28 Jan 2026
Postwar Art Worlds and Codes of Affiliations: South Asian artists Shakir Ali, Krishna Reddy and Ram Kumar
Paris, France
The École des modernités
Simone Wille is Elise Richter Fellow at the Institute of Art History, University of Innsbruck (Austria). As an art historian, Wille examines elements of the aesthetics of art, political thought, ideological positionings, and transcultural exchange in connection with cultural mobility, and socialist internationalism and thereby provides an important model for thinking internationalism beyond North Atlantic narratives.
She published André Lhote and His International Students (iup, 2020). As the project leader of “South Asia in Central Europe: The Mobility of Artists and Artworks between 1947 and 1989”, she published the monographCold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague, 1947-1989 (Leuven Univ. Press, November 2025), and the co-edited book Collecting Asian Art: Cultural Politics and Transregional Networks in Twentieth-Century Central Europe, Markéta Hánová, Yuka Kadoi, Simone Wille (eds.) (Leuven Univ. Press, 2024). In collaboration with the National Gallery Prague, she is currently preparing an exhibition cum publication on Indian post-independence art in Prague.
28 January at 6:30pm
Giacometti Lab and Live on Youtube
By Simone Wille
Lecture in English
The trajectories of many South Asian artists were shaped by various modes of regional and transregional mobility in the postwar period — flight, migration, relocation, travel. These modes overlapped with ideological, social, and political “codes of affiliation” that directly influenced their careers and their artistic practice.
This lecture explores these “codes of affiliation” through the work and experiences of three South Asian artists: Shakir Ali (1916–1975), Krishna Reddy (1925–2018), and Ram Kumar (1924–2018). Their journeys — from South Asia to different parts of Europe, across empires, nations, continents, and their ideologies, including Paris — provide a lens through which to examine the artistic worlds of the postwar era.
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