome” (installation view), 2010  /  194 Mithu Sen, Free Mithu invitation, 2007–present  /  195 Mithu Sen, Free Mithu gift exchange, February 19, 2009  /  195 Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing II, December 11–14, 2007  /  197

ILLUSTRATIONS

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INDEX

Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 14, 161, 163–68, 165–67, 186 Abidi, Bani, The News (2001), 109–10, 111 Abraham, Ayisha, 92, 94, 96–97 abstraction vs. figuration, tension between, 51, 53 the academy, as funding and support source, 132–33 actor-network theory. See network theory Adajania, Nancy: overview, 10–11; as critical of NGOs, 134, 222n13; curating The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out; Navjot Altaf: A Life in Art (2018–19 retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Mumbai), 228n35; on Girish Dahiwale, 75–76, 212–13n27; on Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA), 173, 174; on documenta XI, 125–26; as excluding language from art, 126; on Shilpa Gupta, 141; “new mediatic realism,” 51, 53, 74, 214n55;

on painting engaged with media-circulated images, 75–76; and Baiju Parthan, 77; on the political in art, 126, 222n13; on Raqs Media Collective, 143 Adil, Ayesha, 167 adivasi art practices: Jaidev Baghel and development and promotion of, 170, 172; and craft/art distinction, 170–71, 172; Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172, 219n60; India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art (1993 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), 37, 208n40; Modes of Parallel Practices: Way of WorldMaking (1997 collaborative work with Navjot Altaf ), 171–72, 171; Jagdish Swaminathan’s Bharat Bhavan project of support for, 227n27. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association Africa: artist workshops held in, 101; art networks connecting to, 7, 46, 73, 101, 105, 200; colonial history of

249

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Africa (continued) icons of locality, 159; documenta XI platform brought to, 125; feminist networks in, 200; récuperation movement, 159, 226n4; Triangle Network-affiliated workshops established in, 101 Agarwal, Meenal, 41–42, 210n56 Agarwal, Ravi: overview, 14–15; and art infrastructures, 185–86; curating DAMned ART (2018 public program at the Goethe Institut, Chennai), 229n54; and demystification, 184–85; in documenta XI (2002), 123, 126, 180; Down and Out, Labouring under Global Capitalism (2000 India Habitat Gallery solo exhibition, Delhi), 221n3; environment and land-rights as focus of, 180–81, 184–85; in 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (2008 international public art festival, Khoj), 180, 229n52; funding of, 186; and language as medium, 180; Toxics Link (NGO), 180. Works: Alien Waters (2004–6 series), 180, 184; collaboration with Jan Bremer, 180; Embrace Our Rivers: Public Art and Ecology in India (2018 catalog with Florian Matzner and Helmut Schippert), 229n54; Embrace Our Rivers (2018 unrealized public art project), 180, 229n54; Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? (2007), 180, 181, 184–85, 186; participatory project (2007), 180, 181, 185; River Bank I (2007), 180–81, 182; Sarai Reader contributions, 186, 229n56; Yamuna-Elbe Project (2010), 180; The Yamuna Project (2007 two-person Khoj residency with Atul Bhalla), 163, 180, 186 agency of images or objects, 90–91, 190–91, 216–17nn8–9,11–12 Ahmedabad, 26, 67, 102 Ahmed, Roohi, 165 Akhlaq, Zahoor ul, 83 Akka, Mahadevi, 25 Alice In Chains, “Over Now” (1995), 59 All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS) gallery, 5 Altered Altar (1998 Lakeeren Gallery exhibition of Shilpa Gupta), 224n49 Alter, Joseph, 67–68, 69 Alternating Currents. See Johannesburg Biennale (1997) Alternative Law Forum (Bengaluru), 224n35 American nonresident Indians (NRIs), 78 Anand, Shaina, 220n63 Ananth, Deepak, 177 Andre, Carl, 98 Andrews, Jorella, 45

250

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Angel Row Gallery (Nottingham), 217n21 Ankur, joint education initiative with Sarai (Cybermohalla), 137, 140 anthropology: of infrastructure, 8; and the material turn, 90–91, 217nn9,16; view of gossip, 196 anticolonialism: and male designation of women as guardians of femininity-as-tradition, 19–20; and Sharma’s Freedom Bus, 219n60; as site for the articulation of feminism, 20 Antoniolli, Alessio, 101, 102, 108 Apeejay Media Gallery (Delhi), 123 Appadurai, Arjun, 10, 53–54, 56, 90, 91, 137, 217n9, 226n10; PUKAR, 137. See also de- and reterritorialization APT. See Asia-Pacific Triennial (Brisbane, Australia) Araeen, Rashid, 10 Arario Gallery (Beijing and Seoul), 117 Architectural Digest, 205n22 Art & Deal, 205n22 Art & Public gallery (Geneva), 117 “Art and Nature” (1995 international workshop), 85, 86, 216n1 ArtAsiaPacific (magazine), 154, 205n22 Arte Povera, 218n33 Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), India Songs (1993), 37, 208n40 Art Gallery of Western Australia, Nalini Malani in collection, 33 art history as discipline: and the agency of images or objects, 90, 216–17n8; art talk (gossip) as everyday art historical archive, 191–92; autonomy of works of art, 9, 178, 222n9; Joseph Beuys’ practice as defying categorization by, 71; Pierre Bourdieu on the density of social interaction at the moment of an artwork’s production as key to its analysis, 191; canons of, 73; local history of abstraction/figuration tension placed in context of, 53; and materiality, 90, 98–100, 118, 216–17n8; normative argument for the production of an archive disentangled from the art world, 190; and the referential gesture, 74; silence about the shaping roles played by materials, the market, and infrastructures of circulation, 9; and tactility/the haptic, 98–99, 118; warning against the market as writing and re-writing art history, 190 Art India, 44, 53, 56, 125–26, 190, 230n14 art informel, 216–17n8 art infrastructure: artist workshops as producing works that are challenging to, 90; collapse of the boundary between circulation and form, 82;

INDEX

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definition of, 8; as essential to sustaining formal shifts by artists, 46–47, 190–91; failures of, 8; as intersecting with development infrastructure, 173–74, 228n40; as intersecting with infrastructures of everyday life, 14, 160, 161; modernist infrastructure, displacement of, 5; Nalpar project as recombining existing, 170; network of circulation between cultural centers outside of the West, 24–25, 34; performance and installation needing different kinds of, 18–19; post-recession professionalization of, 199; post-recession slowing down of, 189, 196, 199–200; sexual harassment accusations, protections, and grievance procedures, 199, 230nn19–20. See also artist networks of friendships, collaboration, and exchange; artist residencies; artist workshops, international; art market; art talk (gossip); biennial-style international exhibitions; circulation infrastructure; commercial galleries; exhibitions, new conditions of; funding; funding sources; materiality; new media; nonprofit arts institutions; publishing and journalism; studio assistants artist collectives: CAMP (Mumbai), 220n63, 224n35; CONA, 200n63; Desire Machine Collective, 156, 220n63; Open Circle as, 104. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA); Raqs Media Collective artist exchanges, 46; Fire & Life (1996–97), 209n46, 210nn56,67 artist networks of friendships, collaboration, and exchange: Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists) as, 164–65, 168; art talk (gossip) as forging and lubricating, 191; biennial-style international exhibitions and development of, 38; break with painting in favor of performance and installation and development of, 19; feminist debate and development of, 46; international artist workshops and development of, 107; theater and film and, 46. See also artist collectives; artist exchanges; artist residencies; artist workshops, international; collaboration artist residencies: Civitella (Italy), 155; as facilitating artists’ movement across the world, 109, 186, 220n64; funding of, 108, 109, 111, 155, 220n64, 227n19; Khoj, 108–11, 180, 183, 184–85, 186; Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, California), 149, 155, 215n68, 225n59; and slower, more densely knitted networks, 108–11; Triangle Network/Gasworks, 104, 108, 109, 186,

219n54, 220nn63–64; workshops compared to, 108–9 artist workshops, international: overview, 89–90, 100; as artist-driven alternatives to commercial galleries and large international exhibitions, 90; as continuing to move artists across borders, 186; crossover between members of, 104, 219n54, 220n63; and everyday things as medium, 13, 53, 105, 117; materiality and ephemerality and, 90, 105–7, 117–18; residencies compared to, 108–9. See also artist residencies; Khoj International Artists Association; Open Circle; Triangle Network art market: Ranjit Hoskote’s 2011 Venice Biennale pavilion as framed against, 156; Indian artists’ works more accessible to international than to Indian audiences, 117, 198, 230n14; Mithu Sen and alienation from, 193, 194. See also art infrastructure; art talk (gossip); commercial galleries; expansion of the Indian art market; Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008); Indian art world; liberalization of India’s economy (1991); nonprofit arts institutions; post-recession Indian art world; prices; value art networks: art talk (gossip) as forging and lubricating, 191; as assemblages of human and nonhuman entities, 8; connecting to sites around the world, 7, 46, 73, 101, 105, 200; and development of infrastructural art forms, 161–62 art publishing. See publishing and journalism Art Radar Asia, 205n22 art talk (gossip): overview, 15, 196; careful study of, 191–92, 196; as everyday art historical archive, 191–92; as forging and lubricating art networks, 191; gossip defined as un-verifiable speech, 192; Indian market boom as subject for, 192; post-recession, on the collapse of the market, 196; Sen, Mithu’s Facebook post of Vuk Vidor’s print Art History (2004), and game of who “owns” what, 192–93, 196; as shoring up the boundaries of community against those who violate its shared norms, 196; silences in community-building power of, 199; and value, 191, 196 art world. See Indian art world Asia: art journalism established across, 10–11, 205n22; art networks connecting to, 7 Asialink, 209n46 Asia-Pacific Triennial (Brisbane, Australia), 13, 46; second edition (APT2, 1996), 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 208n42; fourth edition (2002), 38, 209n45; Khoj workshop invitees found via, 219n50

INDEX

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Asia Society (New York), 172 assemblages: art networks as, of human and nonhuman entities, 8; and de- and reterritorialization, 10, 55, 204–5n20; definition of, 9; image condition as, 53, 191; infrastructural forms of art as, 160, 162, 168, 170; infrastructure as, of material and immaterial elements, 162, 163; infrastructure as, through which other assemblages circulate, 162, 186–87 Atul Dodiya: Broken Branches (2003 Bose Pacia Modern, New York exhibition), 66 auctions of art: expansion of the art market evident in, 203n3; India-based auction houses, 6, 74–75; international auction houses, 5–6, 228n49. See also Saffronart.com (gallery and auction website) audience engagement: Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists) and the vernacular public sphere, 164, 165, 168; displacement of, Atul Bhalla and, 182, 184; distraction of, Subodh Gupta and, 113–14, 116; installation and, 33, 35; and legibility of artworks, demand for, 7, 13–14, 119, 201; performance and theater and, 25, 26; post-recession, 109; video and, 82. See also participation; tactility/the haptic Australia: art journalism established across, 10–11, 205n22; art networks connecting to, 7, 38, 46, 73, 200; curators hired by European and US institutions, 198; Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172; feminist installation and, 34–35; feminist networks in, 34, 38, 200; Fire & Life (1996–97 artist exchange), 209n46, 210nn56,67; India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art (1993 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney exhibition), 37, 208n40; regional art press established in, 10–11, 205n22. See also Asia-Pacific Triennial autonomy of art objects, 9, 178, 222n9 Ayodhya. See Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent civil violence (Ayodhya) Baazigar (film), 49 Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent civil violence (Ayodhya): overview, 3; as context for feminist exploration of religious and gender identity, 25–26; as impetus for formal change in artists’ work, 19, 23, 37, 87, 200; and the pluralistic urban imaginary, 42; and shrinking social space for Muslims, 93–94; Vivan Sundaram’s Memorial as commemoration of, 3; as symbol of the collapse of India’s secularist consensus, 19

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Badrinarayan, S., 26, 27 Bagchi, Jeebesh. See Raqs Media Collective Baghel, Jaidev, 170, 172, 173, 227n27 Baij, Ramkinkar, 91 Balaram, Rakhee, 177 Banerjee, Sarnath, 110 Bangladesh: Britto artist organization, 108, 220n63, 227n19; Dhaka Art Summit (2012–), 230n17; and the visa regime, 163–64 Basu, Anustup, 42, 44 Bath Festivals Trust, Telling Tales (1997 traveling exhibition), 45, 46, 92–95, 209n49, 210n56 Baudelaire, Charles, 177 Bawa, Manjit, 208n40 Beaconsfield (London), Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings (2000), 92, 94, 217nn21–22 Belting, Hans, 216–17n8 Bengaluru: 1. Shanthi Road (artist group), 101, 220n63; artist group led by C.F. John, 101, 219n45; commercial galleries increasing in, 6; India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), 135, 171; Khoj workshop, 108, 219n45; pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) (2008), 224n35; popular theater and, 45; Pushpamala N. and, 45, 210n56; Ranjana Shettar and, 97 Benjamin, Walter, 114, 116, 177, 223n21 Bennett, Jane, 9, 90–91, 109, 217nn11–12 Ben, Teju, 208n40 Berent, Hella, 216n1 Beuys, Joseph: antiaesthetic impulse of, 73; artist-as-political-actor model proposed by, 71; Atul Dodiya’s references to, 71, 214n48; “everyone is an artist,” 71; Fat Chair (1964), 99, 214n48; I like America and America likes me (1974), 71 Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan (2005 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai exhibition), 83, 84, 186, 216n71 Bhagavata Purana, 31–32 Bhalla, Atul: overview, 14–15; and art infrastructures, 185–86; and displacement of the viewer’s attention, 182, 184; in 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (2008 international public art festival, Khoj), 180, 229n52; funding of, 186; and tactility/the haptic, 185; water infrastructure as focus of, 180, 182–84, 185–86. Works: I was not waving but drowning II (2005 series), 182, 183, 185; Mumbai Walk, 183; The Yamuna Project (2007 two-person Khoj residency with Ravi Agarwal), 163, 180, 186; Yamuna Walk (2007), 183–84, 185, 185 Bharat Bhavan project (Jagdish Swaminathan), 227n27

INDEX

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Bhau Daji Lad Museum (Mumbai), 64, 197 Bhulabhai Desai Institute (Bombay), 29 biennial-style international exhibitions: accompanied by smaller, network-engaged projects, 85, 86, 209n46, 216n1; and the “aesthetics of experience,” 11–12; artist networks developing from, 38; and the break with painting in favor of installation and performance art, 13, 18–19; cultural representation demanded by audiences of, 13–14; early improvisational characteristics of, 46; funding of, 46, 198; geographical reach expanded via curatorial authority, 24–25; globality consolidated by, 12; legibility demanded by audiences of, 7, 13–14, 119, 201; and locality, 12; national pavilions and the cultural-geographical model for, 23–24, 37–38; and national sovereignty, 12; post-recession establishment of new, 198–99, 230nn15,17. See also specific exhibitions Biswas, Sutapa, 209n49 Black Candy: (iforgotmypenisathome) (2010 Mithu Sen exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai), 193, 194 Blazwick, Iwona, 58 “bling” aesthetics, 205n24. See also shininess Bodhi Art Gallery (Singapore), 75 body.city: new perspectives on India (2003 exhibition, House of World Cultures, Berlin), 60; subTerrain (curated by Geeta Kapur), 60, 146 Bombay: use of name in this text, 203n2. See also Mumbai “Bombay Boys,” 13, 51, 53, 198 “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001” (2001 exhibition, part of Century City), 58–61, 59–62, 71, 212nn24,26 boom market. See expansion of the Indian art market; Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008); liberalization of India’s economy (1991); post-recession Indian art world borders: Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 14, 161, 163–68, 165–67, 186; and artists and collectors meeting in third spaces, 186; image technologies and ability to evade, 82, 84; and Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside (1997), 125, 127, 164; partition and sense of loss, 164. See also Partition (1947) Bose, Arani and Shumita, 154, 155, 225n59 Bose Krishnamachari: and art historical canons, 73; Death of Memory Is End of History and Self, Legends Exist Only with Memory (2001), 73; and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 198, 230n15; prices for works by, 215n61; and the referential gesture, 73–74

