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In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”
DIVA theoretically informed cultural study of the design, production, and circulation of Indian calendar art./div
A provocative exploration of photography's relationship to capitalism, from leading theorists of visual culture. Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays in Capitalism and the Camera investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism's violence--and if so, how? Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource ext...
Die international anerkannte Künstlerin Dayanita Singh bezeichnet sich selbst oft als »Buchkünstlerin«. Singh ist maßgeblich an der Erstellung dieses Ausstellungskatalogs beteiligt, der die große, von Stephanie Rosenthal kuratierte Retrospektive von Singhs Werk begleitet. Der Katalog ist die bisher umfassendste Publikation zu Singhs Kunst und enthält zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Essays, farbige Reproduktionen und Installationsaufnahmen. Die Texte setzen Singhs Werk in Beziehung zu Themen wie klassische indische Musik, Fotografietradition, die Idee des Archivs, Choreografie und Reproduktionsökonomien. Die Publikation stellt alle wichtigen Schaffensphasen der Künstlerin vor und betritt das Archiv von Singh, um u. a. noch nie gezeigte Frühwerke aus den 1980er Jahren zu präsentieren, sowie eine neue Serie von Montagen oder die Arbeiten Let's see, Museum of Chance, Museum of Shedding, I am as I am, Go Away Closer und Box 507.
The book presents a decade-long perspective on contemporary visual practices in India, with stunning visuals and insightful essays by leading intellectuals in the field. Engaging with a diversity of art practices and creative conditions, the publication (and exhibition) questions cultural structures that segregate visual practices, making a case for a polycentric aesthetic. In this argument for an inclusive and non-hierarchical consideration of visual culture, Edge of Desire presents a new contribution from the sub-continent to the debate on the nature and purpose of art practices and art histories. At the same time, it offers a visually exciting and intellectually stimulating array of new art from India generated through an intermingling of influences and traditions.
Chris Pinney demonstrates how printed images were pivotal to India's struggle for national and religious independence. He also provides a history of printing in India.
Combining entertainment and education, India's most beloved comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, or "Immortal Picture Stories," is also an important cultural institution that has helped define, for several generations of readers, what it means to be Hindu and Indian. Karline McLain worked in the ACK production offices and had many conversations with Anant Pai, founder and publisher, and with artists, writers, and readers about why the comics are so popular and what messages they convey. In this intriguing study, she explores the making of the comic books and the kinds of editorial and ideological choices that go into their production.
Global Icons considers how highly visible public figures such as Mother Theresa become global icons capable of galvanizing intense affect and sometimes even catalyzing social change.
"Although blasphemy is as old as religion itself, its history has begun a new chapter in recent years. Slanders of the sacred are everywhere, as in the highly visible Charlie Hebdo case, with "religion" sometimes appearing as little more than a membrane for giving and receiving offense. Where some explain the contemporary preoccupation with blasphemy by pointing to the interconnectedness of twenty-first-century media, J. Barton Scott argues that we need to look deeper into the past at the colonial-era infrastructures that continue to shape our globalized world. Slandering the Sacred examines one such powerful and widely influential legal infrastructure: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code....
As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?