Monday, November 18, 2019

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall

This lecture constructs an account of radical art practice in India through two seminal figures: Vivan Sundaram, the contemporary Delhi-based artist, and Geeta Kapur, the pre-eminent theorist, critic, and curator, and most significant interlocutor of the post-1968 avant-garde generation to which Sundaram belongs. This married couple (both b. 1943) are widely regarded as veterans of socially engaged art in the subcontinent. Drawing from her new book-length study (Duke University Press, 2019), Professor Mathur explicates the meaning of their highly individual, parallel, and at times intersecting, contributions to the visual arts in India over the past five decades, and sketches a model of radical practice in India that responds, more urgently than ever, to the crises of our contemporary era.