Bose Pacia Modern (New York), 56, 66, 154, 155, 225n65 Botha, Andries, 103 Bourdieu, Pierre, 191 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 9, 204n15, 220n73, 221n79 brand logic, all other artists using that characteristic labeled “derivative,” 193 Brazil, 218n29; Emoção Art.ficial (2002 Itaú Cultural Institute exhibition), 121 Brecht, Bertolt: anti- and post-Brechtian approaches, 31, 33; The Job or by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou fail to earn thy bread, 31, 32 Bremer, Jan, 180 bricolage: “hot” vs. “cool,” 170, 173, 178; the Nalpar pump project as “hot,” 169–70, 173; Sundaram’s Barricade (2008) as, 177, 178 British Council (Delhi): Tania Bruguera’s Made in India (2001), 106–7, 106; Telling Times (1997 traveling show called Telling Tales at other venues), 45, 46, 92–95, 209n49, 210n56 Britto (Bangladesh), 108, 220n63, 227n19 Brown, Bill, 10, 91, 116, 123, 216–17n8, 217n16 Brown, Rebecca M., 11 Bruguera, Tania, Made in India (2001), 106–7, 107 Buchloh, Benjamin, interview with Gerhard Richter, 73, 74, 214n52 Bushan, Rasna, 92–94, 209n49 Butalia, Urvashi, 19, 20, 25 Butler, Judith, 40 Butt, Gavin, 192 calendar art, 55 CAMP (Mumbai), 220n63, 224n35 Campbell, Peter, 31 Canada: Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal), 223n26; and Triangle Network, 101 capitalism: conceptual art and critique of, 141, 224n51; and degradation of labor, 159–60, 175; the internet as extension of, 137, 139; logic of obsolescence of, 160; multiculturalism associated with, 10; neoliberalism, 133, 205n24; and postmodernism, 99–100, 218n39. See also globalization capitalist mimetics, 114, 116 Caro, Anthony, 101 Carroll, Alison, 209n46 caste: and Chintan (NGO), 175; and Girish Dahiwale’s politics, 212–13n27; in Amar Kanwar’s A Night of Prophecy, 129, 131; and limits on diversity of artists of the period, 7; and nationalist ideal of womanhood, 38 catalog essay genre, 58

INDEX

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categorical distinctions: anxiety in the face of breakdown due to technologies, 162; of art and everyday life, 173, 177–78; art as breaking down, and the need to understand the intertwining of infrastructure and form, 191; breakdown of, and desire for human contact, 168; infrastructural forms of art as disruptive of, 174, 176–77; of language and politics in art, 126, 146; of language and politics in art, breakdown of, 146 Caur, Arpana, 216n1 Cecchi, Enzo, 149 Celano, Germano, 208n32 Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) (Delhi), 122–23, 134, 135 Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2001 Tate Modern exhibition), 13, 58; “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001,” 58–61, 59–62, 71, 212nn24,26 Chaitime.com, 75, 214n56 Channel [V], 13, 51, 55 Chatterjee + Lal (Mumbai), 83–84 Chatterjee, Partha, 19–20, 38; The Nation and Its Fragments, 20 Chaturvedi, Bharati, 228n47 Chemould Prescott Road (Mumbai): Black Candy: (iforgotmypenisathome) (2010 Mithu Sen exhibition), 193, 194. See also Gallery Chemould (Mumbai) Chennai Photo Biennale (2016–), 230n17 Chhachhi, Sheba, 25, 42; Urvashi—Staged Portrait (1990), 20; The Water Diviner (2008), 229n52 Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (Mumbai), 197 China: and acceleration of the art market, 190; art networks connecting to, 218n29; experimental art in, 100; national pavilions of, 155; and Tibet, 127; trade in small painting on glass from, 212n14 Chintan (Delhi NGO): “Knowledge Power” initiative of, 176, 177, 228n47; Vivan Sundaram partnership with, 159, 162, 174–78 Chitava, Jaedesh Vaghi, 208n40 Chomsky, Noam, 145 Chopra, Nikhil, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing II, 197, 197 Christie’s auctions, 78 Ciotti, Manuela, 60–61 circulation infrastructure: art historical silence about shaping role of, 9; collapse of boundary between form and, 82; between cultural centers outside of the West, 24–25, 34; feminist networks, 200; infrastructural forms address-

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ing, 158–59, 161, 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 180, 181, 186–87; the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s dependence on, 198; and language as medium, 124; new, for documentary film, 133; photorealism and, 74, 81; Vivan Sundaram and, 158–59, 160–61, 177; timing of, 196; value of art required for, 196 the city: as archive, 42; “clean city” as marker of modernism, 159; as locality, 61; as spatial-cultural unit of choice, 58; Vivan Sundaram’s work with trash and framework of, 160–61; waste disposal as visible structure of, 160. See also infrastructure Civitella (Italy), artist residency program, 155 Clark, Lygia, 218n33 Clicking into Place (2002 exhibition), 76–77, 215n58 climate crisis, 179, 228n50 Cold War, 134 collaboration: of artists and NGOs, 14–15, 159, 162, 174–78; Dialogue Interactive Artists Association as, 168, 170, 176; feminism and, 25, 26, 33–34, 200; as Saffronart.com business model with commercial galleries, 75, 78; spirit of, and Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 163, 168, 227n19; as Triangle Network principle, 227n19; Vivadi feminist theater troupe emphasizing, 25, 26. See also artist collectives; artist networks of friendships, collaboration, and exchange collectors/investors: acquisition of Pakistani artists’ works by Indian collectors and art institutions, 84, 186; buying for love vs. investment, 194, 196; Europe as third space for meetings with artists, 186; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) (Delhi), 197–98; Anupam and Lekha Poddar, 109–10, 186; practice as transformed by changes in image culture, 53; seeking lesser-known artists at the height of the boom, 196–97 colonialism: African history of icons of locality, 159; and de- and reterritorialization of form, 54–55, 212n14; the fall of Apartheid, 23; gender allegorized to allow the feminine to stand in for the colonized other, 31; the internet as extension of, 137, 139; and the spectacle of infrastructural efficiency, 159. See also anticolonialism; postcolonialism commercial galleries: the boom and increase in size and numbers of, 6, 75; cooperation of nonprofit institutions with, 7, 110–11, 117, 155, 174; and electronic art, interest in, 123; Subodh Gupta and development of relationships with, 111,

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116–17; infrastructural forms, success of, 172, 178, 228n49; international artist workshops as alternative to, 90; liberalization of India’s economy and ascendance of, 5–6; and materiality, success of works engaging with, 110–11; photorealism, success of, 53; Saffronart. com business model of collaboration with, 75, 78; Vivan Sundaram, success of waste-related works, 178, 228n49; warning against art history being written and re-written by, 190. See also auctions of art Commonwealth Games (2010), 179, 180–81 CONA, 220n63 conceptual art: critique of late capitalism in, 141, 224n51; Shilpa Gupta and, 14, 73, 122, 124, 141; lack of foothold in India, 122 Connarty, Jane, 92–94 Contractor, Anahite, 227n24 cosmopolitanism: Bombay/Mumbai locations and, 41–42; Kochi-Muziris Biennale curatorial themes and, 198; récuperation artists and, 226n4; Shiv Sena’s virulently anticosmopolitan politics, 53, 54, 211n10 Cotter, Holland, 212n21 cow dung: Sheela Gowda’s use of, 3, 14, 21, 85, 87, 89, 91, 97, 117; Subodh Gupta’s use of, 14, 87, 89, 91, 111, 112, 113, 117, 216n5; Khoj workshop location and availability of, 105; materiality of, 87, 91, 92; as “poor material,” 91; as sacred substance, 87, 216n5 craft/art distinction, 170–71, 172, 173, 220n64 Creative Cities network, 220n64 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 69 crossing generations: diVERGE (2003 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai), 140, 146, 147–49, 148, 150, 225nn57–58 Cuba. See Havana Biennial cultural diplomatic funding, Khoj and, 101, 104 Cultural Economic Development Program (Netherlands), 223n27 cultural meaning: borrowing of significance of, 100, 111, 112, 116, 159; materiality as escaping the question of, 91–92, 100, 117, 118 curatorial approach, team based, 208n42 curatorial discourse: and break with painting in favor of performance and installation, 19, 46; and development of circulation network between cultural centers outside the West, 24–25, 34; on formal experimentation vs. cultural-geographical model for biennial-style exhibitions, 37–38; globalization of art as both problematized and facilitated by, 10–11; and

new infrastructures for the production and circulation of art and documentary film, 133; on récuperation, 159, 226n4 Cybermohalla (educational nonprofit), 137, 140 Dada, 71, 72, 116 Dahiwale, Girish: as absent from Debt exhibition (2002), 75–76; Nancy Adajania on, 212–13n27; Geeta Kapur on, 59, 60; Riyas Komu’s portrait of, 76; and the referential gesture, 74; suicide of, 59; we’ll pay our debt sometime (1998), 59–60, 61, 65, 212–13n27 Dak’Art (Dakar, Senegal biennial exhibition), 12 DAMned ART (2018 public program at the Goethe Institut, Chennai), 229n54 Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal), 223n26 Darmawan, Ade, 103 Das, Veena, 149 Dawood, Shezad, “Stronger Together,” 166, 166 de- and reterritorialization: overview, 53–54; and accelerated time, 64; and assemblages, 10, 55, 204–5n20; early colonial trade and, 54–55, 212n14; as framework of thought for painting practice, 54, 56; globalization as, 10; Sheela Gowda and, 87, 89; and the image condition, 81; and image offense, discourse of, 69; and Ranbir Kaleka’s Crossings, 83; Jitish Kallat and, 62–64; liberalization of the Indian economy and acceleration of, 55–56; materiality-ephemerality dyad and, 91; Rashid Rana’s photo collages and, 84; the single-country survey exhibition and, 61; and the vernacular economy, 55, 212n15 Debt (2002 exhibition at Guild Art Gallery), 75–76 Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 55, 190–91 Delhi: commercial galleries increasing in, 6; documenta XI platform brought to, 125–26, 136; living it. out. in. delhi (2005 Vivan Sundaram exhibition, Rabindra Bhavan Gallery, Delhi), 159, 160–61, 175–77, 176, 178; waste disposal infrastructure and the specter of postcolonial failure, 159; Yamuna River artworks, 14, 159, 162, 163, 178–86, 179, 181–83, 185, 229n52 dematerialization: anxieties about mediatic technologies, 91; and photography/film, 116 demystification, 184–85 “derivative” label and brand logic, 193 Desai, Ajay, 102 Desai, Himanshu, 76 Desai, Prajna, 44 Desai, Vishakha, 218n29 Desire Machine Collective, 156, 220n63 Devenport, Rhana, 37

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Devi Art Foundation, 186 Dhaka Art Summit (2012–) (Bangladesh), 230n17 Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA): and acquisition funds from Modes of Parallel Practice, 172; children’s play space (Pilla Gudi), 172; as collaboration, 168, 170, 176; empowerment and, 173; establishment of, 170–73, 174, 176–77; funding of, 172, 173, 174, 228n40; in Ground Works (2004 exhibition curated by Grant Kester), 173; and infrastructure as shaping the bodily experience of artists, 186; and intersection between the arts and development, 173–74, 228nn40–41; membership of, 161–62, 172; Nalpar (2000– pump project by DIAA), 14, 161–62, 163, 168–70, 169, 172–74, 176–77, 186, 228nn40–41; NGO tasks taken on by, 176; opposition to, as reassertion of the categorical distinction between art and everyday life, 173; politics of, as focused on the limits of infrastructural networks, 163; process of, 173–74, 228n41. See also adivasi art practices Dietz, Steve, 123 digital image technologies, materiality and, 91, 118 Dimé, Moustapha, 159 diplomatic reading rooms, art magazines in, 53 Dispossession (1995 Johannesburg Biennale), 13, 17–19, 21, 23–25, 34, 92, 206n6 documenta (Kassel, Germany): edition IX (1992), 28–29, 28; edition XI (2002), 14, 123, 124–26, 132–33, 134, 136, 142–43, 146, 222n9, 225n58; edition XII (2007), 225n58 documentary film: and documenta XI platform (Delhi), 124–25, 126; the essay film, 126–29, 222n15; international foundation funding of, 133–34; Amar Kanwar and, 122, 123, 124, 132, 133; and language as medium, 122–23; Public Service Broadcasting Trust as influence on, 133–34; Raqs Media Collective and, 122, 124, 133, 134, 135, 223n29; and social subjectivity, 127; state-driven patronage of, 133. See also film Dodiya, Anju, 69, 70, 77 Dodiya, Atul: overview, 13; and Adajania’s “new mediatic realism,” 214n55; Atul Dodiya: Broken Branches (2003 Bose Pacia Modern, New York exhibition), 66; in crossing generations: diVERGE (2003), 146, 147, 149; Gandhi references by, 65–72, 147, 213nn38,40, 214n48; in iCon (2005), 146–47, 149; and Bhupen Khakhar, 49, 55, 212n24; and language as medium, 146–47, 149; and new media, 55–56, 211n6; and photorealism, 51, 53, 66–67, 77, 79; quotation of other painter’s styles, 49, 55, 211n1; rate of artistic production

