 Welcome to the PMC and my name is Shriya Chatterjee and I'm Head of Research and Learning at the Centre. So I'm really pleased that you've braved the cold that Karen Zitzvitz has so kindly brought with her from Michigan to London. And I know that we were expecting more people in person, but it looks like we have a lot of people joining online. So hello to both sort of in person and our online audiences. Now to properly welcome you to the final event of our research seminar series. Today's event is titled Infrastructures of Thought, Networks of Practice, Indian Feminist Art in and with Britain in the 1990s. And our speaker today is Karen Zitzvitz, who I will introduce in a moment. Today's talk will centre around a group of artists, namely Anita Dube, Pushpa Mala N, Romana Hossain and Sheila Gouda. Drawn from her book Infrastructure and Form, the Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991 to 2008, which is just recently out from University of California Press. Feel free to look it up, order it. Karen's talk today suggests a method for understanding the artists that I just talked about, how the works of these artists function in a complex and balanced relationships between infrastructures that support art, ranging from frameworks of thought to modes of communication and travel to the availability of materials and also the formal choices made by artists. So to introduce Karen Zitzvitz is an Associate Professor of Art History at Michigan State University. She's the author of Infrastructure and Form, which I just mentioned. That came out in 2022. The Art of Secularism, the Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India, which came out in 2014. And the Perfect Frame, the 2003 Memoirs of a Mumbai Gallerist Keku Gandhi. Her research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Program. She's a former chair of the editorial board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open. So without further ado, I will hand over to Karen. I'm really looking forward to your talk. I want to thank you all for being here. I know that everything is kind of against it. Coming out of your house is enormously difficult, particularly on the day where there are transport problems and weather issues and I don't know, football probably, though I'm off the schedule at the moment. I am so delighted to be here and delighted to be speaking to you in the room and you online at the Palm Island Center for British Art, which has done so much to encourage entangled art histories, which is a phrase that I associate with this center and with people associated with it, like Hamad Nasser and Sarah Turner and Shria Chatterjee as well. I'm very grateful to Shria for her invitation to speak. I'm really grateful to Ella Fleming and before her, Shana Blanchfield for their practical sort of setting up of everything. A portion of this research was actually facilitated by the PMC, including my trip to London to speak at the Showing, Telling, Seeing, Exhibiting South Asia in Britain 1900 to Now conference, which is where I met Sarah, which was extraordinarily good fun. Actually, the main memory is that we had a really good time, but also it was intellectually stimulating. It was, I promise. What I was doing then was doing research on Triangle Network, which is a London-based network that has chapters throughout the Global South and particularly in South Asia. Later, I was awarded, and I'm very grateful for a short-term fellowship from the PMC to research this topic, which was first interrupted by my horrible decision to chair my become head of department, which meant that I didn't have a summer to do this, and then COVID. What that means is that I was finally able to come in May and do some research, but it was never quite exactly what I wanted it to be. This is really in some ways a beginning of an entangled history and more history at this point of misunderstandings. I want to talk about that as well. Also, finally, my abstract mentioned a different group of artists than the ones I'm going to actually talk about, which is sad. Those of you who really want to hear about Anita Dubey, we can talk after about Anita, but I'm also going to start out by talking about Nalini Malani and Nile Mache. You get some bonuses, I guess. All right, let's get going. As presented in the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale, Nalini Malani's media material combined a series of narrative paintings a neon sculpture, video, and large robe-like works of painted mylar in the middle of the exhibition space. Malani's works told the story of Medea and had emerged from a 1993-94 performance collaboration with actress Alakdanda Samarth based on East German playwright Heiner Müller's reworking of Euripides' tragedy. In the Biennale, her work was shown alongside Nile Mache's song space. A series of large, double-sided paintings on cloth hung so that viewers walked among them. Sheik's paintings, many of which feature allegorical landscapes that enact Viraja, or the longing for the endlessly deferred divine love that is a major theme in devotional poetry. While made for the exhibition, Sheik traces her work with such texts and forms to her experience designing sets with Vivabi, a feminist experimental theater group. Long friends, Malani and Sheik's painting practices were grounded in similar politics and concerns, but the form of their work had always been quite different. Their exhibition in the Johannesburg Biennale in a group show that also included the work of younger artists Pushpa Malan and Shila Gauda, and here these are works that were shown in the show, highlighted how the artist's experimentation with forms of performance had occasioned a unique intersection in their practices as they extended painting into installation. I began to look at feminist art networks through this question. The question of how and why Malani, Sheik, and other women artists at the time began to work at a much larger scale and in media heretofore largely unused in India. I wanted to examine how their work began to come off the wall or off the pedestal to fill large rooms, to be made from unconventional materials and to move across artistic disciplines. It was clear that such work required different spaces of exhibition and modes of patronage than the practices these artists had pursued in the period just before. With hindsight, it also became clear that the showing in Johannesburg arranged through a new curatorial model in which local curators spread throughout the global south were deputized to select work for international shows that were often run on shoestring budgets. It was among the first events in what became a pronounced shift through which Indian artists and art circulated through new networks. While many studies of art and globalization have emphasized large biennial style exhibitions, my initial focus on the emergence of new forms of feminist art made it clear that often smaller scale projects were also crucial to piecing together vital and organic networks of practice. Knowledge of these events led me in infrastructure and form, the