Walking a Tightrope: Indigenous Indian Art and its Reception (original) (raw)
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The Contemporary Moment In Indigenous Art: Global Events and Sociopolitical Critiques
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This chapter discusses the works of contemporary indigenous artists in India hailing from four communities (the Warli tribe from Maharashtra, the Pardhan-Gond tribe from Madhya Pradesh, the Mithila folk artists from Bihar and the Chitrakar folk artists from West Bengal). It examines how these artists negotiate with concepts of tradition and contemporaneity through works that explore the urban, that tackle global themes and reflect upon contemporary concerns. The artists discussed herein often engage with these subjects by portraying a contemporary event, be it a natural disaster, a terrorist attack or a disease with global ramifications (e.g. AIDS) but equally, they do so by tackling sociopolitical issues within their communities (including feminist issues such as female foeticide). In the latter vein, they effectively adopt the position of artivists. Within this discussion, care has been taken to keep Arjun Appadurai's observation in mind, i.e. that modernity today is “irregularly self-conscious and unevenly experienced", which -- it may be argued -- applies to an understanding of contemporaneity within the Indian context.
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Brochures of Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2014
A description of the motifs and meaning of Santal, Madhubani, Godna (Tattoo), Kalamezuthu, Gond Art, Ganesh Gopal Jogi's Art, explaining the continuing vitality and aesthetic charm in tribal art of India.
Indian Art History: Changing Perspectives, ed. Parul Pandya Dhar. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld., 2011
The shaping of the disciplinary practice of art history in the Indian context has been a fascinating process and brings to the fore a range of viewpoints, issues, debates, and methods. Changing perspectives and approaches in academic writings on the visual arts of ancient and medieval India form the focus of this collection of insightful essays. A critical introduction to the historiography of Indian art sets the stage for and contextualizes the different scholarly contributions on the circumstances, individuals, initiatives, and methods that have determined the course of Indian art history from colonial times to the present. The spectrum of key art historical concerns addressed in this volume include studies in form, style, textual interpretations, iconography, symbolism, representation, connoisseurship, artists, patrons, gendered readings, and the interrelationships of art history with archaeology, visual archives, and history.
Editorial Introduction Contemporary Art Practices in Twenty-first Century India
The Chitrolekha Journal on Art and Design, 2018
Contemporary, as a terminology, means anything and everything that live-in or belong-to or occur-in the same epoch, especially the one that is prevailing. Being used in the realm of human art-practices, it refers to a specific time-frame rather than a special type of art. It was framed as a coin at the beginning of Modernism in western-world, while its definition – being anchored in the present – always had a start-date that kept on moving with time. Thus works bought by the Contemporary Art Society of London, for instance, way back in 1910 could no longer be described as so, while museums with a permanent collection such works inevitably find them aging. In addition to this, the contextual functionality of the term was also taken over time and again by various ‘–isms’ through the last six-seven decades. Multiple definitions came into the fore, since 1960s, of what constitutes Contemporary Art and today they vary widely from each other. The term however is now used specifically to limit the art of the present, produced in the latetwentieth century or the early twenty-first. To be more substantial, ‘contemporary’ now refers to art made and produced by artists living today, though commercial-galleries, art-dealers and artmagazines often restrict the coin to the works done after AD 2000 only. Thus it poses further issues with the mid or late twentieth century artists who are still productive after a long career, along with ongoing art-movements that have lasted for long – leaving us imprecise about the divide between contemporary and non-contemporary.