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of, 75; referential practice of painting, 73, 74; and the relationship of painting to photography, 72–73; and Saffronart.com auctions, 78, 79; sale of installation by, 78; self-confidence of, 49, 211n2. Works: 2nd October (1993), 65, 65; An Artist of Non-violence series (1998–2002), 65–72, 147, 213n40; Antler Anthology (2003 series), 147, 148, 149, 225n58; Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974 (1998), 70–71, 70; Bombay Buccaneer (1994), 49, 50, 55; Broken Branches (2001), 65, 66, 71; Dadagiri (1998), 72–73, 72, 74; Fasting in Rajkot (1998), 68–69, 70; German Measles series (1999), 214n48; Missing (2001), 58, 59–60; Obedient Boys (1999), 214n48; The Post-dated Cheque (1998), 69; The Route to Dandi (1998), 67; Sea-Bath (Before Breaking the Salt Law) (1998), 67, 68, 69, 70; Stammer in the Shade (2005 series), 149; Tearscape series, 72 Dong, Song, 105 Doordarshan (TV) and Films Division, 133 dot.com boom/crash, 51, 75 Down and Out, Labouring under Global Capitalism (2000 India Habitat Gallery, Delhi), 221n3 Downey, Anthony, 126, 222n9 Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings (2000 Iniva and Beaconsfield traveling exhibition), 92, 94, 217nn21–22 Dube, Anita: overview, 14; curator of 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 199; feminism of, 199; on the haptic as the “optical caress,” 14, 95, 96, 121; in How Latitudes Become Forms (2003), 97, 98, 99–100; in iCon (2005 exhibition), 146, 149–52; Indian genealogy of artistic practice and, 100; and Khoj, 102, 103, 105, 117–18, 151–52; and language as medium, 146, 149–52; and materiality, 94–95, 98, 99–100; and ready-made materials, 97, 99; in Telling Tales (1997 traveling exhibition), 92, 94–95. Works: Desert Queen (1996), 101; Serenissima (journey on the red sea) (2005), 149–52, 152; Silence (Blood Wedding) (1997), 94–96, 95–96; The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters (2003), 97, 99, 99; untitled (meat performance) (2005–), 151–52; untitled (tree wrapped in thread) (1998), 103 Duchamp, Marcel, 73, 208n32 Dutch East India Company, Upstream exhibition commemorating (2002), 137–41, 138–39 Dutt, Guru, 164 e-commerce: eBay and Amazon, 78; the Indian diasporic community as target of, 75, 78. See also internet; Saffronart.com

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Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172, 219n60 education, Sarai/Cybermohalla joint initiative, 137, 140 Edwards, David E., 145 Eglise Saint-Bernard (Paris), 114, 220n73 electronic media art, 123. See also new media; video Emoção Art.ficial (2002 Itaú Cultural Institute exhibition, Brazil), 121 English: as lingua franca in artworks, 121–22; mobility of artists as dependent on, 7 the environment, 34, 35, 85, 132; climate crisis, 179, 228n50. See also Agarwal, Ravi; waste-disposal infrastructure; water infrastructure Enwezor, Okwui, 10, 14; curating documenta XI (2002), 123, 124, 133, 222n9, 225n58; curating the second Johannesburg Biennial (Alternating Currents, 1997), 24, 124, 125, 158 ephemerality. See materiality and ephemerality Esquillo, Alfredo, 215n58 essay film, 126–29, 222n15 Europe: art networks connecting to sites in, 7, 101; and the Creative Cities network, 220n64; Subodh Gupta and commercial success in, 117; Amar Kanwar and commercial success in, 154–55; the KNMA as supporting institutions to develop expertise in South Asian art, 197–98; as reference point, 73; and relational aesthetics, 9; as third space for meetings of collectors and artists, 186. See also colonialism Evans, Julie, and iCon: Indian Contemporary (2005 Venice Biennale collateral event), 146, 154, 155, 221n4, 225–26nn59,68 everyday life materials: overview, 13–14; as exploration of changes to everyday life, 7; Subodh Gupta and mass-produced stainless steel vessels (bartan), 111–14, 116, 159; international artist workshops and, 13, 53, 87, 105, 117; international exhibitions and, 117; recontextualization of, 3; récuperaction as engaging with, 159, 226n4; as Triangle Network imperative, 105. See also cow dung; readymades; waste-related works Everyone agrees: It’s about to explode (2011 Venice Biennale pavilion), 156, 225–26n68 Ewington, Julie, 34–35, 37, 209n46 exhibitions, new conditions of: in the assemblage of image condition, 53; forms of art as conditioned by, 191; new and spacious galleries, 6, 75; single-country surveys, 60–61. See also artist workshops, international; biennial-style

international exhibitions; private Indian art museums expansion of the Indian art market: accelerated rate of production of artworks and exhibitions, 6–7, 53, 75, 81, 215n66; accelerated timeline of the artistic career and, 56, 83–84, 216n71; acceleration in prices, height of boom (2003–2008), 78, 189, 215n61; alternating feelings of euphoria and unease as response to, 189–90; art talk (gossip) about, 192; and certainty about image vitality, 81–82; commercial galleries, increase in number of, 6, 75; and cooperation between commercial and nonprofit institutions, 7, 110–11, 117, 155, 174; diversity of artists in, 7; as efflorescence, 200–201; isolation of the painting medium from other forms, 75; materiality, commercial success of works engaging with, 110–11; photorealism and, 74–78, 79–84, 215n58; sculpture as selling from Saffronart website at height of boom, 78–79; segmentation of the market by artistic trends, 75; studio assistants made possible and necessary by, 6, 160. See also auctions of art; Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008); liberalization of India’s economy (1991); post-recession Indian art world; prices; Saffronart.com (gallery and auction website) Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 223n19 fax (facsimile) machines, 51, 74 Fearless Nadia (Mary Anne Evans), 42, 44, 45 Fellowship for the Physically Handicapped in Mumbai, 140 feminism: collaboration and, 25, 26, 33–34, 200; as crucial to the development of circulation between cultural centers outside of the West, 25, 34, 200; on doubly marginal subject-position of women, 21, 40; institutional formations in politics, publishing, and the arts, 19–20, 20, 206n3; intersectional, installation and, 34; and loss of confidence in the modernist project, 200; male artists, critique of, 200; materiality and, 45, 98; and the nationalist designation of femininity-as-tradition, 10, 19–20, 25, 41, 45; of Navjot Altaf, 170, 227n24; and painting, break with in favor of installation and performance art, 13, 19, 33–34; and performance and subjectivity, 40–41, 44, 45, 209–10n54; and the recuperation of the marginal voice, 19, 20; and religious identity, 25, 45; sexual harassment accusations and development of protections

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feminism (continued) and grievance procedures, 199, 230nn19–20; women’s self-representation in narrative, 26. See also Vivadi (feminist experimental theater troupe) Fer, Briony, 99, 100, 218n39 Ferran, Anne, 34 Festival of India (mid-1980s), 11 figuration vs. abstraction, tension between, 51, 53 film: dematerialization of, and tactility/the haptic, 116; denial of interiority and, 42, 44; Hindi cinema, 41, 42, 43, 44, 84, 105–6; and image production, 53, 84; posited as the basis of local visual culture, 58. See also documentary film film poster genre, 49, 55, 211n1 Fire & Life (1996–97 artist exchange), 209n46, 210nn56,67 Flores, Patrick, 215n58 Fluxus, 71 Fogle, Douglas, 97, 218nn29,33 Ford Foundation funding: and Cold War ideology, 224n39; India Foundation for the Arts, 135; International Fund for Agricultural Development, 173, 228n40; Khoj, 135; mobility of artists, 7, 108; NGOs, 134–35; Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), 133, 135; Sarai, 134; South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA), 108, 111, 227n19 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (2008 international public art festival, Khoj), 179–80, 181, 228n50, 229n52 Foucault, Michel, 214n54 Foundation for Ecological Security (Anand, Gujarat), 132 Foundation for Universal Responsibility of HH the Dalai Lama, 133 fragmentation: of bodies, sexual violence and, 41; the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995) and, 23; growing sense of, 19, 20; and the intersection of feminist and historical thought, 20–21; and the recuperation of the marginal voice, 19, 20; in theater, as reflecting the contemporary culture, 31 fragment, significant, 19, 23, 44, 45, 99 France: and genealogy of installation, 208n32; Subodh Gupta’s God Hungry (2006), 113, 115, 220n74; Subodh Gupta’s Very Hungry God (2006), 112–14, 114, 220n73, 221n82; La Nuit Blanche (2006), 220n73, 221n79; Lille 3000 Bombaysers de Lille (France), 220n74 Francois Pinault Collection, 114, 220n73 Freedberg, David, 216–17n8 frictionless mobility, 9 frictionless network, spatial imaginary of, 163

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friction, productivity of, 186 Fried, Michael, 25, 206n9 friendships. See artist networks of friendships, collaboration, and exchange Frieze London, 129 Fujita, Akiko, 216n1 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan): Jitish Kallat in collection of, 56, 57; Khoj workshop invitees found via, 219n50; Modes of Parallel Practice acquisition, 172; Kuroda Raiji and, 10, 37–38 Fukuoka Triennial (1999), 38, 46, 56; Modes of Parallel Practice shown in, 171–72 funding: of Ravi Agarwal, 186; of artist residencies, 108, 109, 111, 155, 220n64, 227n19; of Atul Bhalla, 186; for biennale-style international exhibitions, 46, 198; of documentary film, 133–34; of electronic media art, 123; of Shilpa Gupta, 140; of Amar Kanwar, 132–33; for Khoj, 101, 104, 109–11, 133, 135, 155, 219n62; of media-based practices, 123; of NGOs, 134–35; for Open Circle (Mumbai), international workshops, 104, 133; of Pushpamala N., 46, 210n56; for Raqs Media Collective, 133, 134–35, 137, 223nn27,29; of Rummana Hussain, 46; of SANA, 108, 111, 227n19; of Sarai, 134, 135, 223n27; of time-based work, 123 —sources of: the academy, 132–33; changes to, in post-recession Indian art world, 156, 186, 197, 198; cultural diplomatic, 46, 101, 104; NGOs as, 123, 133, 134; nonprofit patronage, 46, 133–34; SANA (mobility fund for artists), 108, 111, 227n19; smaller exhibitions as, 46, 210n56. See also commercial galleries; international foundations; private funding; public-private hybrids; state-driven arts patronage Furukawa, Chisen, 216n1 Galerie, 205n22 Galleria Continua, San Gimigiano, Italy, 117, 221n79 Gallery Chemould (Mumbai), 56, 210n67; crossing generations: diVERGE (2003 exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai), 140, 146, 147–49, 148, 150, 225nn57–58; When Soak Becomes Spill (1999 Subodh Gupta exhibition), 111–12. See also Chemould Prescott Road (Mumbai) Gandhi, Mohandas K.: as artist of non-violence, 66, 68, 71; assassination of, 133; body politics and representation of, 66–72; Girish Dahiwale’s reference to, 59, 65; Dandi Salt March (1930), 67, 70, 213n37; Atul Dodiya’s references to, 65–72, 147, 213nn38,40, 214n48; image of as

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flashpoint in the post-liberalization period, 64–66; and image offense, public discourse of, 69, 70, 214n44; Jitish Kallat’s references to, 62, 65, 148, 213n37; Amar Kanwar film referencing nonviolence and the search for truth, 125, 127–29; letter to Hitler (1939), 213n37; Natraj Sharma’s reference to, 219n60; three-monkey symbol associated with, 62, 65 Gandhy, Behroze and Dilesh Korya, Kekee Manzil—the House of Art (2020), 210n60 Gandhy, Shireen, 23–24, 42, 210nn60,67 Gangadevi (Bhatt), 168; in Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA) Gasworks residencies (Triangle Network headquarters, London), 104, 108, 109, 186, 219n54, 220nn63–64 Gego, 218n33 German cultural diplomatic mission. See Max Mueller Bhavan (Bombay galleries) Germany: and the artist-as-political-actor model of Joseph Beuys, 71; Atul Dodiya’s references to postwar German artists, 71, 73, 214n48; exposure to art from, in diplomatic reading rooms, 53; Oil21 (Berlin), 224n35; subTerrain (2003 House of World Cultures, Berlin exhibition, part of body.city), 60, 146; YamunaElbe Project (2010 collaboration with Ravi Agarwal), 180. See also documenta Gessuram, 162; Modes of Parallel Practices: Way of World-Making (1997 collaborative work), 171–72, 171. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA) Gilbert and George, 45 global financial crisis. See Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008) globality, and the second Johannesburg Biennial (1997), 158–59 globalization: biennial-style international exhibitions and, 11–12; and curating/curated cultures, distinction between, 12; “grassroots,” bottom-up agents of, 137; historical juncture with capitalism and postmodernism, 99; locality as critique of, 56; and locality, production of, 54; récuperation use of everyday materials as critique of, 226n4; and the relationship between art’s infrastructure and its form, 8, 204n10; the single-country survey exhibition as exemplary of, 60–61; technologies of, 8. See also de- and reterritorialization Global South: artist networks connecting to sites in, 101; the Creative Cities network and stated

emphasis on, 220n64; generalized expansion of the art market in, 13; Geeta Kapur writing in dialogue with group of key writers from, 10; transnational feminism and diasporic communities and, 19, 34; the Triangle Network’s support of, 100–101. See also artist networks of friendships, collaboration, and exchange; colonialism; de- and reterritorialization; feminism; globalization Goethe Institut (Chennai), 229n54 Goethe Institut (Germany), 7, 85 Gomez, Luiz, 105 Gopinath, Suman, 92, 94, 217n22 gossip. See art talk (gossip) Gowda, Sheela, 97, 98, 99–100; overview, 14; cow dung as material used by, 3, 14, 21, 85, 87, 89, 91, 97, 117; in Drawing Space (2000 Institute of International Visual Arts, London exhibition), 92, 217nn21–22; on globalization, 87; in How Latitudes Become Forms (2003), 97, 98, 99–100; Indian genealogy of artistic practice and, 100; infrastructural form and, 7; in Johannesburg Biennale (1995), 21, 23, 46; and labor, 89, 91, 98, 99, 118; and materiality, 14, 87, 92–93, 94, 96–97, 98–100, 117–18; and materiality and ephemerality, 117, 118; and “poor materials,” 91; on seeing the familiar with new eyes, 89; and shininess, 118; as stretching curatorial frameworks, 117; and tactility/the haptic, 99; in Telling Tales (1997 traveling exhibition), 92; on “the purity of the medium,” 87; in Venice Biennale (2009), 1–3, 7. Works: And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001), 92, 93, 94, 96–97, 97, 217n22; Behold (2009), 1, 2, 3, 7, 118; Private Gallery (1999), 97; untitled (site-specific installation at Buddha Jayanti Park) (1995), 85, 86, 87; Untitled (Triptych) (1992–93), 21, 23; untitled single rope (1997), 92 Goya, Francisco, Caprichos etchings, 97 Grabski, Joanna, 12, 226n4 Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008): overview, 15; development in Delhi left undisturbed by, 186; economy of India less affected by, 11; as end of period starting with the liberalization of India’s economy (1991), 11, 189, 200, 205n24; modern art market as rebounding relatively quickly, 189; and reentry to the art market of Vivan Sundaram’s waste-related works, 178, 228n49; relief mixed with sense of loss as response to, 190, 196; Girish Shane predicts the crash, 194, 230n10; and slowing down of art infrastructure, 189, 196; value lost in, 189. See also expansion of