book in which this material forms a foundational first chapter. When it's Hamad, I point at him because he wasn't even here for me to thank him for hosting me before. Anyway, knowledge of such events led me in infrastructure and form, of which this material forms the foundational first chapter, to argue for a model of art history that explicitly connects material changes in form, in this case the extension of painting or sculpture into installation or performance, to various infrastructures, a category that includes both art institutions and wider material and immaterial networks for circulation. The systems I gather together under the category of infrastructure range from transportation and shipping networks to new regimes of banking, to art residencies and international curatorial programs, to the forms of thought and discourse that allow dissimilar practices to be understood as connected. In what I'll discuss today, I will focus primarily on the immaterial forms of infrastructure that facilitated artistic work, such as the development of curatorial and critical expertise or networks of friendship, collaboration, and exchange. I'll discuss how transnational, often explicitly third world feminist theory engaged with issues of signification and embodiment, worked in tandem with changes in artistic practice, and I'll highlight how the UK emerged as a crucial node in these debates. Indian feminists began in the 1980s to build for themselves institutional formations in politics, publishing, and across the arts, making networks that extended across and beyond the nation. The group of artists who were animated by these shifts found opportunities to show their work in new ways and in new venues under new formal and curatorial imperatives. Alongside this growing sense of possibility that drove these women, however, was a deep unease about the dissolution of many of the certainties that had driven artistic practice and intellectual life in India. For several artists, the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and Ayodhya, which occurred 30 years ago yesterday, was an impetus for a sudden formal change in their work. Immediately recognized as a symbol of the collapse of India's fragile secularist consensus, the events in Ayodhya were overlaid, caste-sectarian and separatist conflicts that had emerged or had been renewed throughout the decade of the 1980s. All of these crises intersected powerfully with issues of gender, inequality, and women's vulnerability to violence. These events signal a more general, quite profound loss of confidence among many artists and intellectuals in the cultural definition of the nation. An emergent alternative imagination championed the fragment, and employed methods aimed at recuperation of lost or silenced voices that were shared across humanistic and artistic disciplines. So as an aside, let me add this. We shall see that this impulse was fed in part by transnational feminist discourse across a network of post-colonial communities in the Global South and in diasporic communities in the West. But lest this account seem too overtly celebratory of these transnational efforts, it's important to note how often emergent critical frameworks misjudged changes in practice in this period. The specificity of an intervention was often lost at some point in its circulation among communities that were necessarily divided in their experiences. That has sometimes made the international exhibition more historically significant as an opportunity for the production of particular works of art than for its full discursive contribution. What that means is that art historically, it is necessary to read these events quite carefully, sorry, and to temper one's enthusiasm for the role that straight exhibition history can play in accounts of the global contemporary in favor of a more mixed approach that holds open the possibility that curators may choose the correct artist at the right time, but not yet understand the significance of what they're making possible for those artists. Okay, I'm going to return to the story. Institutional sites for circulating feminist ideas have been established in mid-1980s Delhi, exemplified by the Journal of Arts and Ideas, founded in 1983 to join studies of theater, literature, art, and film, and the small press, Kali for Women. The press, founded by Urvashi Bhutalia and Ritu Menon in 1985, published a series of collected writings by women, as well as a landmark 1989 collection of feminist history called Recasting Women, which was, I think, more or less required reading for any one of my generation who was learning Indian history. It was, like, you know, the most important thing that people read. Included in that volume was the essay that everyone had to read from the volume, which was by part the tragedy on the nationalist women's question, in which he tied the decreasing support for political rights for women during the Indian nationalist movement to the anti-colonial designation of women as guardians of an inner and domestic sphere of Indian tradition unsullied by colonial contamination. That essay became the core of Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments, published in 1994, which examined the anti-colonial movement from the perspective of a series of subaltern, meaning roughly dispossessed in the way that it's used in nation and its fragments, populations. Chatterjee's influential essay implicitly answers the challenge levied to the then exclusively male subaltern studies collective by Gayatri Chakravarty-Svivak to consider women as subaltern actors in her landmark essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? In a matter of few years, left a debate about the nature of national culture and political life started to incorporate the articulation of feminism as one of its goals. And this is the kind of thing that seems logical now, but at the time wasn't anything but. This was a very surprising thing to have happened. In the longer chapter that this comes from, I look at a series of events through which artist's championing of the significant part, or fragment, over the synthetic whole placed their work in line with these currents of post-colonial humanistic and historical thought, which had belatedly come to embrace feminism's consistently championed, consistent championing of the marginal voice. I trace this impulse through the Johannesburg Biennale and the Asia-Pacific Trinale, both emergent art world infrastructures that capitalized upon feminist networks to develop alternative geographies for art circulation. Today, however, I want to highlight the temporary ad hoc intersection of these networks in and through Britain, where two key exhibitions supported the development of novel forms of art. One more aside. It's important to note that behind these exhibitions were broader infrastructures for the mobility of artists, curators, feminist scholars, and others through British institutions of higher education and cultural production. As a kind of sign of this, I'll mention that the artist Pushpemala N, whom I'll discuss in great