The South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley is delighted to launch Crisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series, a new speaker series that addresses provocative and generative intersections between creative processes and societal, cultural, and environmental crises. The Series features conversations among artists, art professionals, curators, and scholars.
The second event in this series features a conversation between sculptor, painter and printmaker, Alwar Balasubramaniam and Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art, History of Art Department, UC Berkeley, Atreyee Gupta .
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DATE: Thursday, November 12, 2020
TIME: 9am Berkeley | 5pm London | 10pm Lahore | 10:30pm New Delhi | Calculate Your Local Time
This event will also be live streamed on the Institute's FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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Speaker Bios
Sculptor, painter and printmaker Alwar "Bala" Balasubramaniam, makes work that cross the boundary between art, perception and life. His ghostly sculptures and minimalist two-dimensional works have been exhibited at some of the worlds greatest art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Bala earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Government College of Fine Arts in Madras in 1995, and has been recognized with prizes and fellowships by major artistic institutions around the world almost every year since. Among those, he received Britains Charles Wallace India Trust Arts Fellowship in 1997 and a residency in Vienna from the UNESCO-ASCHBERG Bursary for Artists in 1998. In 2006, he was awarded the Sanskriti Award for Excellence in Visual Arts. In 2008, he was invited to teach art at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. His works have exhibited at the Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo; the National Portrait Gallery, in Canberra, Australia; the Singapore Biennale; the Sapporo International Print Biennial in Japan; the Egyptian International Print Triennial, in Giza; and at the Lalit Kala Academy, in New Delhi. He has held solo exhibitions in Girona, Spain, Vienna, Mumbai, New Delhi and New York. Bala was born in Tamil Nadu, India; he lives and works in Bangalore.
Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She was trained at the University of Minnesota and the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. Her area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the global aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global more broadly. Gupta is presently completing Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 19301960, a book on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. Her coedited books include Postwar A Global Art History, 19451965 (with Okwui Enwezor) and Global Modernism/s: Infrastructures of Contiguities, ca. 19051965 (with Hannah Baader and Patrick Flores). Guptas essays have appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, and journals such as Art Journal, Yishu, and Third Text.
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Other events in this series include:
Oct 8, 2020: Allan deSouza + Gayatri Gopinath (New York University)
Feb 18, 2021: Naeem Mohaiemen + Yasufumi Nakamori (Tate Modern, London)
April 7, 2021: Asma Kazmi + Santhi Kavuri-Bauer (San Francisco State University)
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The South Asia Art Initiative, inaugurated in Spring 2018, is the culmination of a comprehensive art program, built over the past several years, that promoted conversation around the visual cultures of South Asia through talks, conferences, and exhibitions. The goal of the Initiative is to move onto the next level with local, national, and international collaborations that combine creative energies with insights drawn from scholarly research. To read more about the Initiative or to help support its various fundraising goals, please click HERE.
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Event made possible with the support of the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies
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The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