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Great Recession and collapse (continued) the Indian art market; liberalization of India’s economy (1991); post-recession Indian art world Grounds, Joan, 34 Ground Works (2004 exhibition curated by Grant Kester), 173 Guattari, Félix, 10, 190–91 Guerilla Girls, 199 Guild Art Gallery (Mumbai), 75–76, 78 Gujral Foundation, 225–26n68 Gupta, Shilpa: overview, 14; on acceptance of political art, 146; Altered Altar (1998 Lakeeren Gallery solo exhibition), 224n49; and conceptual art, 14, 73, 122, 124, 141; curating Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 14, 161, 163–68, 165–67, 186; funding of works of, 140; and the imperative mode, 141, 143; and institutional contexts, creation of, 154–55; instructions for construction of her installations, 224–25n52; on the internet as extension of colonial/capitalist regimes of exchange, 137, 139; and internet as medium, 51; and language as medium, 14, 120, 122, 123–24, 138–39, 140–43, 145–46, 225n53; in My East is Your West (2015 Venice Biennale Indo-Pak collateral event), 225–26n68; and the NGO sector, 137; and Open Circle, 14, 103, 124, 224n44; and postmodernism, 73; as refusing to discuss her process in public discourse, 146; as Rummana Hussain’s studio assistant, 122; and surveillance, 143; in Upstream (2002 Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam), 137–41. Works: Blame (2002–4), 120, 122, 141–42, 166, 166; There Is No Explosive in This (2007), 143; Untitled (2003), 139–40, 140, 146; Untitled (2008–9 motion flapboard), 143, 145, 145; untitled (There is No Border Here) (2005–6), 143, 144; untitled instruction work (1996), 141, 224n49; untitled instruction work (1998), 141; untitled interactive video installation (2004), 143; untitled/unfinished work rejected by Amsterdam museum (2002), 140–41; We Change Each Other (2018), 225n53; Your Kidney Supermarket (2002–4), 137–39, 138–39, 141 Gupta, Subodh: overview, 14; audience distraction and, 113–14, 116; bartan (stainless steel vessels) as ready-made everyday material, 111–14, 116, 159; capitalist mimetics and, 114, 116; combining the ready-made with the made, 105; commercial success of, 117; cow dung used as material by, 14, 87, 89, 91, 111, 112, 113, 117, 216n5; cultural significance of material, 111, 112, 116, 159;

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“dazzling vacancy” of works, 113–14, 117; “discovery” of, as perpetual, 117; and formation of relationships between market and nonmarket institutions, 111, 116–17; in Fukuoka Triennial (1999), 56; in Havana Biennial (2003), 104–5, 112; and Khoj, 87, 102, 104–5, 111, 117–18; and materiality, 14, 87, 116; materiality and ephemerality and, 111, 112; and migration, 89, 105, 116; and postmodernism, 73; in Post Production, Sampling, Programming & Displaying (Galleria Continua, San Gimigiano, Italy 2001 exhibition), 221n79; and Saffronart.com, 78; scale of works, and extension of art infrastructure to accommodate, 116–17, 221n82; scale of works, and mastery, 113; sculptural practice of, 111, 112, 116–17; and shininess, 112, 113–14, 116, 220n75, 221n80; and the “spectacle of plenty” of economic liberalization, 116, 221n79; as stretching curatorial frameworks, 116–17; and tactility/the haptic, 111, 114, 116, 221n80; transition to enduring works, 112; When Soak Becomes Spill (1999 Gallery Chemould solo exhibition), 111–12. Works: Bihari (1999), 89, 89; God Hungry (2006), 113, 115, 220n74; My Mother and Me (1997), 87, 88, 105; Pure (1999), 87, 88, 89, 105; Pure (2000 video), 87, 89; Saat Samunder Paar (Across Seven Seas, 2003), 105; Stainless Steel Bucket (2008), 229n52; Very Hungry God (2006), 112–14, 114, 220n73, 221n82; The Way Home (I) (1998–99), 111–12, 113, 113 Gutai, 216–17n8 Hacker, Rosemary, 74, 214n54 Hamilton, Richard, 73 Hannerz, Ulf, 226n10 haptics. See tactility/the haptic Haraway, Donna, 217n11 Hashmi, Salima, 216n71 Hashmi, Zarina. See Zarina Haubitz + Zoche, The Yamuna Blues (2008), 181, 229n52 Hauser & Wirth galleries, 117 Havana Biennial, 10; Eighth (2003), 104–5, 112, 124 Hazra, Abhishek, 100–101 Helen (Helen Ann Richardson Khan), 42 Hesse, Eva, 98, 99, 218nn33,37 Hindi cinema, 41, 42, 43, 44, 84, 105–6 Hindu nationalism: feminist critique of, 10, 19–20, 25, 41, 45; SAHMAT in opposition to, 101; Shiv Sena (nativist political party), 42, 51, 53, 54, 211n10. See also Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent civil violence (Ayodhya); violence

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Hivos (development NGO), 219n62, 223n27 Hlavajova, Maria, and Simon Sheikh, Former West, 205n24 Hockney, David: Dodiya’s quotation of, 49, 50 Hoet, Jan, 28–29, 207n20 Hong Kong, 205n22 Hoskote, Ranjit: Clicking into Place exhibition (2002), 76–77, 215n58; on Atul Dodiya, 69, 211nn2,6; Everyone agrees: It’s about to explode (2011 Venice Biennale pavilion), 156, 225–26n68; on Jitish Kallat, 61; on national pavilions, 155–56; on painting engaged with media-circulated images, 75, 77, 78; on the problem of Indian artists being more accessible to international audiences than at home, 230n14; Real in Realism exhibition (2002), 77; on T.V. Santhosh, 79; Venice Biennale (2009 collapsed project), 155 House of World Cultures (Berlin). See body.city exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (2003 Walker Art Center traveling exhibition), 97–100, 99, 123, 149–50, 218nn29,33 Huber, Pierre, 117 Hughes, Stephen, 105 Husain, M.F., 54 Hussain, Fauzia, 167 hybridity. See network theory iCon: Indian Contemporary (2005 Venice Biennale collateral event), 146–47, 149–54, 152, 153, 155, 156, 215n68, 221n4, 225–26nn59,68 iconoclasm, 3. See also Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent civil violence (Ayodhya) identity: as “cruel historical baggage” (Raqs Media Collective), 135; as Western preoccupation (Pushpamala N.), 44 Ilesanmi, Olukemi, 218n29 image condition: overview, 13, 200–201; and the abstraction/figuration tension, 51, 53; as assemblage, 53, 191; and de- and reterritorialization, 81; definition of, 53; emergent painting practices linking into, 53, 55–56, 82, 84; and locality, production of, 53–54, 56; Muslim and/ or Pakistani, politicization of after September 11 attacks, 84; and nationalist publicity after liberalization, 68; photography as saturating, 73; Rashid Rana’s responsiveness to the Indian image condition, 84; and recuperation of older modes of image production, 53; resonance with American painting movements, 141; thought frameworks as central to, 9–10

image offense, Gandhi image and, 69, 70, 214n44 image production: film and, 53, 84; the internet and, 74; materiality and, 91, 118; photorealism and, 74; photo reproduction technology, ubiquity of, 3, 13, 51; Saffronart.com buyers’ reliance on digital or printed photographic reproductions, 79–80. See also internet; new media; photo collage; photography Images Re-drawn (1996 Navjot Altaf exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai), 170, 227n24 India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), 135, 171 India Habitat Centre (Delhi), 125, 221n3 Indian art world: as “art fraternity,” 192, 196; and community, solid sense of, 196; English fluency as necessity in, 121–22; and the playfulness of Pushpamala N.’s Phantom Lady, 42; reversal of reverence for seniority and embrace of youth, 56; sexual harassment accusations and development of protections and grievance procedures, 199, 230nn19–20; Shiv Sena’s anticosmopolitanism viewed as attack on, 54. See also art infrastructure; art talk (gossip); expansion of the Indian art market; Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008); liberalization of India’s economy (1991); post-recession Indian art world Indian diasporic communities: e-commerce in art as targeting, 75, 78; suspicion of positioning in, 222n13 Indian Highway (2008–2012 traveling exhibition), 60 India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art (1993 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney exhibition), 37, 208n40 “India’s Quest” film series, 133 indigeneity, exceptional status in art, 170 indigenous people. See adivasi art practices Indonesia, ruangrupa (in RAIN network), 103 Indo-Pak relationship: Bani Abidi’s The News (2001) as exploring, 109–10, 111; Rashid Rana’s work as addressing, 84. See also Partition (1947) infrastructural forms: overview, 14–15, 160–62, 186–87; Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 14, 161, 163–68, 165–67, 186; as assemblages of material and immaterial/human and nonhuman elements, 160, 162, 168, 170; awareness of changes in infrastructure and, 162, 186–87; and blurring the boundaries of the art object, 186; circulation infrastructure addressed in, 158–59, 161, 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 180, 181, 186–87; commercial

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infrastructural forms (continued) success of, 172, 178, 228n49; constraints of infrastructure and, 165, 168, 186; as critique of infrastructure, 162; cutting ties with the infrastructural network, 176–78; formal symmetries and contiguities between networks examined by, 187; and friction, productivity of, 186; Sheela Gowda’s Behold, 7; and intersection of art infrastructure and everyday infrastructure, 14, 160, 161; as making invisible structures more visible, 187; Nalpar (2000– pump project by DIAA), 14, 161–62, 163, 168–70, 169, 172–74, 176–77, 186, 228nn40–41; and NGOs, collaboration with, 14–15, 159, 162, 174–78; politics of, as focused on the limits of infrastructural networks, 163; and process, 173–74, 228n41; Vivan Sundaram and, 7, 14, 157–61, 162, 174–78, 186, 187; Yamuna River artworks, 14, 159, 162, 163, 178–86, 179, 181–83, 185, 229n52. See also Agarwal, Ravi; Bhalla, Atul; bricolage infrastructure: anthropology of, 8, 190; as assemblage of material and immaterial elements, 162, 163; as assemblage through which other assemblages circulate, 162, 186–87; definition of, 8; fractal nature of, 162; Sheela Gowda’s work as referencing changes in, 7; as intersecting with art infrastructure, 14, 160, 161; spectacle of efficiency in the colonial and modernist imagination vs. specter of inefficiency in the postcolonial, 159; turn toward artworks referring to the role of changes in, 7, 161–62. See also art infrastructure; circulation infrastructure; mail infrastructure; waste disposal infrastructure; water infrastructure infrastructure of thought. See assemblages; categorical distinctions; craft/art distinction; curatorial discourse; de- and reterritorialization; feminism; image condition; locality; medium specificity; network theory; publishing and journalism; space, coding and recoding; subjectivity; tactility/the haptic; techno-optimism; value Inside Out: Contemporary Women Artists of India (1995–96 traveling exhibition), 38, 39, 46, 209n49 Instagram, #MeToo movement of India, 199, 230n19–20 installation: and “a poetics of displaced objects” (Kapur), 216n6; appropriation of experimental theater and performance in, 33; and audience engagement, 33, 35; immersive aesthetic and, 34; and intersectional feminisms, 34–35; Nalini

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Malani and, 31, 33; materiality and ephemerality and, 34–35, 37; sculpture-based genealogy of, 34, 208n32; Sundaram’s Memorial as early Indian example of, 3. See also painting, break with in favor of performance and installation Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) (London), Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings (2000), 92, 217nn21–22 international foundations: and the Cold War, 134, 224n39; crossovers between the arts and development, funding of, 173–74; filmmakers and funding by, 133–34; and influence of NGO organizational structures on arts organizations, 7, 134–35; Khoj funding by, 101, 104, 135; mediaand time-based practices funded by, 123; NGOs funded by, 134–35; and period following the Great Recession (2008), 186; Sarai funded by, 134, 135, 223n27. See also Ford Foundation funding International Fund for Agricultural Development, 173, 228n40 international workshops. See artist workshops, international internet: and Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 165; as artistic medium, 51; Chaitime.com, 75, 214n56; dot.com boom/crash, 51; as extension of colonial and capitalistic regimes of exchange, 137, 139; insufficient bandwidth and early Indian websites, 214n56; optimism for empowerment capacity of, 136, 137; and transmission of photographs, 74. See also e-commerce; new media; Saffronart.com Iralu, Easterine Kire, 130, 131 Italy: Civitella artist residency program, 155; and genealogies of installation, 208n32; Subodh Gupta’s Very Hungry God exhibit (2007), 220n73, 221n82; Post Production, Sampling, Programming & Displaying (2001 Galleria Continua, San Gimigiano, exhibition), 221n79. See also Venice Biennale Jaar, Alfredo, 125, 222n13 Jack Shainman Gallery (New York), 117 Jadhav, Prakash, “Under Dadar Bridge,” 129, 130 Jain, Kajri, 54–55, 212nn14–15 Jain, Sameera, 135 Jakimowicz, Marta, 77–78 Jakobson, Roman, 222n18 Jal, Hoshi, 3 Jameson, Frederic, 99, 218n39 Jamia Millia Islamia University (Delhi), 122

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Japan: art networks connecting to, 46, 218n29. See also Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan); Fukuoka Triennial (1999); Japan Foundation Japan Foundation, 76–77, 85, 215n58, 217n22 Jayaram, Suresh, 101, 220n63 Jehangir Art Gallery (Mumbai), 170; as a site for Aar-Paar (2002), 166–67; Jaidev Baghel exhibitions, 170; Images Re-drawn (1996 Navjot Altaf exhibition), 170, 227n24 Jhaveri, Shanay, 145 Joag, Tushar, 103, 219n52 Johannesburg Biennale (1995): overview, 13; “Art and Nature” (international workshop) held during, 85, 86, 216n1; curated by Geeta Kapur, 21, 23–25, 34, 92, 206n6; Dispossession (India pavilion), 13, 17–19, 21, 23–25, 34, 92, 206n6; funding for, 46; improvisational character of, 46; institutional goals and structure of, 23–25; récuperation practice represented in, 159 Johannesburg Biennale (1997): Alternating Currents (exhibition), 158–59, 158; curated by Okwui Enwezor, 24, 124, 125, 158 John, C.F., 101, 219n45 Johns, Jasper, 57 Jonathan, Yoba, 105 Jones, Amelia, 10, 40, 41, 44, 45, 209–10n54 Jones, Caroline, 11–12 Joshi, Anant, 75 Joshi, Suresh, 26 journalism. See publishing and journalism Journal of Arts and Ideas, 19, 206n3 Judge, Amit, 75 Kala Ghoda (Bombay neighborhood), 54 Kaleka, Ranbir: overview, 13; adoption of image technologies and evasion of the border by, 82, 84; in iCon (2005), 146–47, 215n68; “imagestructure” combining painting and video, 82–83, 146–47; Montalvo residency of, 149, 155, 215n68. Works: Crossings: Two Stories (2005), 82–83, 83, 149, 215n68; Man Threading Needle (1998–99), 82 Kalidas, S., 112, 113, 116 Kali for Women (press), 19, 206n3 Kallat, Jitish: overview, 13; accelerated timeline of artistic careers and, 56; and Adajania’s “new mediatic realism,” 214n55; in crossing generations: diVERGE (2003), 146, 147–48; and de- and reterritorialization, 62–64; Geeta Kapur on, 59; and locality, 58, 61, 63; and new media, 54, 55–56; photorealism and, 51, 53, 77, 79; and postmodernism, 73; rate of artistic production

by, 75; recapitulations of earlier works, 63–64; and the referential gesture, 74; resonance with American painting movements, 57–58, 141, 212n21; and Saffronart.com auctions, 78, 79, 215n61; on the self and the outside world, 63, 213n33. Works: 1. Ordinary Recipe 2. Heading from My Old City Book, Mailing the Same to Good God’s Cook (1998), 56–58, 57; 22,000 Sunsets (2001), 61–62, 63, 64; Anger at the Speed of Fright (2002), 63–64, 64; Anger at the Speed of Fright (2002 temporary text-based work), 63–64, 213n34; Anger at the Speed of Fright (2010 clay figurines), 64; Covering Letter (2012), 213n37; Epilogue (2010–11), 64; poster for Aar-Paar (2002), 166; Public Notice 1 (2003), 147, 149, 150–51; Public Notice 2 (2007), 148, 213n37; Public Notice 3 (2010), 148; Tradigienne (Taste, Lick, Swallow, and Speak) (2002), 62; When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw (1995), 51–53, 52, 56 Kaneria, Raghav, 91 Kanwar, Amar: overview, 14; discussing his process in public discourse, 146; and documentary film/ video, 122, 123, 124, 132, 133; in documenta XI (2002), 123, 126, 132–33; and the essay film, 126–29, 222n15; financing of films, 132–33; and institutional contexts, creation of, 154–55, 225n65; and language as medium, 14, 120, 122, 123–24, 126, 132; poetic quality of language and, 127–29, 131–32, 143, 147, 222n18, 223nn19,21; and prose, rejection of, 132; and questions of evidence, 132, 153; Renaissance Society (University of Chicago) solo exhibition of Kanwar’s Trilogy (2003), 132–33; and translation, 131–32. Works: The Lightning Testimonies (2007), 132; Many Faces of Madness (2000), 132; A Night of Prophecy (2002), 126, 129–33, 130, 143, 147, 223n19; A Season Outside (1997), 120, 121, 125, 126–29, 128, 132, 133, 147, 164, 222n18; The Sovereign Forest (2011), 132; To Remember (2003), 133, 146 Kapoor, Kamala, 37, 40, 95, 209n49 Kapoor, Rajat, 29, 41, 210n56 Kaprow, Allan, 34 Kapur, Anuradha, 25, 26; The Job or by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou fail to earn thy bread, 31, 32 Kapur, Geeta: overview, 10; and “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001” (2001, part of Century City), 58–60, 71, 212nn24,26; calls for the explicit association of art with democratic principles, 60, 71; critique of multiculturalism, 10, 37–38; and crossing generations: diVERGE (2003), 140, 146; and curatorial authority as expanding

