How are artists in the age of social media and information adapting art activism and deploying aesthetic responsibility to react to politicized issues of today like the #Metoo Movement, feminism and gender sensitivity/rights, climate change and environmental responsibility and fake news and electoral manipulations? Art Musings Gallery and Avid Learning present Art and Politics in the Age of Information, a panel discussion on the trajectory of political aesthetics and its future in the online space. Join Artist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar and Cultural Theorist, Nancy Adajania in conversation with Curator, Poet and Cultural Theorist Ranjit Hoskote. This talk will be the second panel discussion of the third iteration of Avid Learning’s Beyond Contemporary Art Series. BCA#3 is presented in conjunction with Art Musings Gallery’s ongoing year-long exhibition The 20th- curated by Ranjit Hoskote – that celebrates two decades of the gallery.
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf, combines an art historical perspective with a politics of culture approach (The Guild, Bombay, 2016). It presents for the first time an elaborate historical analysis of the little-known Progressive Youth Movement (PROYOM) of the 1970s. She was joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) and she co-curated ‘No Parsi is an Island’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2016), which retrieves artistic positions that have been marginalised from canonical accounts of Indian art history. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies: The Curatorial Conundrum (Bard/MIT Press, 2016) and Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (BAK/MIT Press, 2016). She recently edited the Raza Foundation journal Aroop -- 'Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge', 2017.
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Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Most of the projects are research-intensive and seek unique interventions to offer new modes of dissemination. They sometimes attempt to unlock historical and contemporary data through placing the work in the context of an unseen social history.His city-related projects include those that map living conditions in current strategies of urbanisation [cityinflux - Gentricity - Stories of Philanthropic Trusts] or speculative histories of reclamation [ Isles Amidst Reclamation - 7 Isles Unclaimed]. Modelled Recycled Systems is a long term project recording ship-breaking practices at Alang. A series of works were recently showcased at the Bergen Assembly Triennial - 2016 and a 2nd iteration of shipping infrastructure works were commissioned for Colomboscope - 2019. His grant & awards include Majlis Visual Arts Fellowship, U.D.R.I Architectural Fellowship, Leverhulme Trust Artist Residency, SAI Harvard University Artist residency, Wellcome Trust Seed Award, and a Gasworks Artist Residency.
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Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is also a leading Anglophone Indian poet. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking 2014), and Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton 2018); and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König 2010) and Atul Dodiya (Prestel 2014). Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). He was co-convenor, with Maria Hlavajova, Kathrin Rhomberg and Boris Groys, of the exhibition-conference platform Documents, Constellations, Prospects (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013). He co-curated, with Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, the exhibition-conference platform The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, 2016).
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