detail, spent a year in residence at St. Martin's School of Art in London on a Charles Wallace Trust fellowship in 1992-93, that not only exposed her to art practices and the uniquely energetic world of black British cultural studies at the time, but it also meant that she and her then husband, Ashish Rajidaksha, were out of his hometown of Bombay during the riots. That's just one example. There are lots of other diasporic and mobile characters in these stories, and so if you want to play some form of bingo, you can go ahead and mark them yourself in your notes, if you want. Chatterjee's argument was built on his observation that among the most enduring aspects of Indian nationalism was the manner in which a normative ideal of high-caste Hindu womanhood came to be seen as the site for the preservation of Indian tradition and identity. Malani and Sheikh mined historical texts from global and Indian literatures to subvert this repressive ideal, while Rumana Hussain and Pushpemala N, who will be the focus of this talk, really, found resources for critique in the performance medium's capacity to collapse the distinction between subjectivity and objecthood. Beginning in 1995-96 and working independently of one another, Rumana and Pushpemala developed performance-based practices that also involved the making of artifacts. Their modes of performance were distinct, but with Rumana engaging more with performative agency and Pushpemala more with impersonation. But each tended to produce works that were loose rather than tight, valuing openness to interpretation. Even as their works staked out positions that resonated with the artist's immediate political and intellectual context, their performance works circulated first among feminist networks that connected the UK and Australia with India. Visitors to the 1995-96 touring exhibition Inside Out, Contemporary Women Artists of India would have experienced Rumana Hussain's 1995 Living on the Margins performance first through video. A recording was presented on a monitor alongside a series of mixed-medial works that were later included in Rumana's installation Home Nation. And here what I have is two examples of the smaller works and then their inclusion on the right side of the room inside gallery Kimmeled in her Home Nation installation. In each of the small works, a text associated with women's political action was printed on perspex acrylic sheeting suspended in a clear sleeve along with photographs and small objects. The image, text and object were all somehow connected with links ranging from a kind of metaphorical link to the easily classifiable sort of direct links between things. Rumana's performance, which was recorded on the grounds of the National Center for Performing Arts in Mumbai for the British Exhibition, was framed therefore by a wider record of women's agency. For the performance, the artist held a halved papaya in her hands and walked silently around a square courtyard with gungrues or bells worn by dancers tied around her ankles. She periodically held her mouth open in a shape that echoed the shape of the sliced fruit at once a repeated form and an estranging gesture, a silent scream. She punctuated her walk with deliberate gestures lighting dias or small oil lamps more open oval shapes that had been arranged in a large oval around the papaya and a vacuum cleaner attachment. During the performance, she scattered indigo powder and geru or clay on her path using symbolically rich media and the open vessels that the artist often used as stand-ins for the body. Enriched by feminist principles, the title of the work, Living on the Margins, flags Rumana's understanding of her doubly marginal subject position as an Indian woman. Excluded from the position of transcendence subjectivity afforded the white male subject. The performance highlights the artist's agency in the present as she borrows from the grammar of dance artist's attention on each step. As Kamala Kapoor describes, quote, solo, a steer often almost ritualistic, her performance is anchored to the image of a woman's life through color, motif, material, object, and touch. This inner world with its feminine energy has its parallel in the outer world with its more masculine components which remain implicit, quote. It's worth noting that the work does not refer to the artist's Muslim background, but instead enacts a normative Hindu subjectivity, sorry, an normative Indian subjectivity through symbols of proper womanhood and practices associated with Hindu ritual. Rumana's Living on the Margins is legible as part of the global impact of feminist theories of performance and subjectivity developed through the reception of the work of Judith Butler. Butler's focus on the performative function of speech, of doing by saying, it's the understanding of how gendered subjectivity was constituted through and with language. In her 1998 book, Body Art, Performing the Subject, art historian Amelia Jones very skillfully articulates the broadly emergent understanding of performativity to argue that performance art fundamentally troubles the distinction between subject and object. Focusing particularly on the work of Carol E. Schneemann and Hannah Wilkie, she begins a model in which, sorry, she builds a model in which performance has the most to gain analytically from exploiting the medium of performance's possibilities. For as Jones argues, and I quote, feminist body art crosses over subjects and objects of cultural production in a chiasmic interweaving of self and other that highlights the circuits of desire at play among them and refuses the notion of an objective aesthetic judgment, I quote. The feminist artist subject is also the woman art object at once actor and acted upon. As Jones observes in feminist body art, the artist's subject position is both made manifest and subverted, rendered false through the act of articulation. Through the set of props or actions used in the performance through Manas living on the margins, dwells upon the things that women do that are valued. That includes the very mundane vacuum cleaner attachment. But most of what the performance enacts are everyday ritual practices and therefore point to the role that women have in maintaining the ritual status of domestic space. Dance was made present and her performance through the Gangurus. Once a sign of immorality, dance had become associated with the proper middle-class Hindu feminine subjectivity that stands in for national womanhood. Lighting the Diyah and marking space with pigment are similarly common tools for marking the borders of domestic space and maintaining its auspiciousness. By invoking these religiously coded practices of proper femininity, Rumana's performance draws attention to the agency afforded to women through ritual and then recontextualizes those acts through their performance in and as art. The performance gains power by juxtaposing these immediately legible quasi-ritualistic acts with the more ambiguous and erotic signs of the cut papaya and open mouth. Both, fruit and lips, are volatile references to the