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Kapur, Geeta (continued) geographical reach, 24–25; and Dispossession (first Johannesburg Biennial), 21, 23–25, 34, 92, 206n6; and Inside Out (1995–96), 209n49; on installation and “a poetics of displaced objects,” 216n6; on Amar Kanwar, 123; and the Kasauli Art Centre, 5; on narcissistic subjectivity among male painters, 58–59, 212nn24,26; and Open Circle’s first workshop, 103; and SAHMAT, 5, 101; and subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold (2003 House of World Cultures, Berlin exhibition), 60, 146; on theatricality, 25, 206n9 Karachi Biennale (2017–) (Pakistan), 230n17 Karle, Shreyas, 220n63 Karmarkar, Abir, 214n55 Karode, Roobina, 172 Kasauli Art Centre, 5, 25–26, 101; Ghar aur Bahar (1989), 25, 207n13 Kashmir: Roohi Ahmed’s work for Aar-Paar (2000), 165; Agha Shahid Ali and, 147, 225n57; Nilima Sheikh and, 147, 225n57 Kassar, Mereille, 150 Katyal, Nand, 216n1 Keefe, Alexander, 137 Kenya, Wasanii International Artists Workshop, 101 Kerala Radical Artists Group, 91 Kester, Grant: Ground Works (2004 exhibition), 173; on Navjot Altaf and Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA), 173, 174, 228n41 Khakhar, Bhupen: adoption of popular forms by, 55, 211n1; in documenta IX (1992), 28–29, 207n20; in Atul Dodiya’s self-portrait, 49, 55; Atul Dodiya’s showing adjacent to, 73; eyesight of, and figuration, 28, 207n19; in India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art (1993), 208n40; Geeta Kapur’s interpretation of, 58, 212n24; in role as artist whose risk-taking reveals truth, 71, 214n47. Works: Mojila Manilal (1989), 26, 28, 45; Paan Beedi Shop (1992), 28–29, 28, 207n20; Truth Is Beauty and Beauty is God (1972 catalog), 44–45 Khakhar, Haku Shah, 208n40 Khan, Naiza, 220n63 Khan, Shah Rukh, 49, 210n60 Kher, Bharti: and Khoj, 102, 103; on the work of Subodh Gupta (husband), 112. Works: Chocolate Muffin (Hybrids series, 2004), 110; The grass is always greener and searching for roots (2002), 109; Hybrids series, 109; Silver Midas (2000), 165 Khoj International Artists Association (Delhi): as “alternative” platform, the art market and, 109–11; artist residency program, 108–11, 180,

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183, 184–85, 186; crossover between Open Circle and, 104, 219n54, 220n63; founding and goals of, 100–101; funding basis of, 101, 104, 109–11, 133, 135, 155, 219n62; and the Havana Biennial, 104–5; opposition to SAHMAT, 101; patrons, development of long-term relationships with, 109–11; permanent space of (Khirkee Village), 108, 109, 219n62; ready-mades combined with the made as marker of, 105; Mithu Sen’s Free Mithu (2007–), 193–94, 195, 196; sexual harassment protections instituted by, 230n20; and South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA), 108, 111, 227n19; Triangle Network affiliation of, 100–101, 104, 111; Triangle Network affiliation, weakening of, 111; Yamuna River projects growing out of programs of, 162, 179–80, 183, 186, 229n52 —international workshops: overview, 13, 100–101; 1997 workshop (Modinagar), 87, 102–3, 105; 1998 workshop (Modinagar), 103, 105–6, 106, 107; 1999 workshop (Modinagar), 87, 88, 105, 163–64; 2001 workshop, 106–8, 172; 2003 workshop, 219n45; Aar-Paar (2000–4) project growing out of, 161, 163; 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (2008 international public art festival) adapting the format of, 179; Indian participants, 102, 108; international participants, 102–3, 219n50; itinerant locations of, 108; local goods purchased as material, 87, 105; locality and, 105; materiality and ephemerality and, 105–7; residencies compared to, 108–9; site specificity and, 105, 109 Khouri, Kristine, 191–92 Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) (Delhi), 197–98 Kishore, Avijit Mukul, 82 Knox, Gordon, and iCon: Indian Contemporary (2005 Venice Biennale collateral event), 146, 149, 154, 155, 221n4, 225–26nn59,68 Kochi Biennale Foundation, 230n15 Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012–) (“the People’s Biennale”), 198–99, 230nn15,20; Students’ Biennale, 198 Kolleri, Valsan, 216n1 Koloane, David, 102, 105 Kolte, Prabhakar, 51 Komu, Riyas: and Adajania’s “new mediatic realism,” 214n55; and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 198, 230n15; and photorealism, 75, 76, 77–78, 79; Pouch Full of Stories (I Carry the Weapon of Your Name) (2002), 76 Kondagaon, Nalpar (2000– pump project by DIAA), 14, 161–62, 163, 168–70, 169, 172–74, 176–77, 186, 228nn40–41

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Korya, Dilesh and Behroze Gandhy, Kekee Manzil—the House of Art (2020), 210n60 Kounellis, Jannis, 218n37 Kreckler, Derek: BlindNed, 210n67; Nadia & Ned (with Pushpamala N.), 210n67 Kumar, S., 172. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA) labor: capitalism and degradation of, in Vivan Sundaram’s waste-related works, 159–60, 175; Sheela Gowda and, 89, 91, 98, 99, 118 Ladi, Prithpal Singh, 102 Lahore Biennale (2018–) (Pakistan), 230n17 Lakeeren Gallery (Mumbai), 210n56; Altered Altar (1998 exhibition of Shilpa Gupta), 224n49 Lalitha, K. and Susic Tharu, Women’s Writing in India, 170 Lalit Kala Akademi (national Academy of Fine Arts, India), 85, 156; national fine art competition, 170, 227n27 Lalit Kala Contemporary, 216n1 language as medium: overview, 14, 119; and alternative discursive conventions, exhibition spaces, and networks of circulation, 124; avoidance of, 122, 123, 126, 146, 154; and blame, 120; common speech–adjacent language, 120; and crossing generations: diVERGE (2003 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai), 140, 146, 147–49, 148, 150, 225nn57–58; documenta XI and acceptance of, 14, 146; embodying words, 149–52; English as lingua franca of, 121–22; essay films, 126–29, 222n15; exclusion of language from art, 126, 152, 156; and iCon: Indian Contemporary (2005 Venice Biennale collateral event), 146–47, 149–54, 152, 153, 155, 156, 215n68, 221n4, 225–26nn59,68; as independent of medium, 123–24; as institutional critique, 149; instructions, 141–42, 143; the limits of knowledge and, 132; materiality and mediation and, 123–24, 152; as particular/general and exception/the rule, 119; and persuasion, 121; and pleasure in language, 120–21, 122; poetic language, 127–29, 131–32, 143, 147, 149, 222n18, 223nn19,21; and politics/political art, 124–26, 146, 149; and problems of communication, 152–53; and the sense impact of words, 120; and surveillance, 142–43; and translation, 131–32, 143; and violence, 121, 125, 127, 149; the visual meaning of text, 147–48 —artists: Agarwal, Ravi, 180; Dodiya, Atul, 146–47, 149; Dube, Anita, 146, 149–52; Gupta, Shilpa, 14, 120, 122, 123–24, 138–39, 140–43, 145–46, 225n53; Kanwar, Amar, 14, 120, 122, 123–24, 126, 132;

Raqs Media Collective, 14, 120–21, 122–24, 142–43, 152–53, 154; Sheikh, Nilima, 147 La Nuit Blanche (2006, France), 220n73, 221n79 Larkin, Brian, 8 Latitudes (2003). See How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age Latour, Bruno, 10, 90–91, 107–8, 190–91, 217nn11–12, 226n10 Lee, Pamela, 8, 135, 204n10 Lee Wen Choy, 190 legibility of artworks, international audiences and expectations of, 7, 13–14, 119, 201 liberalization of India’s economy (1991), period following: absorption of Indian art into postmodernity, 73–74; ascendance of commercial institutions in India’s art infrastructure, 5–6; de- and reterritorialization accelerated in, 55–56; and Subodh Gupta’s spectacle of plenty, 116; image of Gandhi as flashpoint in, 64–65; migration as signal phenomena in, 89; as period ending with the Great Recession of 2008, 11, 189, 200, 205n24. See also expansion of the Indian art market; Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008); post-recession Indian art world Lille 3000 Bombaysers de Lille (France), 220n74 Lipi, Tayeba Begum, 220n63 living it. out. in. delhi (2005 Vivan Sundaram exhibition, Rabindra Bhavan Gallery, Delhi), 159, 160–61, 175–77, 176, 178 Lloyd, Alison, 209n49 locality: biennial-style international exhibitions and, 12; the city as, 61; and the emancipatory potential of painting engaging with photographic sources and digital practices, 76–77; and fine art, 55; found images and, 84; and globalization, critique of, 56; importance of, as a critical and curatorial framework, 53–54, 58, 60–61; Jitish Kallat and, 58, 61, 63; Khoj workshops and, 105; production of, 53–54, 56; site-specificity as reoriented toward, 97; and symbolic use of materials, 100; as Triangle Network imperative, 105. See also de- and reterritorialization Loder, Robert, 101–2, 108 Lokhandwala, Arshiya, 210n56 Lovink, Geert, 134, 136, 223nn29,31 Lynn, Victoria, 37, 208n40, 209n46 Madani, Adnan, 83, 84, 167 Magiciens de la Terre (1989 Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris exhibition), 170

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mail infrastructure: the Aar-Paar cross-border artist exchange project and (2000–4), 164–65, 167–68; and the sense of loss attached to spaces and objects, 164 Majlis (Mumbai), 224n35 Malani, Nalini: overview, 13; in APT2 (1996), 34, 35, 37; erasure performances, 35; and Hindu nationalist violence, 205–6n32; in iCon (2005), 146; in India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art (1993), 208n40; and installation, 31, 33; in Johannesburg Biennale (1995), 17–19, 21, 25; and the nationalist designation of femininity-as-tradition, 38; and Open Circle’s first workshop, 103; and performance, 17–19, 29, 31, 33–34, 35, 206n2. Works: Alleyway of Lohar Chawl (1991), 3, 5; Body as Site series, 35; Despoiled Shore: Medeamaterial: Landscape with Argonauts (1993), 29, 30, 31, 37; Medeamaterial (1993), 17–19, 18, 21, 25, 29, 31, 35, 46, 207–8n28; Memory: Record/Erase (1996), 31; Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain (2005), 149; Mutants series (1994), 35; The Job or by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou fail to earn thy bread (1997), 31, 32, 207–8n28; The Sacred and Profane (1998), 31, 33, 33–34; Unity in Diversity (2003), 146, 149 Mangos, Simone, 34 Manifesta, 136 Mansur, 73 Marian Goodman Gallery, 225n65 Marley, Bob, 212–13n27 Masters, H.G., 154 material improvisation, 107, 159, 160, 226n4 materiality: and the agency of nonhuman images and objects, 90, 216–17n8; art historical viewpoint on, 90, 98–100, 118, 216–17n8; commercial success of works engaging with, 110–11; of cow dung, 87, 91, 92; cultural significance of materials, 100, 111, 112; defined, 87; and digital image technologies, 91, 118; as escaping the question of meaning, 91–92, 100, 117, 118; exhibition conventions as constraint on, 92; feminism and, 45, 98; Sheela Gowda and, 14, 87, 92–93, 94, 96–97, 98–100, 117–18; Subodh Gupta and, 14, 87, 116; of lived experience, 156; medium and, 149–52, 217n20; “poor materials,” 91; and the “prelapsarian real,” 91, 123; ready-made, 96; symbolic richness combined with, 100; thingness and, 92; and the vitality of things, 90–91, 217nn11–12. See also materiality and ephemerality; materiality and mediation; tactility/the haptic

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materiality and ephemerality: overview, 14, 90, 117–18; as both conceptual framework and infrastructural form, 90; and de- and reterritorialization, 91; Sheela Gowda and, 117, 118; Subodh Gupta and, 111, 112; installation and, 34–35, 37; international artist workshops and, 90, 105–7, 117–18 materiality and mediation: overview, 14; language as medium and, 123–24, 152; Raqs Media Collective and, 97; signification and meaning and, 91 materials, everyday. See everyday life materials; ready-mades Mathur, Saloni, 10, 175 Matzner, Florian, 229n54 Max Mueller Bhavan (Mumbai, German cultural diplomatic mission’s galleries), 46; Malani’s Medeamaterial (1993), 18, 29, 30, 46 Mazzarella, William, 67–68, 69, 214n44 mediatic images, 51, 53, 73 medium and materiality, 149–52, 217n20 medium specificity, 87, 98–99 mediums. See film; infrastructural forms; installation; internet; language as medium; new media; painting; performance; theater; video Mehrotra, Rajiv, 133, 134 Mehta, Naushil, 26 Menezes, Meera, 125–26 Menon, Ritu, 19 Merali, Shaheen, 81, 215n66 Merz, Marisa, 218n33 methodology of the text, 12–13, 190–91, 200; positionality of the researcher, 11, 191, 205n23 #MeToo movement, 199, 230nn19–20 Mewada, S. Raju, 171 Middle East, art networks connecting to, 101 Middlesbrough Art Gallery (England): Inside Out (1995–96 traveling exhibition), 38, 39, 46, 209n49; Telling Tales: Of Self, Of Nation, Of Art (1997 traveling exhibition), 45, 46, 92–95, 209n49, 210n56 migration, 89, 105, 116 Millet, Jean-Francois, Gleaners, 177 Minakshi, 208n40 miniature painting, 26, 83, 84 Mirza, Quddus, 83, 216n71; poster for Aar-Paar (2002), 166 Mitchell, W.J.T, 216–17n8 mobility: artist residencies as favored form of, 220n64; English fluency and, 121–22; foundation-funded opportunities for artists, 7, 108; frictionless, 9; migration, 89, 105, 116; and the

