Speaker: Mansi Kashatria (Linköping University)
In-person at Niagara C0826 and on Zoom.
Abstract: Contemporary art is often understood as a shared ‘now’, a space where diverse visual practices coexist. Yet, beneath this apparent simultaneity lies a persistent hierarchy of temporalities. Tying the global north and the global south in a hierarchical relationship of coloniality, globalisation, and modernity, the existing frameworks to read contemporary art and its institutions are spatially and temporally locked. Calls to re-imagine and find alternate futures shuttle between digging a past or rescuing a future, often lapsing the one thing that needs to stay under the critical eye – the present.
Through multi-site field research, I follow the histories and practices of two contemporary art institutions: Konsthall C in Stockholm and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, one located in the presumed periphery of the ‘global north’ and the other in the ‘global south’ of the contemporary art world. From tracing the curatorial text to using storytelling as a valid mode of inquiry, I investigate how they are building a sense of being locally rooted as well as globally situated, albeit with different formal, scale, and material concerns. Critiquing the comparative approach to read differences, the book focuses on these institutions’ distinct methods of producing a site and re-producing the present. However, the research reveals a flawed foundational understanding of the global that connects them.
Radical Nuisance? Contemporary Art Practices and Re-Imagined Globality then interrogates this unchallenged foundation of the global by questioning how contemporary art is practiced when there are deep trenches existing between the institutional, artistic, and curatorial practices. By arguing for the artworks as the site where not only contradictions of how histories are remembered, or whose pasts are not re-imagined, but also where the societal (relational) conditioning of caste and race are constantly mediated and translated, the book effectively provides a referential framework for reading the imaginative potential of contemporary art.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.