Book Manuscript Mini-Conference: Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960.
Participants: Iftikhar Dadi, the John H. Burris Professor in History of Art at Cornell University; Rebecca M. Brown, Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University; and Ming Tiampo, Professor of History of Art at Carleton University; and Lawrence Cohen, Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley in conversation with Atreyee Gupta, Assistant Professor, History of Art, UC Berkeley
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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact the History of Art Department at art_history@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
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Speaker Bios
Rebecca M. Brown, Professor in the History of Art, is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian visual culture and politics, and she has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. Her work examines urban space, modernity, visual political rhetoric, cultural diplomacy, and rhythm, motion, and time in art, visual culture, and exhibitionary contexts. Her publications include: Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (University of Washington Press 2017), Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present (co-edited with Deborah S. Hutton, Routledge 2016), Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (exhibition and catalog, 2011), Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010), Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Duke University Press 2009), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (co-edited with Deborah S. Hutton, Wiley-Blackwell 2011), Asian Art (co-edited with Deborah S. Hutton, Blackwell 2006), and articles in Visual Anthropology, Res, Interventions, CSSAAME, Archives of Asian Art, Art Journal, Journal of Urban History, Screen and Journal of Asian Studies.
Lawrence Cohen is Professor of Anthropology and South & Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. His book No Aging in India is about Alzheimer’s disease, the body and the voice in time, and the cultural politics of senility. His two current projects are India Tonite, which examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India, and The Other Kidney about the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant.
Art historian and artist Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor in History of Art at Cornell University. He teaches and researches modern and contemporary art from a global and transnational perspective, with emphasis on questions of methodology and intellectual history. His writings have focused on modernism and contemporary art of South and West Asia and their diasporas. Another research interest examines the film, media, and popular cultures of South Asia, seeking to understand how emergent publics forge new avenues for civic participation. Prof. Dadi’s recent publications include Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010); the edited volumes The Lahore Biennale Reader 01 (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015); and essays in numerous journals and edited volumes. Co-curated exhibitions include Pop South Asia (2022–23), Lines of Control (2012–13), and Tarjama/Translation (2009–10). As artist, Iftikhar Dadi works in collaboration with Elizabeth Dadi and exhibited widely internationally. Their practice investigates the salience of popular media in the construction of memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization, and the potential of creative resilience in urban informalities.
Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Her area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Affiliated with the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender, Gupta teaches courses on modern and contemporary Asian and Asian American art and architecture, along with thematic seminars on South and Southeast art, art and decolonization, curatorial practice, and global modernisms more broadly. She also co-founded and co-leads the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies with colleagues from Art Practice (Allan deSouza; Asma Kazmi) and Art History (Sugata Ray). Her curatorial projects at University of California, Berkeley include When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020), which she co-curated with BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder and undergraduate and graduate students in the seminar The Folk and/in the Modern: Critical Concepts + Curatorial Practicum in Twentieth-Century South Asian Art. Her forthcoming books include Postwar—Towards a Global Art History, 1945-1965 (co-edited with Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, forthcoming), and Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960, which is the subject of this Book Manuscript Mini-conference.
Ming Tiampo is a Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. She is interested in transnational and transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for critically reimagining global narratives. Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum in NY, and co-edited Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Brill Academic Press). Her latest book, Jin-me Yoon, was published with Art Canada Institute in 2023. Her current book projects include Mobile Subjects, a monograph that examines histories of migration post-Empire with an emphasis on artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the former French and British Empires, as well as Intersecting Modernisms, a co-edited sourcebook on global modernisms. Tiampo is an associate member at ici Berlin, a member of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational Advisory Board, a member of Asia Forum, a founding member of TrACE, the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange network, and co-lead on its Worlding Public Cultures project.
