Events Archive

Past Events

• October 4-5, 2024
  Buddhist Art History in South and Southeast Asia: Innovations and Interactions
  (link is external)All day  | 370 Dwinelle Hall
• Wednesday, October 9, 2024
  Yuthika Sharma(link is external) | The Dilli Qalam: Modernizing Mughal Painting in Company-era Delhi
  (link is external)5-6:30 pm  | 10 Stephens Hall
• Saturday, October 12, 2024
  Celebrating 10 Years of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies
  Thinking from Bangladesh, Building with Justice
  (link is external)1 - 7 p.m. | David Brower Center
• Wednesday, October 16, 2024
  Yousuf Saeed | Popular Visual Culture of South Asian Muslims: Islamic Poster Art
  (link is external)5-6:30 pm  | 10 Stephens Hall
• Thursday, October 24, 2024
  Ratish Nanda | Preserving India’s Monuments: A 25-year Journey
  (link is external)5-6:30 pm  | 10 Stephens Hall
• Tuesday, November 19, 2024
  Anu Mridul(link is external) | Contemporizing Historic Water Architecture: Restoration, Iteration, & Mainstreaming
  (link is external)5-6:30 pm  | 10 Stephens Hall
• Wednesday, November 20, 2024
  Tamara Sears | Wilderness Urbanisms: On Politics, Nature, and Travel in the Peripheries of Premodern India
  (link is external)5-6:30 pm  | 10 Stephens Hall

Scholars Speak

• Devika Singh | A transnational history of art in India (Apr 18, 2024)
• Bashabi Fraser | The Primacy of Creativity in Rabindranath Tagore (Apr 4, 2024)
• Debra Diamond | Geo-aesthetics in Udaipur: Cartography, Temporality and Emotions in Monumental Paintings, 1700-1900 (Mar 14, 2024)
• Mudit Trivedi | Archaeologies of Iman: Fragility, Ornament and the embrace of Islam in Medieval North India (Mar 7, 2024)
• Nadeem Omar Tarar | Crafting the Art Education in Pakistan: An Archival History of NCA (Mar 5, 2024)

• Salar Mameni| Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Mar 4, 2024)

• New Directions in Modernist Studies (Dec 5, 2023)
• New Directions in Buddhist Art History (Oct 11, 2023)
  --- Sonali Dhingra: Making Monumental Figural Sculpture at Ratnagiri, Odisha (ca. 8th-10th centuries)
  --- Padma Dorje Maitland: Emotional Fragments and Modern Networks of Buddhist Materiality in India
• Rochona Majumdar | Anger and its Aftermath in Indian Cinema (Apr 18, 2023)
• Partha Mitter | Why Do We Need to Reimagine Modernism?: Global Modernism and its Discontents (Apr 7, 2023)
• Partha Mitter | The Virtual Cosmopolis (Apr 5, 2023)
• Partha Mitter | The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Global Avant-garde, 1922-1947 (Apr 3, 2023)
• Nancy Um | The Art of Wood and its Narratives of Mobility across the Western Indian Ocean (Feb 21, 2023)
• Jason Felch | Chasing Shiva: Investigating the Market in South and Southeast Asian Antiquities (Nov 03, 2022)
• Supriya Chaudhuri | Modernism, Realism and Catastrophe: Local and Global Aesthetics in Mid-Twentieth Century India (Oct 17, 2022)
• Dalvir Pannu | Beyond Borders: An Illustrated history of the Sikh shrines in Pakistan (Sept 13, 2022)
• John Guy | China in India: Porcelain Trade and Attitudes to Collecting in Early Islamic India (Oct 14, 2021)
• Osmund Bopearachchi Gandharan Art Revisited: What is New and What is Next The Mahomedali Habib Distinguished Lecture (12/9/2021)
• Usha Iyer | From the Cabaret to the Melodrama of Dance Reform: Corporeal Histories of 1950s-60s Bombay Cinema (3/4/2021)
• The Long Way to Tagore’s Self-discovery as an Artist (2/2/2021)
• When All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern in Postcolonial India (3/3/2020)
• Patrick Flores When Commitments Confuse: Writing and Curating (Around) the Nature of Art History (5/8/2020)
• Salima Hashmi Rumours of Spring: Some Reflections on Pakistani Contemporary Art The Mahomedali Habib Distinguished Lecture (9/16/2020)
• Catherine B. Asher The Qutb Complex: India and the Persianate World (4/12/2019)
• Sarah Pinto The Arts of Counter-Ethics (2/8/2019)
• Sandow Birk American Qur'an (10/22/2018)
• Matti Braun Vikram Sarabhai - A Modern Indian Icon (10/13/2018)
• Tapati Guha-Thakurta From Craftsmanship to Commercial Art (9/28/2018)
• Stephanie Schrader Rembrandt and the Mughals (4/30/2018)
• Nadia Samdani, Rajeeb Samdani, & Chitra Ganesh South Asian Art | Past, Present, Future (4/27/18)
• Robert Del Bontà Ragamala Painting (7/8/2017)
• Y.S. Alone Neo-Buddhist Visual Culture (9/8/2016)
• Iftikhar Dadi Urdu Cinema during the 50s (11/24/2014)
• Parul Dave Mukherji On the Common Sense of Indian Aesthetics (9/18/2014)
• Parul Dave Mukherji Art History in India (9/17/2014)  - VIDEO
• Alka Patel Geopolitics & Material Culture in North India (10/23/2014)
• Qamar Adamjee Persia, India & a Zoroastrian silver bowl (03/13/2014)
• Sugata Ray For the Love of Land: Corporeal Topophilia and the Remaking of “State Space” in Colonial India (03/04/2013)
• Salima Hashmi Guftugu: Faiz & his influence on Art (9/25/11)
• Rajiv Lochan Art & South Asia (7/29/2007)