objectification of women to the fragmentation of their bodies through acts of sexual violence. Living on the margins embraces the grounding assumptions of the artistic medium in which the artist's body simultaneously makes and makes up the work of art. Following Emilia Jones, it is possible to see how Rumana's careful combination of acts and objects exploits the manner in which feminist body art fluidly interweaves subjectivity and object hood. The materials and acts that make up this performance are separable into those associated with acting and being acted upon, but the artist herself participates in each role. The exhibition that commissioned Rumana's work, Inside Out, was prompted by Vivan Sundaram's artist residency in Middlesbrough Art Gallery where he was accompanied by his partner Kapoor, and where they began talks with curatorial staff about a future exhibition. Kapoor facilitated contacts with artists across India, and when curator Alison Lloyd came to Middlesbrough from Cleveland, Ohio where initially she had a track record of international feminist art exhibitions, she applied for funding to travel to New Delhi, Baroda and Bombay to do a series of studio visits. Lloyd focused the exhibition on painting including works by Nalini Malani, Nilema Sheikh and others, but included some video and mix media work, like that of Rumana and a video version of Malani and Samarth's media material performance material at work. Kapoor's introduction to the show is written in profound tension with Lloyd's medium specific choice of curatorial frame. Though most profoundly engaged with poetry, a significant portion of Kapoor's text focuses on sculpture and installation, and marks as feminist overall contribution quote, a redefinition of self in non-metaphysical terms that brings up an exploration of language, materiality and the object, quote. This is also the frame that Kapoor developed in Johannesburg in 1995, i.e. in the same year and facilitated her understanding of what she both deserved and wished to help Indian artists perform, which was the break with painting. Curatorial notes on each artist were written by prominent Indian critic Kamala Kapoor and British Asian artist Shuthaba Biswas. Those treatments of the individual artists are insightful but they don't actually add up to more than the sum of their parts. And so the overall textual record left by the exhibition is deeply internally contradictory. What I mean is you have an organizing curator that has one vision, a major statement by an art critic that has a profoundly opposed vision and then individual sort of writings on artists that are, you know, motivated by those individual practices. The second UK show that I'll highlight came in 1997. The Bath Festival's Turing exhibition Telling Tales of Self, of Nation of Art, which was curated by Roshna Bhushan, then resident in Britain. Oops, wrong way. There's our group pic. Yes, it has the names, okay. The show was profoundly engaged with the intersection between feminist art and materiality that had been articulated by Kapoor. Unlike the show just two years before, the only artist showing painting in Telling Tales was Aisha Abraham and here you'll note that this is a massive failure on the part of the art historian in which I have no good image whatsoever of the painting and instead just have a crappy image that I took in a library. I apologize to you and to Aisha and to all humanity, I'm sorry. Alright, so Aisha Abraham showed painting even though now she's best known for her work with the photograph and with archival film material. Abraham alone among the five artists lived outside of India having been born in England in 63 then educated in India at MS. and then further educated in New York where she lived on and off during the 1990s. And so what you have here is a show with five artists, four of whom are very closely and densely connected in their practices and one of whom is not. The show was very, very good with Anita Dubey, Sheila Gouda, Ruma Nohusein and Pushpa Mala N showing what has become to be accepted as some of their most important work. Taking advantage of the very important patronage festivals to expand the scale of their practice. While the title uses a relatively tame and certainly well established idea of women's art emphasizing storytelling and the self, the actual work was deeply engaged in material and formal experimentation and the artists often broke substantially with previous practice. The modest brochure that accompanied the exhibition outlines the intention quote, to bring to the surface the historical processes which have present senses of self, of society, of nation with quote, an underlying theme of resistance to oppressive or restrictive social structures, out quote. It also specifies the desire to break with previous curatorial processes that had characterized the exhibition of Indian art in Britain by bringing in a curator of Indian origin. The text emphasizes the connections and commonalities between the Indian and international contexts rather than representing a more essentialized notion of cultural difference and it gives over much of its space to testify to the artist's ambition, concluding that quote, the scale of their remit is great indeed as is witnessed by the scope of their individual concerns which range from the tensions that exist between the smallest of rural communal groupings and rapidly expanding urban societies, the erosion of rural ways of life and natural resources, the ascendance of religious chauvinism, ethnic conflict, the transnational workings of capitalism and conflicts between genders and classes within the cultural arena, there is very little that is not addressed by these artists. I'm kidding but I'm also not kidding. It's actually true. One of the major projects made possible by telling tales was Pushmamala N's first performance photography series, Phantom Lady or Kismet, building out what had been a one-day shoot in response to a Mumbai-based curatorial prompt to consider cinema. The Bath Festival's commission gave Pushmamala the opportunity to extend Phantom Lady into a rich and layered narrative in which she played stock film personas in city locations evocative of film noir. In photographs that project objecthood with little of the internal life or agency associated with subjectivity the artist places her performance in a dense referential network as she later wrote and I quote, Phantom Lady takes from pulp fiction, folklore, cheap stunt films, cinematic formulae, detective thrillers, comedy, slapstick, popular archetypes and cliches and complicates them to make a grand narrative of the city. These gestures interrupt the performance medium's typical consolidation around the body of the artist and allows for contributions from other performers such as actor Rajak Kapoor here visible on the left with the gun and several artist friends as well as highly skilled collaborators handling everything from lighting to costumes to photography. The series of 25 photographs traces a loose narrative about twin sisters separated in childhood and reunited