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visa regime in South Asia, 163–64. See also artist residencies; artist workshops, international modernism: contemporary exhibitions and displacement of art infrastructure of, 5; Atul Dodiya’s openness to a wider genealogy of art, 73; installation as subversion of, 34–35; the KNMA as supporting institutions to develop expertise in South Asian art, 197–98; loss of confidence in, 200; market in, as rebounding relatively quickly from 2008 crash, 189; postmodern concerns with materiality as stemming from concerns with medium of, 218n39; Rashid Rana abandoning painting while retaining his link to, 83 modernity: the artist as truth-revealers in, 71, 214n47; the “clean city” as marker of, 159; and materiality, 91; and poverty of materials, 91, 159, 226n4; and the prelapsarian real, 91; shamanism and access to truth, 71; and the spectacle of infrastructural efficiency, 159; and waste as material, 177 Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, California): artist residency program, 149, 155, 215n68, 225n59; and iCon (2005 Venice Biennale collateral event), 149, 155 Mosquera, Gerardo, 10, 12, 103 M.S. University (Vadodara), 53 MTV, 13, 51, 55 Mudgal, Shubha, 35 Mudrawala, Asma, 220n63 Mughal portraiture, 83 Mukherjee, Mrinalini, 34, 35; Van Shringar (forest ornament) (1992), 35, 37 Mukhopadhyay, Kausik, 103, 219n54, 220n63; poster for Aar-Paar (2002), 166 Mulji, Huma, 200; curating Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 14, 161, 163–68, 165–67, 186; Mera Ghar (My House) (2002 poster for Aar-Paar), 166, 167 Müller, Heiner, 17, 21, 29, 31, 33 multiculturalism: as associated with unbridled capital, 10; and the fall of Apartheid, 23; rejection of cultural-geographical model for biennial-style exhibitions, 37–38 Mumbai: “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001” (2001 exhibition, part of Century City), 58–61, 59–62, 71, 212nn24,26; Bombay’s name changed to, 54, 203n2; coding and recoding space in, 54, 211n10; commercial galleries increasing in, 6; and the political mobilization of the image, 54 Mundrawala, Asma, 164; poster for Aar-Paar (2002), 166

Murdoch, Rupert, 55 music, and humanism, 59, 212–13n27 Muslims: anti-Muslim riots (2002 Gujarat), 62, 63, 104, 149; and politicization of the Pakistani image condition after September 11 attacks, 84; Rummanna Hussain on the shrinking social space for, 93–94; Sindhi Muslim Society (Karachi, Pakistan), 166. See also Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent civil violence (Ayodhya) Nagy, Peter, 57; on Subodh Gupta, 116–17; and iCon: Indian Contemporary (2005 Venice Biennale collateral event), 146, 154, 155, 221n4, 225– 26nn59,68; on Jitish Kallat, 57–58, 212n21 Nair, Surendran, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1993), 67 Nalpar (2000– pump project by DIAA), 14, 161–62, 163, 168–70, 169, 172–74, 176–77, 186, 228nn40– 41 Nambiar, Balan, 216n1 Namibia, Tulipamwe Workshop, 101 Narayan (later Padamsee), Bhanumati, 171 narcissistic subjectivity among male artists, 58–59, 212nn24,26 Narula, Monica. See Raqs Media Collective Nasar, Hammad, 12 Natesan, Shibu, 77, 78, 214n55; Desert Route (2001), 77 National Centre for the Performing Arts (Mumbai), 32, 39, 40 National College of Art, Lahore (Pakistan), 83 National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai), 83, 190, 216n71; Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan (2005), 83, 84, 186, 216n71; crossing generations: diVERGE (2003), 140, 146, 147–49, 148, 150, 225nn57–58 nationalism: Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists) and subversion of, 164–65; the nationalist designation of femininity-as-tradition, 10, 19–20, 25, 41, 45. See also Hindu nationalism National School of Drama (Delhi), 32 Nature Morte (Delhi), 57, 83–84, 117, 225n65 Nature Morte (New York), 57 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 164 Navjot Altaf: overview, 14–15; archetypal form of sculptures of, 227n24; The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out; Navjot Altaf: A Life in Art (2018–19 retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Mumbai), 228n35; feminist and Marxist influences of, 170, 173, 227n24; Images Re-drawn

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Navjot Altaf (continued) (1996 solo exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai), 170, 227n24. Works: Links Destroyed and Rediscovered (1994), 171, 171; Modes of Parallel Practices: Way of World-Making (1997 collaborative work), 171–72, 171. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association Nayar, Ved, 216n1 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 69, 147, 149 neo-Dada, 71 neoliberalism, 133, 205n24 Nepal Sutra artist organization, 108, 227n19 Netherlands: Cultural Economic Development Program, 223n27; Hivos (development NGO), 219n62; RAIN/Rijksakademie network, 103, 104; Upstream (2002 Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam), 137–41, 138–39; Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam), 134 networked authorship, 135–36, 137, 161 network theory: agency of nonhuman images and objects, and collapse of subject-object distinction, 90–91, 190–91; art as a network assemblage, 9; art networks as assemblages, 8; “cuts in the network” (identification of limits on networks), 9, 14, 162–63, 164, 168, 173, 199; emergence of Sundaram’s Trash as simultaneous with development of, 162, 226n9; networked authorship and, 135–36, 137, 161; ontological quality of the actor network, 107–8; as resonating with shifts in medium that occurred in Indian art, 118, 162, 163; sexual harassment viewed from, 199; and technologically driven anxiety, 118, 162, 163. See also assemblages; de- and reterritorialization New Image Painting, 57 new media: overview, 13; and the dot.com boom/ crash, 51; electronic media art, 123; lack of direct market support for, 155; media-circulated images, paintings engaged with, 75–76; photo reproduction technology, ubiquity of, 3, 13, 51; proliferation of television channels, 55; as shaping vs. displacing painting, 13, 51, 211n6; youth audience, focus on, 55. See also expansion of the Indian art market; image production; internet “new mediatic realism,” 51, 53, 74. See also photorealism New York art world: auction house sales in India, 5–6; Atul Dodiya’s Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974 (1998), 70–71, 70; Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172, 219n60; Jitish Kallat’s young age for solo show in, 56;

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sexism in, Kochi-Muziris Biennale opening performance addressing, 199; Vivan Sundaram’s Trash (2008–9 traveling exhibition), 159, 178. See also United States NGOs: artists collaborating on projects with, 14–15, 159, 162, 174–78; arts organizational structures as influenced by, 7, 133, 134–35, 137, 155, 176; assuming some of the tasks of the State, 134, 176; Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and, 134; funding of, 134–35; funding of artists by, 123, 133, 134; as interfering with the relationship of people to the State, 136–37; making claims on the State, 136–37, 176; Open Circle as oriented toward, 104; as perpetuating the power of the West, 134, 136, 224n39; public distrust of, 134; Raqs Media Collective as imitating institutional form of, 135, 137; Raqs Media Collective/Sarai members as critical of, 135, 136, 223n31. See also Chintan (Delhi NGO) Nigeria, documenta XI platform brought to, 125 Nirvana, 212–13n27 nodal networks (nodes/no-des, Raqs Media Collective), 135 nonprofit arts institutions: cooperation with commercial art infrastructure, 7, 110–11, 117, 155, 174; patronage by, as important art infrastructure, 46, 133–34; structure of, as resembling NGOs, 7, 133, 134–35, 137, 155, 176. See also artist workshops, international; NGOs Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 60, 146, 154 obscenity: accusations against painting, 54, 211n9; Mithu Sen’s strategic deployment of, 193 Oil21 (Berlin), 224n35 Oldenburg, Claes, 218n37 Omega, Ludenyi, 105 1. Shanthi Road (artist group), 101, 220n63 Open Circle (Mumbai), international workshops: 2000 workshop, 103–4, 219n52; as artist collective, 104; crossover with Khoj/Triangle Network/Gasworks, 104, 219n54, 220n63; and everyday things as medium, 13, 53; founding and goals of, 103–4, 219n52; funding for, 104, 133; Shilpa Gulpta and, 14, 103, 124, 224n44; and the Havana Biennial (2003), 104, 124; NGO orientation of, 104; political-economic agenda of, 104; and the RAIN Network, 103, 104 Osian’s, 74–75 Oxford Bookstore (South Bombay), Shilpa Gupta’s Your Kidney Supermarket exhibition, 138–39

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pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) (2008), 224n35 painting: image condition and emergent practices of, 53, 55–56, 82, 84; internal frame, 26; and laughter, representation of, 69; miniatures, 26, 83, 84; new media as shaping vs. displacing, 13, 51, 211n6; obscenity accusations against, 54, 211n9; and photography, relationship of, 71–73, 74, 80–81, 83–84, 214n54; primacy as a medium, 74; quotation of other painters, 49, 55, 211n1; Rashid Rana’s photo collage and conceptual overlap with, 83, 84; realism, 74, 77; referential gesture in, 73–74; representations of the city associated with social(ist) realism, 61; virtuosity and, 49, 74. See also painting, break with in favor of performance and installation; painting, movement into three dimensions; photorealism painting, break with in favor of performance and installation: expansion of biennial-style international exhibitions and, 13, 18–19; feminist theory and, 13, 19, 33–34; networks of friendship, collaboration, and exchange developing with, 19; rejection of painting as insufficient to address the shock of Hindu nationalist violence, 13, 205–6n32; Vivan Sundaram and, 3, 228n49 painting, movement into three dimensions: iCon (2005) addressing, 149, 153; performance and theater projects and, 18, 25, 34 Pakistan: Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 14, 161, 163–68, 165–67, 186; acquisition of artists’ works by Indian collectors and art institutions, 84, 186; Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan (2005 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai exhibition), 83, 84, 186, 216n71; efflorescence of the Indian art market expansion, 200; image condition of, politicization after the September 11 attacks, 84; Karachi Biennale (2017–), 230n17; Lahore Biennale (2018–), 230n17; and the miniature painting tradition, 83, 84; National College of Art, Lahore, 83; Sindhi Muslim Society (Karachi), 166; television of, 84; Vasl artist organization, 108, 109, 164, 220n63, 227n19; and the visa regime, 163–64. See also borders; Indo-Pak relationship; Partition (1947) Palav, Prajakta, 214n55 Palazzo Grassi (Venice), 220n73 Pal, Gogi Saroj, 216n1 Parekh, Madhvi, 18 Parekh, Manisha, 101, 102

Parthan, Baiju: and Adajania’s “new mediatic realism,” 214n55; Diary of the Inner Cyborg (2002), 76–77, 77; and internet as medium, 51; and Saffronart.com auctions, 78, 79 participation: in the Chintan NGO section of Sundaram’s collaborative exhibition (Cash and Carry 2005), 175–76; Shilpa Gupta using language as medium to facilitate, 141, 143, 146; Geeta Kapur on, 25, 206n9; and relational aesthetics, 171–72; Mithu Sen’s Free Mithu (2007), 193, 194, 196 Partition (1947): new approach to historiography of, 125, 222n10; pervasive sense of loss in both subjects and spaces, 164 —and violence: documenta XI Delhi platform exploring, 125, 222n10; Shilpa Gupta referencing, 145; Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside and memory of, 125, 127; Nilima Sheikh referencing, 147, 225n57; violence against women and girls, 127, 149. See also violence Patnaik, Prabhat, 157 Patwardhan, Sudhir, 103 Peabody Essex Museum, 50, 65 Pearl Jam, 212–13n27; “Garden” (1991), 59 performance: and audience engagement, 25, 26; Beuys’ coyote piece, 71; and extension of painting into space, 18, 25, 34; feminism on subjectivity and, 40–41, 44, 45, 209–10n54; and formal transformation through acts of cross-disciplinary borrowing and exchange, 18; Gandhi’s bodily practices misunderstood as, 71; Nalini Malani and, 17–19, 29, 31, 33–34, 35, 206n2; and narrative, 18, 25, 41; popular theater and, 45; post-recession thriving of, 197, 197, 199; Pushpamala N. and, 38, 41–45, 210n56; Rummana Hussain and, 38–41, 42, 45; and scale, 25, 33. See also painting, break with in favor of performance and installation; theater Persian Gulf, as third space for meetings of collectors and artists, 186 Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 210n67 Philippines, 215n58 photo collage: Rashid Rana and, 83, 84; Vivan Sundaram’s Barricade (2008), 177–78, 178 photography: the body as mediated through, 71–72; capitalist mimetics and, 114, 116; dematerialization and, 116; digital, as “copies without an original,” 80; documentation with, 71; the image condition as saturated by, 73; image-transfer and painting, 75–76; the relationship of painting to, 71–73, 74, 80–81, 83–84, 214n54; tactility/the haptic and, 114, 116. See also documentary film; film

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photorealism: overview, 13, 51, 53, 74; and circulation infrastructure, 74, 81; commercial success of, 53; as “copies without an original,” 80; Girish Dahiwale and, 59–60; Atul Dodiya and, 51, 53, 66–67, 77, 79; and the expansion of the art market, 74–78, 79–84, 215n58; image production and, 74; and the internet-facilitated boom auction market, 13; Jitish Kallat and, 51, 53, 77, 79; Riyas Komu and, 75, 76, 77–78, 79; mimetic skill and virtuosity and, 74; “new mediatic realism” as alternate term, 51, 53, 74; and overproduction, 81, 215n66; and the rapid circulation of art, 74, 81; Gerhard Richter and, 74, 79, 214n54; Saffronart. com (gallery and auction website) and, 78, 79–80; T.V. Santhosh and, 75, 77, 79, 79–81, 215n65; scale and, 56, 79, 82 photo reproduction technology, ubiquity of, 3, 13, 51 Picasso, Pablo, 73 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, 67, 70 Pinney, Christopher, 170 place. See locality Poddar, Anupam and Lekha, 109–10, 186 Point of View (Mumbai), 224n35 police, reaction to Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 166, 168 political art: and the act of making oneself visible, 92–93; artist-as-political-actor model of Joseph Beuys, 71; calls for an explicit association of art with democratic principles (Kapur and Rajadhyaksha), 60, 71; critique of political art platform of documenta XI, 126, 222n13; documenta XI and breaking down of categorical distinctions, 146; documenta XI controversy, 124–26, 222nn9,13; Indian debates about, 126, 222n13; as synonymous with language as medium, 124, 149; viewed as categorically opposed to art, 126, 146 political mobilization of the image: obscenity accusations against painting, 54, 211n9; Bal Thackeray/the Shiv Sena party and, 54 politics of representation: Adajania’s critique of, 126; definition of, 94; and Telling Tales (1997 traveling exhibition), 94 Pollock, Jackson, 73 Ponmany, Justin, 75, 77 poor materials (poverty of materials): and materiality, 91; récuperation viewed as issue of, 226n4 postcolonialism: assumptions of difference mapped by postmodernism, 11; and the double disenfranchisement of women, 21; national