Artists Speak

• Lectures by the Recipients of the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative Awards for 2024 (Apr 17, 2024)
• Indus Blues: The Forgotten Music of Pakistan (Oct 31, 2023)
• Tsherin Sherpa | Art from the Himalayas: Past into Present (Apr 30, 2023)
• UC Berkeley South Asia Art Award Lectures: Titles TBD (April 19, 2023)
• Osman Khan | Road to Hybridabad (Mar 13, 2023)
• Asim Waqif: Decentralising the Creative Process (Sept 30, 2022)
• Asma Kazmi: Ecologies of Meaning (Apr 26, 2022)
• Saba Qizilbash The UC Berkeley South Asia Artist Prize Lecture for 2022, (Apr 20, 2022)
• Hajra Waheed Crisis and Creativity (Feb 08, 2022)
• Faizan Ahmad A Photobook from Pakistan: Traveling on the Metro Bus for Five Years (11/18/2021)
• Walking Across Disciplines, artist talk by Naiza Khan (3/31/2021)
• Aziz Sohail and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr., two queer Pakistani artists redefining what it means to be queer and Pakistani. (3/10/2021)
• A conversation betweennoted collector of Indian art, Dr. Gursharan S Sidhu and New Delhi-based art historian and curator Naman Ahuja. (3/3/2021)
• Filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen in conversation with Tate Modern Senior Curator Yasufumi Nakamori (2/18/2021)
• Amar Kanwar + Shanay Jhaveri | Crisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series (9/21/2020)
• Sugata Ray & Ranu Mukherjee Catastrophe & Storytelling Climate Change and Sacred Groves (5/4/2020)
• Jane and Kito de Boer + Deepanjana D. Klein Vital Love: Collectors Speak Series (9/18/2020)
• Allan deSouza + Gayatri Gopinath Crisis & Creativity: Artists Speak Series (10/8/2020)
• Brendan Fernandes and Mithu Sen Virtual Artists in Residence (10/25/2020)
• Alwar Balasubramaniam + Atreyee Gupta Crisis & Creativity: Artists Speak Series (11/12/2020)
• Art from Politics in Bangladesh (7/19/2019)
• Haroon Mirza The Creative Repercussions of Counterculture (4/3/2019)
• Allan deSouza How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change (10/26/2018)
• Shuddhabrata Sengupta Kinetic Contemplation (11/6/2018)
• Neha Choksi Exploring Absence (2/26/2018)
• Atul Bhalla Ecoaesthetics: A Round Table (3/3/2016)
• Pushpamala N. Performative Cultures (4/3/2015)
• Indrani Baruah Creative Placemaking (11/4/2014)
• Daisy Rockwell The Little Book of Terror (04/13/12)
• Naiza Khan Contemporary Pakistani Art (10/16/11)
• Anjolie Ela Menon Artist Talk (10/11/2010)
• Jatin Das Artist Talk (10/5/2009)

Curators Speak

• Amrita Jhaveri + Manjari Sihare-Sutin | Vital Love: Collectors Speak Series (Mar 21, 2024)
• Asim Waqif: Decentralising the Creative Process (Sept 30, 2022)

Conferences, Workshops, and Documentaries

• Five Tables of Art and Climate Change (Dec 7, 2023)
• 3rd i’s 21st Annual SF Int’l South Asian Film Festival (Oct 20-22, 2023)
• Buddhist Art in a Global World: SAAI Fieldtrip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York with Professor Sugata Ray (Oct 12-14, 2023)
• Emergenc(y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War (Feb 22 – Mar 21, 2023)
• Yasmin Jahan: Art from Politics in Bangladesh (7/19/2019)
• Indian Ocean Art Histories: Goa; Bombay: Kochi (4/23/2019)
• History of Art graduate students visit India as part of the 2019 Judith Stronach Travel Seminar
• A Retrospective: James Ivory In Person (2/20-23/2019)
• Panel: Art, Cinema, & Popular Culture in Bangladesh (2/22/2019)
• Shuddhabrata Sengupta and the Raqs Media Collective (11/7/2018)
• Bay Area Conversations: The Arts of South Asia and its Diasporas (10/26/2018)
• Eco Art History: Genealogies, Methodologies, Practices, Horizons (3/4-5/2018)
• Cinephiles, Fandoms, and Global Media Cultures: Indian Cinema from a Transcultural Perspective (10/6/2017)
• Amit Dutta Three Shorts on Indian Painting (09/8/2017) 
• Collecting South Asia: Archiving South Asia (2/18/14)