in the city. The title character dressed in hot pants, mask and a feathered hat and holding a whip searches for her sister eventually finding her dressed in a glamorous gown holding an ostrich fan and performing for suited and booted guests in a mansion. In the vocabulary of Hindi cinema both sisters are stereotypical bad girls a staple type up through at least the 1970s. Shot by film production designer and art director Meenal Agrawal their photographs take place in spaces thought of as being unique to Bombay and expressive of the city's cosmopolitanism. Locations include Ballard Pier Bandra Railway Station an Iranian cafe, collinated passageways and the house belonging to the artist's gallerist Shireen Gandhi which is a material record of her Parsi family's extraordinary history. In an approach that resonates with Sheba Chachi's staged portraits of feminists such as this one of Bhutalia there is at least as much importance placed on the things in the photos the architecture, material culture costumes and food as on the bodies of the performers. In Phantom Lady things are evocative of complex histories rather than serving as archetypal images as in Rumanu's performance. The photographs therefore prompt their viewers to decode to catch the references to a pluralistic urban imaginary or to Hindi cinema or both. They intersect with a then ascendant understanding of the city as an archive to be explored. This broader impulse was in part a reaction to the Bombay riots as well as the political reconfiguration of the city by the Shiv Sena, a nativist Maharashtrian political party. That said to insiders to the Indian art world many of the references were quite playful. Friends would have recognized the Gandhi house as well as the actors and artists who played bit parts in the series. At the core of the work however is Pushpamala's highly skilled but often increasingly neutral inhabitation of the two characters. Most significantly from this first photo performance Pushpamala chooses to inhabit what Anastopasu calls iconic diagrams. The narrow portraits of virtue and vice that struggle to contain the actual women who play them. As mentioned both of Pushpamala's characters are bad girls i.e. they're marked by vice. But also in the vocabulary of Hindi cinema they are marked by whiteness. The fandom lady is based on Hunter Wally, the eponymous heroine of a 1935 stunt film played by Fearless Nadia Marianne Evans, an Australian circus performer turned actress who married producer Homie Wadia. For your viewing pleasure on YouTube there is a about a 30 minute documentary film about Fearless Nadia that I highly recommend that you watch immediately. Well I mean not right now as soon as you get home. The Fearless Nadia films were made before the consolidation of the Hindi film genre and they offered a somewhat chaotic mix of the cinema of attractions with the lured thrills of the underbelly of Bombay. Phantom ladies twin, the vamp parodies the iconic diagrams that emerged in the consolidation of the romantic melodrama the primary film genre of the 1950s to 70s in which female characters were quite strictly classified as either good or bad. Serving as the foil for heroines whose virtue was a sign of their Indianness, vamps were often played by non-Indian actresses. One particularly important example is the French Burmese actress Helen who played roles, this is all Helen, played roles that had little in common with one another except that they are all outsiders. Again YouTube, highly recommended. Pushpa Mala made the Phantom Lady series at a crucial time for the development of film theory in India and abroad when crucial works were being written by theorists who were also her close friends. Emergent writing on Hindi cinema grappled with how much female characters simply reflected male desire. The good woman character in particular lacks subjective depth I say understating the issue quite a bit. As she made Phantom Lady Madhav Prasad was getting ready to publish his foundational writing on the censorship of the kiss in post-independence Hindi cinema which he describes as the quote prohibition of the private. The film genre's denial of interiority is absolutely key to understanding the Phantom Lady series in which subjectivity is external to the characters the artist plays. An agency is found more in things than in people. Her exploration of these ideas is even clearer in her 1997 video work Indian Lady in which she performs the light-hydered gaiety of the film heroine in front of a studio backdrop of the city of Bombay. Seemingly slight, parodic and fun, the video in fact captured the extraordinary attention paid to costume and bodily gesture in normative Indian womanhood and its representation. Instead of collapsing the distinction between subject and object, Pushpamala obviates it with her absolute investment in surface. Indeed Pushpamala has always been quite opposed to her work being framed by discourses of identity which she sees as a peculiarly western preoccupation. And if you engage with her in public and use the word identity in her presence then you will receive a kind of forceful denunciation. It's quite amazing. She really really hates this idea. And so the question is what is she doing instead? As her work practice solidified she settled on the exploration of the constitution of visual types or the surface dependent class of katori schema by which people are recognized. Writing in art India critic Prajna Desai expresses some distress at this approach, complaining that quote, the photographs depend on the viewer's ability to make connections rather than the artist's treatment of the subject. What Desai criticizes the lack of gloss, the disjointed narrative, the inclusion of incongruous elements are products of Pushpamala's deliberate focus on the significant fragment. If as Prasad argues for film, the entry into the private is foreclosed then what is highlighted instead is the short circuiting of desire and a collapse of the feminine figure into objecthood. Now this reading leaves out the sense of improvisation, impersonation and make believe that remains central to Pushpamala's performance photography while according to art historian Chetanya Burani who assisted Phantom Lady on the set of Phantom Lady as a young graduate, Pushpamala knew exactly which shots she wanted. The project still had the risky feeling of a guerrilla film shoot of doing something outrageous and fun. That seems fitting because the character of Phantom Lady recreates a truly exceptional episode in the history of Hindi cinema, one that's outside of the kind of stock characters of nationalist ideology and that really challenges all of those sort of later forms that are consistent with the sort of nationalist treatment of Hindu womanhood. The Fearless Nadia's Hunter Wally is not an iconic diagram but a fantasy of power marked by the exotic appeal of whiteness or foreignness. While this is provocative enough on its own it seems particularly important to mark when we consider the key role played by British and Australian patronage in the production