23 May 2023
Strangers in the City: the Progressive Artists Group (1947-1967) and indian modernity
Paris, France
The École des modernités
At the Institut Giacometti
In 1947, the year of India’s independence from British rule, a group of young men from diverse backgrounds came together in Bombay to establish the Progressive Artists Group (PAG), a short-lived association, and challenge academic and bourgeois norms of artmaking. `
This lecture takes a new approach to PAG artists by emphasizing estrangement as the basis of their practice rather than its heroic, rebellious, or pioneering nature. These colonial and soon-to-be postcolonial subjects were étrangers in the sense of being outsiders and migrants, alien and estranged. The city was material and ground for negotiating that identity.
Sonal Khullar
Sonal Khullar is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on modern art in India, a subject that her first book covered : Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (University of California Press, 2015). She has edited Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (University of Washington Press, 2023) and is completing a book manuscript, The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia.
Tuesday 23 May 2023 at 6.30 PM
At the Giacometti Lab or live on YouTube
English lecture given by Sonal Khullar
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