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sovereignty as retaining power in, 12; waste disposal infrastructure and failure of, 159 postmodernism: absorption into, 73–74; imagedependency of, 122; late capitalism and, 99–100, 218n39 Post Production, Sampling, Programming & Displaying (2001 Galleria Continua, San Gimigiano, Italy exhibition), 221n79 post-recession Indian art world: aesthetic value and the market, examination of the relationship of, 190; art talk, 196; closure of galleries, 196; collectors embracing art from other countries, 196–97; and funding sources, changes in, 156, 186, 197, 198; less capital-intensive forms of practice emerged as practical choices, 197; liquidation of collections, 196; new biennial-style international exhibitions established, 198–99, 230nn15,17; new private museums established, 197–98, 230n14; older institutions, rejuvenation of, 197; performance as thriving in, 197, 197, 199; professionalization of, 199; and relief mixed with sense of loss, 190, 196; sexual harassment accusations and development of protections and grievance procedures, 199, 230nn19–20; slowing down of art infrastructure, 189, 196, 199–200; solidification around established artists, 189; and state patronage, turn back to, 197; suffering of artists who were not yet financially stable, 196. See also expansion of the Indian art market; Great Recession and collapse of the boom market in contemporary art (2008); liberalization of India’s economy (1991) Potts, Alex, 99–100, 218nn37,39 Prasad, Madhava, 42, 44 the prelapsarian real, 91, 123 prices: exceeding their estimates, 78; and the height of the boom market (2003–2008), 78, 189, 215n61; relatively low, and risk for online art buyers, 78; rise in, and artists’ escape from precarity, 6, 192; statistics on returns, 203n3 printing technology, advances in, 53 Prithvi Gallery, 56 private funding: Khoj, 101; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 198 private Indian art museums: established after the market crash, 197–98; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA, Delhi), 197–98; as participating in the expanding art market, 190 process, infrastructural forms engaging with, 173–74, 228n41 Project 88 Gallery (Mumbai), 225n65

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public-private hybrids: national pavilions at biennials as, 23–24; NGO structure utilizing, 134; Shilpi Gram (Bastar), 173 Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), 133–34, 135 publishing and journalism: artist access to good quality reproductions of paintings, 53; establishment of art publishing, 10–11, 205n22; Kali for Women (feminist press), 19–20, 20, 206n3; printing quality advances in art books and magazines, 53; unillustrated/badly illustrated newspaper columns for art criticism, decline of, 53 PUKAR (Mumbai), 137 Pulse (South Africa), 103 Pune Biennale (2013–), 230n17 Pushpamala N.: overview, 13; feminism of, 45; in Fire and Life (1997–7), 210n56; funding and, 46, 210n56; on Sheela Gowda’s installation process, 217n22; on identity as Western preoccupation, 44; in Inside Out (1995–96), 38, 41–42, 44, 46; in Johannesburg Biennale (1995), 21, 23; and materiality, 91, 94; and performance, 38, 41–45, 210n56; in Telling Tales (1997), 45, 46, 92, 210n56, 217n22. Works: “Excavations” (1994), 21, 23, 24; Indian Lady, 44, 210n67; Nadia & Ned (with Derek Kreckler), 210n67; Native Women of South India (2004), 44; Phantom Lady, or Kismet (1996–98), 41–45, 43, 46, 94, 209n49, 210nn56,60,65; Sunhere Sapne (1998), 105–6, 106 Queens Museum (New York), 172 Quotable Stencil (2002 exhibition), 76 Rabindra Bhavan Gallery (Delhi), living it. out. in. delhi (2005 Vivan Sundaram exhibition), 159, 160–61, 175–77, 176, 178 racism, the fall of Apartheid, 23 Raffel, Suhanya, 38, 210n67 Raghavendra Rao K.V., 219n45 ragpickers (waste gleaners), 158, 159, 160 Rahman, Mahbubur, 220n63 Rai, Amit, 55 Raiji, Kuroda, 10, 38 Raina, Gargi, 77 RAIN Network, 103, 104 Raituram, 171 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 29, 31, 58–60, 71, 210n56; Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 210n65 Rajan, C.K., 105 Rajkumar Korram: in Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172; and Khoj workshop

(2001), 172; Modes of Parallel Practices: Way of World-Making (1997 collaborative work), 171–72, 171. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA) Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 213n38 Rana, Rashid: overview, 13; in Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan (2005 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai exhibition), 83, 84, 186, 216n71; career trajectory of, 83–84, 216n71; and image technologies, 82, 84; in My East is Your West (2015 Venice Biennale Indo-Pak collateral event), 225–26n68. Works: All Eyes Skyward during the National Parade (2004), 84, 216n71; I Love Miniatures (2002), 83–84; poster for Aar-Paar (2002), 166; Veil series (2004), 216n71 Rao, Vidya, 26 Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta): overview, 14; and the city as social unit, 119, 153; discussing the process in public discourse, 146; and documentary film/video, 122, 124, 133, 134, 135, 223n29; in documenta XI (2002), 123, 126, 142–43; funding of works, 133, 134–35, 137, 223n29; in How Latitudes Become Forms (2003), 97, 123; in iCon (2005), 146, 152–53, 221n4; on identity as “cruel historical baggage,” 135; and institutional contexts, creation of, 154–55, 225n65; and the internet, 51, 136; and language as medium, 14, 120–21, 122–24, 142–43, 152–53, 154; as “media practitioner,” 122–23; mediation and materiality, 97; and networked authorship, 135–36, 137; and the NGO institutional form, 135, 137; and NGOs, criticism of, 135, 136, 223n31; as no-des (nodal networks), 135. Works: “A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons” (2002), 135; Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, or, 28°28″ N / 77°15″ E: 2001/2002 (2002), 142–43, 142, 144; Hearing and Understanding (2005), 152–53; In the Eye of the Fish, 133; Location(n) (2002), 120, 121; A Measure of Anacoustic Reason (2005), 152–53, 153; OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) (2002), 135, 136; “Regressions from the Memory of a Minor Encounter,” 136. See also Sarai Rauschenberg, Robert, 214n48 Ray, Mohua, 103 ready-mades: combined with the made, as Khoj marker, 105; Dada and, 116; Anita Dube and, 97, 99; Subodh Gupta and stainless steel vessels (bartan), 111–14, 116, 159; material qualities as, 96; Sudarshan Shetty and, 73. See also everyday life materials

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Real in Realism (2002 exhibition, Vadehra Art Gallery), 77 récuperation movement (Senegal), 159, 226n4 Reddy, Ravinder, 208n40 Reiji, K.P., 77 relational aesthetics, 171–72, 204n15,9 Renaissance Society (University of Chicago), 132–33 representation: cultural, demanded by biennial audiences, 13–14; Gandhi’s body politics and, 66–72; women’s self-representation, 26. See also cultural meaning; politics of representation residencies. See artist residencies Richter, Gerhard: Atul Dodiya’s Dadagiri as portrait of, 72–73, 72, 74; interview with Buchloh, 73, 74; and photorealism, 74, 79, 214n54; rejection of “the negation of the productive act in art,” 73 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam), 103, 104 Rimzon, N.N., 25, 34, 78, 91, 208n40, 216n1; House of Heavens (1995), 37 risk-taking of artists, as revealing truth, 71, 214n47 Rockefeller Foundation, 223n27 Rodin, Thinker, 56, 58 Rogoff, Irit, 192 Roy, Arundhati, 136–37 ruangrupa (in RAIN network, Indonesia), 103 Rummana Hussain: overview, 13; feminism of, 40–41, 45; funding of, 46; Shilpa Gupta as studio assistant of, 122; in Inside Out (1995–96), 38, 40–41, 46; and installation, 45; and materiality, 93–94; and the nationalist designation of femininity-as-tradition, 40, 45; and performance, 38–41, 42, 45; in Telling Tales (1997), 45, 46, 92, 93–94. Works: Dissected Projection (1993), 3, 6; Home/Nation (1996), 38, 39, 209n50; Living on the Margins (1995), 38–41, 39, 45, 46, 209–10nn49–50,54; The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal (1997), 93–94, 94 Russia, and genealogies of installation, 208n32 Ruswa, Mirza Hadi, 26 Rutherford, Anne, 132 Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), 5, 101 Saffronart.com (gallery and auction website): business model as dependent on collaboration with commercial galleries, 75, 78; and emphasis on “Modern Masters,” 78; establishment of, 51, 75; goal of increasing Indian art in US-based collections, 75; and low relative prices as lessening the risk of acquiring artworks online, 78; mixed consignments from collectors and

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galleries, 78; painting as initial focus of, 78; and photorealism, 78, 79–80; prices and the boom market, 78, 215n61; reliance on reproductions of art for sale, 79–80; sculpture as selling at height of the boom market, 78–79; transparency about business practices, 78, 215n60. See also auctions of art; expansion of the Indian art market; Internet SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust), 5, 101 St. Lucia, documenta XI platform brought to, 124–25 Saint Marie-Madeleine church (Lille, France), Subodh Gupta’s God Hungry (2006), 113, 115, 220n74 Sakshi Art Gallery, 76–77, 78, 215n58 Salim, Inder, Dialogue with Power Plant, Shrill across a Dead River (2002), 229n53 Salon Natasha (Hanoi), 38 Samant, Sharmila, 103, 219n54, 220n63 Samarth, Alaknanda, 17, 29; Despoiled Shore: Medeamaterial: Landscape with Argonauts (1993), 29, 30, 31 Sambrani, Chaitanya: overview, 10–11; on Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border artist exchange), 164; curating crossing generations: diVERGE (2003 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai), 140, 146, 147–49, 148, 150, 225nn57–58; curating Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172, 219n60; on Malani’s Medeamaterial, 29; as Open Circle resident theorist, 103; organizing Fire & Life (1996–7 artist exchange), 209n46; on Pushpamala N.’s Phantom Lady, 44; on Vivan Sundaram’s use of waste as material, 159 Sangari, Kumkum, 206n3 Sans, Jerome, 220n73, 221n79 Santhosh, S., 79–80 Santhosh, T.V., 13; and Adajania’s “new mediatic realism,” 214n55; and photorealism, 75, 77, 79, 79–81, 215n65; rate of artistic production by, 81, 215n66; and Saffronart.com auctions, 78, 79, 215n61. Works: Better Lessons—II (2009), 80, 81; Blood and Spit (2009), 80, 80; Untitled (2002), 79, 215n61 Sao Paolo Biennial, national pavilions, 23–24 Sarai: Ravi Agarwal as contributor to, 229n56; Cybermohalla ( joint educational initiative with Ankur), 137, 140; ending engagement with contemporary art, 134; establishment of, 14, 122–23, 134; funding for, 134, 135, 223n27; as housed within the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), 134; and language as medium, 124, 135, 154; and locality, 53, 134; as networked authorship, 135–36; and NGOs, 135,

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136–37, 223n31; Sarai 09 exhibition, 154; Sarai Reader, 134, 229n56; techno-optimism and, 136. See also Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Sashidharan, 25 scale: of Subodh Gupta, and extension of art infrastructure to accommodate, 116–17, 221n82; Subodh Gupta’s mastery of, 113; international audiences and, 7; and movement of painting off the wall, 18; performance and, 25, 33; photorealism and, 56, 79, 82; theater and, 25, 26, 28; and tipping point of artistic practice, 200 Scaria, Gigi, 156 Scheepvaartmuseum (National Maritime Museum, Amsterdam), Upstream (2002), 137–41, 138–39 Schippert, Helmut, 229n54 Schneemann, Carolee, 40 Schwitters, Kurt, 214n52 sculpture: Subodh Gupta’s practice of, 111, 112, 116–17; installation’s genealogy based in, 34, 208n32; Navjot Altaf ’s archetypal forms, 227n24; online auctions of, 78–79; and tactility/ the haptic, 98–99, 218n37 Seminar (magazine), 109 Senegal: Dak’Art bennial, 12; récuperation movement, 159, 226n4 Sengupta, Shuddhabrata. See Raqs Media Collective Sen, Mithu: overview, 15; alienation from the art market, 193, 194; Black Candy: (iforgotmypenisathome) (2010 Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai solo exhibition), 193, 194; Facebook post of Vuk Vidor’s print Art History (2004), and game of who “owns” what, 192–93, 196; and obscenity, strategic deployment of, 193; and participation, 193, 194, 196; and “radical hospitality,” 193–94, 196. Works: Free Mithu (2007–), 193–94, 195, 196; Twilight Zone (2003), 108–9 September 11, 2001, 62, 84 Serendipity Arts Festival (2016–) (Goa), 230n17 Serra, Richard, 34 sexual harassment accusations and development of protections and grievance procedures, 199, 230nn19–20 shadow play, 31, 33 Shahane, Girish: on the art market boom, 194, 196, 230n10; at Chaitime.com, 214n56; on painting engaged with media-circulated images, 75, 77, 78; on the problem of Indian artists being more accessible to international audiences than at home, 230n14; and Mithu Sen’s Facebook post

and game of who “owns” what, 193; and Words and Images exhibition, 75 Shahid Ali, Agha, “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight,” 147, 225n57 Shantibai, 162, 168, 172; Modes of Parallel Practices: Way of World-Making (1997 collaborative work), 171–72, 171. See also Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA) Sharma, Natraj: assemblage imitation of the 2001 Khoj workshop, 107; in Edge of Desire exhibition, 219n60; Freedom Bus or A View from the 6th Standard (2001–4), 219n60; in iCon (2005), 146–47, 149; in Real in Realism (2011 exhibition), 77 Sheikh, Gulammohammed, 211n1, 230n14 Sheikh, Nilima: overview, 13; in APT2 (1996), 34, 35, 37; in crossing generations: diVERGE (2003), 146, 147; in Johannesburg Biennale (1995), 17–19, 21, 25; and Kashmir, 147, 225n57; and language as medium, 147; and the nationalist designation of femininity-as-tradition, 38; and performance, 18–19; and theater as medium, 25–28; and Vivadi (feminist theater group), 17, 25, 26. Works: Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14), 147, 225n57; Ghar aur Behar (1989 theater sets), 25; Meghdoot/Savan 2 (1995), 21, 22; Shamiana (Tent, 1996), 35, 36, 37; Songspace series (1995), 17–19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 35; Umrao (1993 theater sets), 26, 27; Valley (2003–14), 147, 225n57 Shettar, Ranjani, 99–100; Thousand Room House (2000), 97–98, 98, 218n33 Shetty, Sudarshan, 73, 78 Shilpi Gram (Kondagaon cooperative studio), 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174 shininess: bling aesthetics, 221n80; Sheela Gowda and, 118; Gupta and, 112, 113–14, 116, 220n75, 221n80 Shisha (UK), 219n50 Shiv Sena (nativist political party), 42, 51, 53, 54, 211n10 Shonibare, Yinka, The Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlor (1996–97), 159 Shree, Geetanjali, 26 Shuvaprasanna, 216n1 Shyam, Jangarh Singh, 208n40 Siddiqui, A., 170, 171 Sikh community, 82, 127, 128, 149 Simeon, Dilip, 127 Sindhi Muslim Society (Karachi, Pakistan), 166 Singapore, 75, 190 Singh, Arpita, 18, 208n40