of Phantom Lady and Indian Lady respectively. When Pushpamala speaks about her entrance into performance she always cites Bhupen Khakkar's 1972 catalogue in which he dressed up as an international spy and a toothpaste model meaning as absurd pop culture figures at odds with the self-seriousness of contemporary art. In a recent conversation however she also pointed to the British artists Gilbert and George whose performance work she had become familiar with during her 1992-93 studies in London and this I chose just because of being close enough to her dates basically. I need to do more talking with her to see what she saw. While a sense of humor and irony pervades all of these artists' work so too does a basic curiosity about what it is to take on a persona that's not your own. To Pushpamala finding another is always an act of critique. That principle might allow us to place Pushpamala's inhabitation of the fearless Nadia character itself a fiction alongside Rumana's choice to perform the ritual acts associated with the normative Hindu personhood available to Indian women. Indeed beyond the tonal difference between parody and passion there are important commonalities between Pushpamala's and Rumana's work. Both worked from a baseline assumption of a critical approach to subjectivity within a context of everyday life structured by a religiously inflected nationalism. They were both bolstered by their participation in feminist and critical discourses that articulated key differences from the unmarked feminism that had run through art networks in the west. While for the two artists performance allowed for a direct engagement with the subject-object relationship as articulated by Amelia Jones they both found in things a set of mediating signs that helped to engage the specificities of experience particularly of the Indian woman or the woman of color. For Rumana in particular the interaction with things allowed performance to intersect productively with installation a medium that she explored concurrently. Both artists encouraged an outwardly radiating arrays of meaning embracing the significant fragment over the coherent whole. We can recognize how fundamental that gesture is to an emergent feminist art discourse that valued the situatedness of practice and the materiality of things. That principle resonated with the audiences for their work particularly for the Telling Tales exhibition which was shown in Delhi before going on to its UK venues. Despite its somewhat off-hiltor title, sort of a general title the significance of the exhibition was understood immediately in both contexts. British critic Jarella Andrews published a long and detailed review in third text that placed the artists in productive dialogue with one another and recognized the formal innovation of the work as well as its feminist critique. All right. With all of that to chew on just a few words in conclusion and I do always like to have my talks be on the shorter side to keep you from hating me. With all of that to chew on just a few words in conclusion. The crucial question of this episode and one of the driving questions of the volume as a whole is what sustains changes in artistic form. As the remainder of the book makes clear the changes these four artists were not made were not anomalous idiosyncratic artistic trajectories but were rather fundamental and consequential shifts that were broadly influential to the art as a whole. The parallel worlds of theater and film offered to these artists not just different ideas of space and narrative but also networks of like-minded, highly skilled people who were often much more open to collaboration than people in the art world. Immaterial infrastructures of thought and of friendship emerged in tandem with these experimental forms of artistic work building and sustaining feminist debate in and outside of India. The curatorial discourse also found new ways to account for and make legible practices from diverse contexts. Although often one step behind the works they showed. Multiple institutions in Australia as well as more isolated actors in Japan, South Africa and as I discussed most today the UK helped to support and circulate the work of these artists as well as the curators and critics in India who were identified as crucial these exhibition area and discursive networks moved Indian art and artists along new circuits. To this was added the more material infrastructures associated with the growth in biennial exhibitions and international art exchanges as well as the financial support that came from a combination of market and non-market institutions. While biennials were almost always sorry, were often almost entirely dependent upon public funding it became really unfashionable in the 1980 90's to work with state-associated curators in this period. And there were no legible links to cultural ministries or state run museums in the Indian case in the 1990's and into the 2000's. I can talk more about that and its implications to be like. Overall the material infrastructure remained ad hoc and underdeveloped at this time, characterized by a now charming sense of improvisation. An instructive story came about this comes from Magauda who emphasized how new she was to international exhibition making when she participated in the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale by pointing out that she hand-carried work to the exhibition on the plane. That seemed like a good idea at the time until it came to trying to get the work back to her because of course there was no room in the crate to ship it back. Oops so it had to be left in Johannesburg. This is not the kind of this is not the way she handles herself now. She legada is amongst the most sophisticated in terms of production of all Indian artists. So the logistical mistakes that she found at that time which were based in equal parts informality and a kind of good faith, a sort of idea that like things will take care of themselves are totally foreign to the Indian art world today. Even smaller exhibitions such as that these two K Turing exhibitions had concrete effects on the development of these artists work. They provided the funds to produce Rumana's high quality video recording and to build out Phantom Lady from a single day of shooting to a full narrative series. Although the funds spent were still relatively small they were enough to allow artists to move away from media that had established sources of patronage and into those that did not. Such material and immaterial infrastructure the combination of key exhibition opportunities curatorial and scholarly frameworks networks of friendship and discipline crossing initiatives were essential to sustaining the formal shifts that artists wish to make in their work. This talk has traced out a number of crucial infrastructures especially advances in feminist thought across intellectual spaces. Artists knew openness to theater performance in film and the development of more dialogic forms of curation and exhibitions that trace new geographies for artistic exchange. To underline this