This panel will focus on the work of Nasreen Mohamedi. One of the most important artists of her generation, Mohamedi made from the early 1960s to the late 1980s a series of abstract paintings, drawings and photographs that constitute a key body of work within the modernist canon. Speakers including artists, curators and art historians will explore her work in detail and reflect on her position within the history of Indian Modernism, as well as in the context international avant-garde movements, and examine the possibility of rewriting art history from a non-Western perspective. Participants will include Deepak Ananth, art historian, curator and lecturer at the École des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France, Rasheed Araeen, artist, writer, curator and founding editor of Third Text, London, Anita Dube, artist, art historian and critic based in Delhi, India, Ruth Noack, art historian, lecturer, critic and curator of documenta 12, Suely Rolnik, psychoanalyst, critic and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil and Daniel J. Rycroft, art historian at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
This programme has been supported by O3-funds as underwritten by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for enhancing collaboration in the contemporary art field with professional artists in countries designated by the MFA. The purpose of the O3-funds as allocated to OCA is to further develop cooperation and professional networking between OCA and the constituency of artists, independent cultural producers, and organisations that are located in designated countries. This includes but is not limited to 'professional research visits by cultural producers, artists, and curators', 'short-term residencies for cultural producers and artists', seminars, conferences, art projects, workshops, etc. that focus on the further development of professional exchange and networking between and among countries', and 'project development (and pilot projects) on an international scale'.
For more information on the exhibition, the panel discussion or the overall project, please contact Marthe Tveitan at marthe@oca.no.
Deepak Ananth, Art historian, curator and
lecturer at the École des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France
Ananth's presentation looks at the singular place occupied by
Nasreen Mohamedi in the context of modern Indian art, dwelling on
her affinities with, but also apartness from, her contemporaries.
It aims to provide an overview of her development as an artist,
touching upon the phases in the evolution of her distinctive formal
language, and drawing upon her notebooks and the evidence of the
photographs that she intermittently took all her life. It attempts
to place her in a map of world art whose contours are being
redrawn, the more to acknowledge the multiple lineages of modernity
and modernism.
Rasheed Araeen, Artist, writer, curator, and
founding editor of Third Text, London, UK
Why is art history Eurocentric? Can its others challenge it and
demand their place in it? How? The aim of Rasheed Araeen's
presentation is to show that the exclusive control and domination
of modernism by the West, and its result as Eurocentric art history
is not based on the objectivity of what modernism has actually
produced within its mainstream, but on the colonial assumption that
perpetuates Europe's white racial supremacy and superiority. The
solution to this problem is not to bypass this by proposing
alternatives, but to confront it through the very knowledge that
has been suppressed by Eurocentric art history.
Anita Dube, Artist, art historian and critic
based in Delhi, India
Dube's presentation on Nasreen Mohamedi takes as its starting point
Julia Kristeva's statement from the Tales of Love that 'No matter
what it is, love brushes us up against sovereignity', and uses it
to explore Mohamedi's work from a feminist and leftist
perspective.
Ruth Noack, Art historian, lecturer, critic and
curator of documenta 12
Nasreen Mohamedi's work was shown in documenta 12 alongside Agnes
Martin, Atsuko Tanaka and Arkila Kerka from Mali, among others.
Noack's presentation will discuss this form of contextualization
and elaborate on the curatorial approach.
Suely Rolnik, Psychoanalyst, critic and
curator, São Paulo, Brazil
During the 1960s and 70s, there was an emergence of artistic
practices focusing on the institutional and disciplinary power
relations at play within the art context. These practices made the
exposition and analysis of relations an essential part of their
poetic potential. In most Latin American countries, a political
dimension was added as a result of the dictatorial regimes that
were in power at the time in the region and their effect on the art
context - artists' experience of terror became an essential part of
the artistic tensions that pushed them to create. In this context,
the seed for the integration of politics and poetics emerges, lived
and actualised within artistic practice but still impossible to
name. However, this possibility was abandoned as a result of the
trauma caused by the dictatorship, and with it were abandoned the
futures that never realised. In the face of this, there is an
urgency to recuperate that seed in the memory of our bodies, in
order to activate their potential of becoming in conjunction with
the forces of the present.
Daniel J. Rycroft, Art historian at the
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
The primary concern of Rycroft's paper is to define shifts in
modernist practice in pre-Independence India, and to assess these
via a world-art approach. The conceptual and historical focus is
'the subaltern', which since the 1920s has been brought into a
field of modernist vision through the artistic interventions of the
Santiniketan School. The paper will address why it is important to
consider the historical and political contexts that defined how
subaltern groups, notably the Adivasi (indigenous/tribal) Santals,
became the medium through which counter-primitivist agendas were
channelled by Bengali artists. The paper will also consider the
intellectual and artistic contours of an 'alternative modernism'
that staged national integration.
