Anirudh Shaktawat, Heap/Hill (from Chaumasa: Four Months of Monsoon), 2020. Rubble (brick, concrete, lime). 66 × 150 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories Initiative, Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History is a three-year research and pedagogical project of the South Asia Art Initiative, housed at the Institute for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Through public programs, field-based workshops, and collaborative research, the project reconsiders the relation between nature and culture in art history, approaching them not as opposing domains but as categories and phenomena co-produced through histories of matter, mobility, imagination, and power. Bringing together a global cohort of scholars and practitioners, the project will develop a lexicon for rethinking the artistic and visual histories of South Asia through the intersecting concerns of climate, decolonization, and planetary thought, while extending these histories beyond the territorial boundaries through which South Asia has conventionally been understood.