book argues that the work of artists emerged in tandem with those of infrastructures. Because of the productivities of the works of art that emerged in this way those very works helped to sustain and encourage growth in these kinds of patronage and thought in a process that began slowly but came to a kind of fever pitch just a few years later and what we now call the boom. Thanks very much. I have a lot of questions but I can already see a hand. I'm going to be a good host and hold on to mine. That's very generous of you. Thank you very much. I'm just curious as to whether you in terms of looking at these artists were also interested in the intersectionality between Indian, British artists like Shaila Kumari Berman for example and the connections and yes. That's the big question and of course now as you might imagine if COVID hadn't happened and I had been able to do the research before the book was in print which is the opposite of what ended up happening then that was the plan. The plan was to trace those things out and so what that means is that I need to do that work still now in order to figure out these kind of interactions. What this episode does is actually the opposite which is what you'll notice in this kind of story is you see a kind of consolidation of meaning making around Indian actors using the UK to show their work and certainly to find patronage in their work but not actually being very open to the meanings that are given to their work by actors, even actors who are British Asian which is I think a really interesting sort of set of historical events that I find in this material. There are other interactions and certainly I think after this key sort of late 90s moment when movement started to become even more frequent and obviously allowed for more kind of mutual understanding I think that that broke down a bit but this is a weird moment in which what looks like a moment of exchange in some ways is also a kind of claiming of control by curators and by artists who are resident in India at this time so it's a strange story that I end up telling through this material and one that I think needs to be supplemented by other stories. Thank you for the question though. Thank you Karen. A question about infrastructure having poured over Rinalini Mukherjee's archives and instructions, vacuum cleaning instructions and it came to her sculptures I was wondering about the role of photography as an infrastructure because I was also thinking about women makers as being fairly in control and sort of having tight control over their production Bishmavala for once but also Romana in her own performances and sort of sealing those performances in the medium that then is potentially to be circulated abroad so the labor that photography enables but also occludes because I know Romana worked very closely with Ron Roman who is a man who has a camera which was a very difficult thing to get hold of back in the day even in the 90's was not something that everyone had access to so thinking about how that infrastructure shapes particular practices that are feminist or informed by feminism and if you had anything to add in terms of that language photography is all over the books that I wrote and what's interesting is that it functions very very differently for different artists I think that your read of what's happening with photography here and the way that it becomes a method of controlling the distribution of your work its circulation and everything that is made by it I think it's really apt for these artists and I would add to that Nalini Malani as someone who has very strict control over her archive and over photographic reproduction in particular and that became even more important for her as she moved into more reproducible media so as she moved into video then photography actually became more important and more resilient in her process so that I think is one story the other story is actually in the chapter that comes after this which is on the weird career of photo realist painting in India and its relationship with the internet and the manner in which images of photographic images that are then painted that are then photographed that are then circulated on the internet in a very interesting loop at a time of such immense creativity that those of you who did not live through it probably can't even imagine a time in which the internet was so new and so wonderful that these things were just like magic right and so the photograph becomes this kind of circuit but instead of being an instrument of control it actually becomes an instrument of kind of free flowing circulation and a kind of really quick networking of images that becomes really important in the expansion of capital so it's photo realistic painting that becomes the site of speculation where you have the flipping of works and their their values becoming astronomical in very very short amount of time so it's like one medium to very very opposite sort of effects of its use so we'll just leave it there and ask my question while we think of others so I was really struck by it's a long question I was really struck by the use of parody, slapstick humor and irony in Guicamara's work and also the way that you sort of just posted with the sort of seriousness and sort of passion and do you call it parody and passion it's a two part question and the first part is I'm really curious about this use of parody in Guicamara's work and other works by her contemporaries in India and kind of the feminist networks in India but also in relation to feminist networks outside and so what can you tell us about that and then the second part of the question how this kind of parody and passion were received both in India and elsewhere so okay so I'll start with the second question because it's the easier of the two the reception of Romano Hussain's work was was just completely changed by the fact that she became ill and then eventually died of breast cancer sort of a few years after living in the margins and so there's a kind of extraordinary productivity over the years where she was sick she went to New York for treatment and made some videos in New York that are amazing and so the kind of tone that is associated with her work this sort of elegiac quality to it it actually just had to do with the situation in which she was living and that growing sort of sense of time being extremely short and so that's part of what's going on with Romano that is just really like she did in some very important ways this was something that she was working out through performance and her friends particularly Gidde Kapoor have written very eloquently about the sort of the space of death in her work it's important to note this is again the grim part of the question there's a lot of other spaces of death at the same time and so you can look at Romano's work and then the work of Bupen Khakkar who gets prostate cancer in 2003 as being sort of too related playing with the mortality in the issue of the body in ways that I think are really very useful Bupen of course is also one of the seeds of irony within