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Singh, Kavita, 182, 190 Singh, Madan Gopal, 82 single-country survey exhibitions, 60–61 Sinha, Gayatri, 73–74 Sir J.J. School of Art (Bombay), 53, 122, 141 site specificity: cultural sites privileged in, 97; Khoj workshops and, 105, 109; as promoted by the international artist workshop, 90; as reoriented toward locality, 97; as Triangle Network imperative, 105; and When Attitudes Become Forms: Live in Your Head (1969 exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann), 97 Sivan, Eyal, 125 Smith Trevor, 97, 98–99 social(ist) realism, 61 social media: Chaitime.com, 75, 214n56; Mithu Sen’s Facebook post, and game of who “owns” what, 192–93, 196; sexual harassment activism, 199, 230nn19–20 social sculpture, 71 Soi, Praneet, 156 Sood, Pooja, 111, 179, 219n50 Sotheby’s auctions, 78, 228n49 South Africa: art networks connecting to, 46, 103, 218; post-Apartheid, 23, 125; Pulse, 103; Thupelo workshop, 102; and transnational feminism, 21. See also Johannesburg Biennale South Asia: art networks connecting to, 101; the Creative Cities network and, 220n64; height of the boom market and collectors seeking artists from, 196–97; intellectual currents of, as foregrounded, 9–10; and the pervasive sense of loss attached to spaces and objects, 164; the Triangle Network’s support of, 100–101, 220n63. See also artist residencies; mobility; Triangle Network (UK) South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA), 108, 111, 227n19 space, coding and recoding, 54, 211n10 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 20 Sri Lanka, Theertha artist organization, 108, 227n19 Srinagar Biennale (2018–), 230n17 STAR TV, 55 state-driven arts patronage: of biennial-style exhibitions, 46, 198; and documentary filmmakers, 133, 134; and Ranjit Hoskote’s 2011 Venice Biennale pavilion, 156; post-recession turn back toward, 156, 197; and soft power, 11, 155; warning against lack of, 190. See also Lalit Kala Akademi (national Academy of Fine Arts, India); public-private hybrids Strathern, Marilyn, 9, 14, 162–63, 164, 173, 226n10

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Streak, Greg, 103 studio assistants: and the acceleration of the art market, 6, 160; of Navjot Altaf, 171; of Vivan Sundaram, 160, 175 Subaltern Studies, 20 subjectivity: agency of nonhuman images and objects, and collapse of subject-object distinction, 90–91, 190–91; documentary film and social subjectivity, 127; feminism on performance and, 40–41, 44, 45, 209–10n54; feminism on the doubly marginal subject position of women, 21, 40; narcissistic, among male artists, 58–59, 212nn24,26; as social, and documentary film, 127 Subramanyan, K.G., 91 subTerrain (2003 House of World Cultures, Berlin exhibition, part of body.city), 146 Suhail, Mariam, 167 Sukumaran, Ashok, 220n63 Sundaram, Ravi, 134 Sundaram, Vivan: in APT2 (1996), 34, 35; at “Art and Nature” international workshop, 216n1; and artist networks arising out of biennial-style exhibitions, 38; break with painting of, 3, 228n49; and circulation, 158–59, 160–61, 177; collaboration with Chintan (NGO), 159, 162, 174–78; commercial success of waste-related works of, 178, 228n49; in crossing generations: diVERGE (2003), 146; and cultural significance of materials, 159; as excluded from the documenta XI Delhi platform, 125; in 48°C Public.Art.Ecology (2008 international public art festival, Khoj), 179, 229n52; and Hindu nationalist violence, 3, 205–6n32; infrastructure forms of, as cutting ties to the infrastructural network, 176–78; and the Kasauli Art Centre, 5, 25; living it. out. in. delhi (2005 Rabindara Bhavan Gallery, Delhi solo exhibition), 159, 160–61, 175–77, 176, 178; and material improvisation, 159, 160; politics of the 1960s as influence on, 177; and SAHMAT, 5, 101; studio assistants of, 160, 175; Trash (2008–9 traveling exhibition), 159, 175, 177–79, 186; and the vernacular, 158; and waste as material, 157–61, 162, 174–78, 187. Works: 12 Bed Ward (2005), 177; Barricade (2008 series), 177–78, 178; The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain (2005), 175, 176; Carrier (1996), 35, 37; Cash and Carry (2005 participatory drawing project), 175; Flotage (2008–9), 159, 178–79, 179, 229n52; Gagawaka: Making Strange (2011), 159; Gora (1991 theater sets), 25, 26; The Great Indian Bazaar (1997–99), 157–59, 158, 160,

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178, 186; Master Plan (2005–8), 159, 160–61, 175, 176, 177, 187; Memorial (1993), 3, 4, 5; Trash (1997–2008), 7, 14, 162, 163, 226n9 Sutra (Nepal), 108, 227n19 Szeemann, Harald, When Attitudes Become Forms: Live in Your Head (1969), 97, 98 tactility/the haptic: overview, 98–99, 218n37; and a sense of vanishing, 118; Walter Benjamin on, 114, 116; Bill Brown on, 116; defined as the measure of materiality in which looking simulates touching, 92; Sheela Gowda and, 99; Subodh Gupta and, 111, 114, 116, 221n80; photography/ film and, 114, 116; symbolic richness and, 14, 100; Michael Taussig on, 114, 116; as an “unbearable optical caress” (Anita Dube), 14, 95, 96, 121 Tagore, Rabindranath, 25 Talwar, Ritu, 31 Tân, Vu~ Dân, 38 Tao Art Gallery (Mumbai), 76, 78 Tate Modern: Sheela Gowda in collection of, 2, 118; Vivan Sundaram in collection of, 4. See also Century City (2001) Taussig, Michael, 114–15 Taylor, Nora, 38 techno-optimism, 136, 137 Teh, David, 9, 205n24 television, 13, 51, 55, 74, 84, 217n16 Telling Tales: Of Self, Of Nation, Of Art (1997 traveling exhibition), 45, 46, 92–95, 209n49, 210n56 temporal fragmentation, and postmodernism mapped onto assumptions of postcolonial difference, 11 Thackeray, Bal, 51, 54, 211n10 Thailand, and relational aesthetics, 9 Tharu, Susic and K. Lalitha, Women’s Writing in India, 170 theater as medium: and audience engagement, 25, 26; and extension of painting into space, 18, 25, 34; Bhupen Khakhar and, 26, 28, 45; and narrative, 25; and scale, 25, 26, 28; Nilima Sheikh and, 25–28. See also Vivadi (feminist experimental theater troupe) Theertha (Sri Lanka), 108, 227n19 Third Text, 10, 45 Thompson, Krista, 205n24, 221n80 Thupelo workshop (South Africa), 102 Tibetan refugee community, 127 time, de- and reterritorialization and, 64 time-based work: discursive question of relation to art, 123; funding of, 123; Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2008–9), 143, 145, 146; and the need for

self-reflexive disengagement, 145; slowness to develop facilities to exhibit, 123 TimeOut Mumbai, 205n22 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 9 Tomii, Reiko, 205n24 Toxics Link (NGO), 180 Transmediale Berlin, 126 transnational advocacy networks, 137 Trash (2008–9 Vivan Sundaram traveling exhibition), 159, 175, 177–79, 186 Triangle Arts Trust, 101 Triangle Network (UK): artist residencies (Gasworks), 104, 108, 109, 186, 219n54, 220nn63–64; and the Bengaluru-based artist group led by C.F. John, 219n45; crossover of Open Circle with Khoj and, 104, 219n54, 220n63; founding and goals of, 101–2; as infrastructure, 107–8; as institutionalizing new practices, 118; Karachi organization (Vasl), 108, 109, 164, 220n63, 227n19; Khoj affiliated with, 100–101, 104, 111; Khoj affiliation as weakening, 111; network affiliate organizations in South Asia, 108, 227n19; and 1. Shanthi Road (artist group), 101, 220n63; permanent buildings viewed as sacrificing workshop impermanence, 108; and the South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA), 108, 227n19; workshops of, 101–2, 105 Tuli, Neville, 74–75; The Flamed Mosaic: Indian Contemporary Painting (1997), 74, 75 Tulipamwe Workshop (Namibia), 101 Turkey, art networks connecting to, 218n29 Turner, Caroline, 37, 208n42 Ulrichs, Timm, 216n1 UNESCO Aschberg Bursaries for Artists, 155, 220n64 United Kingdom: art networks connecting to, 38, 46, 73, 101, 200; Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawings (2000 Iniva and Beaconsfield traveling exhibition), 92, 94, 217nn21–22; feminist networks in, 38, 46, 200; Inside Out: Contemporary Women Artists of India (1995–96 traveling exhibition), 38, 39, 46, 209n49; Shisha, 219n50; Telling Tales: Of Self, Of Nation, Of Art (1997 traveling exhibition), 45, 46, 92–95, 209n49, 210n56. See also Triangle Network United States: art networks connecting to, 7, 101; and conceptualism as critiquing late capitalism, 141, 224n51; early internet and, 217n16; exposure to art from, in diplomatic reading rooms, 53; Subodh Gupta and commercial success in, 117; and How Latitudes Become Forms (2003 traveling show), 218n29; Jitish Kallat and American

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United States (continued) audiences, 57–58, 212n21; Amar Kanwar and commercial success in, 132–33, 154–55; the KNMA as supporting institutions to develop expertise in South Asian art, 197–98; Native Americans, 71; participatory art, 173; rapid changes in industrial infrastructure of, 99–100; as reference point, 73; Saffronart as oriented to Indian diaspora residents of, 75, 78; Triangle Network and, 101. See also international foundations; New York art world Upstream (2002 Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam), 137–41, 138–39 Ushiroshoji Masahiro, 172 Vadehra Art Gallery (Delhi), 73, 77, 78 Vadodara, 26, 53, 102 Vaid, Sudesh, 206n3 Vaidyanathan, Radhika, 105 value: consensus as crucial for, 196; devaluation, 214n52; gossip and questions of, 191, 196; of market, loss in 2008 collapse of boom market, 189; and the referential gesture, 74; relationship between the market and, 190 Varda, Agnes, The Gleaners and I (2000), 177 Varma, Raja Ravi, 73 Varma, Ravi, 149 Vasl (Pakistan), 108, 109, 164, 220n63, 227n19 Vasudevan, Ravi, 134 Vazirani, Minal and Dinesh, 75 Venice Biennale, and national pavilions, 23–24, 155–56, 225–26n68 Venice Biennale (2003), 155 Venice Biennale (2005), 14, 23–24; iCon: Indian Contemporary (collateral event), 146–47, 149–54, 152, 153, 155, 156, 215n68, 221n4, 225–26nn59,68 Venice Biennale (2009): collapsed India pavilion project, 155; Sheela Gowda’s Behold (2009), 1–3, 2, 7 Venice Biennale (2011), Everyone agrees: It’s about to explode (India pavilion), 156, 225–26n68 Venice Biennale (2015), My East is Your West (Indo-Pak collateral event), 225–26n68 Vergne, Philippe, 97, 100, 118, 218n29 the vernacular: as an aesthetic, 158; de- and reterritorialization and, 55, 212n15; forms and processes including, 97; public placement of art in Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists) and, 164, 165, 168 Victoria and Albert Museum, 217n21 video: and Aar-Paar (2000–4 cross-border exchange between artists), 167–68; Apeejay

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Media Gallery (Delhi), 2000 opening of, 123; and audience engagement, 82; Ranbir Kaleka’s “image-structure” and, 82–83; lack of facilities for exhibition of, 123, 155; and nonprofit/ commercial gallery cooperation, 155 Vidor, Vuk, Art History (2004 print), 192–93, 196 Vietnam, 38 violence: against women and girls, 19, 41, 108–9, 149; anti-Muslim riots (2002 Gujarat), 62, 63, 104, 149; language as medium and, 121, 125, 127, 149; righteous violence, 125, 127; Shiv Sena party using, 54, 211n10. See also Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent civil violence (Ayodhya); Partition (1947)—and violence Viswakarma, Sonadhar, in Edge of Desire (2003–5 traveling exhibition), 172 Vivadi (feminist experimental theater troupe): collaboration emphasized by, 25, 26; Bhupen Khakhar’s critique of political and self-serious experimental scene, 28; and representation of women, 25; Nilima Sheikh and, 17, 25, 26. Works: Gora (1991), 25–26; Umrao (1993), 26, 27 Vivekananda, Swami, 148 Vogue India, 205n22 Vohra, Paromita, 222n15 Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam), 134 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), 93; How Latitudes Become Forms (2003 traveling exhibition), 97–100, 99, 123, 149–50, 218nn29,33 Walker, Hamza, 133 Wang, Peggy, 190 Warhol, Andy, 73, 212n21 Wasanii International Artists Workshop (Nairobi, Kenya), 101 waste disposal infrastructure: intersecting with art infrastructure, 160; ragpicking (waste gleaners) market as facilitating waste as material, 158, 159, 160; and the specter of postcolonial failure, 159; Vivan Sundaram’s interest in, 159–60; visibility in the city, 160–61. See also Chintan (Delhi NGO) waste-related works: commercial success of, 178, 228n49; Vivan Sundaram, 7, 14, 157–61, 162, 174–79, 187 water infrastructure: Atul Bhalla and focus on, 180, 182–84, 185–86; Delhi’s city water source, 179; Nalpar (2000– pump project by DIAA), 14, 161–62, 163, 168–70, 169, 172–74, 176–77, 186, 228nn40–41; as shaping the bodies of artists and their communities, 186; Yamuna River

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artworks referencing, 14, 159, 162, 163, 178–86, 179, 181–83, 185, 229n52 Watson, Grant, 92, 94, 217n22 the West: exposure to art from, in diplomatic reading rooms, 53; identity as preoccupation of, 44; new art infrastructure between cultural centers outside of, 24–25, 34; NGOs as perpetuating the power of, 136, 224n39 When Attitudes Become Forms: Live in Your Head (1969), 97, 98 When Soak Becomes Spill (1999 Gallery Chemould Subodh Gupta exhibition), 111–12 whiteness, 42, 44 Wiley, Kehinde, 221n80 Wilke, Hannah, 40, 209–10n54

Witness (NGO), 125 women, double disenfranchisement of, 21, 40 Words and Images (2002 exhibition at Guild Art Gallery), 75–76 workshops. See artist workshops, international Xerox machines, 53, 74 Yamuna River: artworks engaging with, 14, 159, 162, 163, 178–86, 179, 181–83, 185, 229n52; as source of Delhi’s potable water, 179 Yusuf, 216n1 Zarina, 156 Zoche, Stefanie (Haubitz + Zoche), 181, 229n52

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