Indian contemporary practice at large he's not the only one in the country's whatever but Bupen is important so this is very important in bringing the ironic tone really really centrally to this practice and so I think that when Pushpa Mala sort of points at Khakkar as the sort of the basis it's because of this the tone of it and also because of its relationship to low culture but it's crucial to note that that was not the exhibition it was the exhibition it was the catalogue and so what Khakkar is doing there is making a parody of kind of middle class aesthetics and the way that when you go to an event there's a chief guest and that chief guest is feted not necessarily the person whose work it is but the chief guest who's more important this sort of thing the first book I ever wrote was launched by Keiku the person it was about and Thyab Mehta like not even in the frame of the photographs this is an unusual thing this is the kind of thing that Khakkar is skewing skewering and the paintings are paintings right so it's not that I think is separate so what she's doing is she's recuperating that part of his practice and making it into the main now the space of parody also becomes really important for someone like Ato Adodia at the same moment in 1995 making his Bombay Buccaneer self-portrait in which he dresses up like Sharakan who's dressing up like two people and places in his spectacles David Hockney and Bhupan Khakkar I think I'm just also curious about how this plays into sort of feminist narratives especially this idea of the Urvashi Battalia portrayed by Shiba Chachi and you can see this kind of seriousness and also the idea of the need to be taken seriously and that being offset by parody and slapstick and how does that sort of talk to each other? Thank you for re-asking that part of the question so those photographs that series of photographs which is held by the Tate and was up until recently on permanent display so you can go see them is really interesting because it assembles the identity of these women through the things that they do and so it's about through the things that they do with these the things that they with which they do things sorry I flew in this morning so typewriters et cetera books, furniture that sort of thing and so I think that there's a similarity there in thinking about action as being the site of things but mediated through things the very important thing to note about Pushpamala is that there's irony in the pictures but she is nothing not at all ironic about the practice and so the practice itself is very serious absolutely no thank you, I feel like I haven't quite gotten at the core of what you're asking but definitely I'm wondering if Sarah has anything for us from our online audiences there's lots of applause they've been reticent so enjoying the chat excellent we are waiting we're ready we have questions in the room so lots to talk about thank you for that Karen I was also just taken by your almost sort of humorous turn towards the emptiness of the curatorial in terms of the two exhibitions I might have known who was going to be here I'm not a very nice person but that's actually quite interesting and to think about as a phenomena for a certain kind of discursive arbitrage which I think is what you're laying out well there are two things that I'm doing there one has to do with discursive arbitrage the sort of the difficulty of moving across space and the differences of value that you get from that the second is a desire to disarticulate the aspects of the exhibition so we have a tendency to view and this is not really thinking about anyone who's in the room but the kind of triumphalist biennial like obsessive biennial sort of literature that's out there that talks about this history as if it is sort of productive of something but what I'm interested in is the manner in which sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't sometimes a part of it is sometimes a part of it isn't and the way that you actually need to it's just a much more complicated story in which an exhibition is actually five or six different things at once and sometimes it's not the parts that we pay attention to that are actually important but it's the bursary attached or the conversation that happens at the reception that becomes what's important and I mean just extending that line of thinking I was just thinking about the contrast between the time period you're looking at and if we were to take 20 years before that and in terms of that generation of Indian artists working, studying, showing and actually encountering art in Britain and I wonder if that's something sorry I haven't read the book yet if that's something you've kind of looked at so this is a boom book so this is a post-91 book but one of my favorite stories about the pre-moment you know the moment of you know import substitution and socialism there are a couple of very important material there are three very important material stories and if you'll allow me I'll say all three of them the first is that painters in India didn't have Gesso for all the way through the 1960s until Fevacol this is what you do you have a you stretch a canvas and then you prepare it with this stuff that makes it into a surface that won't fall of the paint and it allows you to do this Indian artists made stuff up with like wax and turpentine and so you have a whole problem with 1950s paintings just falling off like the pigment just falls off okay so they got Fevacol and they finally were able to start doing this and then their work started to look enough that it could circulate internationally and not look like it was made out of a completely different material so that's one sort of issue the second is a set of letters that Akbar Padam see and no no no I can't remember yeah it's either Akbar or Raza a set of letters they're in the collection of Krishna and there's no way to send money back and forth though the amount of sort of cash you can send back and forth is so small that it was actually impossible for them to sustain themselves in the early days before they had jobs in Europe and so that is one of the key infrastructures that makes this kind of mobility possible in really radically different ways later on right that and cheaper travel but really it's the ability to send money that makes the 90s a fundamentally different time than the 1970s and 1960s which is what I'm really talking about with those fellas eventually Akbar Padam see came home in 1968 just became too hard to be in Europe like it was just too hard I promised a third one the third one has to do with the production of photographs and it's back to Amelia which is the the photographer Bupendra Karya finding film stock in Bombay between 1966 and 1968 taking film stock and by hand rolling it and placing it into canisters in order to make a 35 millimeter still shots that was the only way that he was able to make the photographs that he was used to being able to make as someone who was resident in New York City a friend of Cornel Kappa a member of Magnum Photos so even Magnum Photo Guy just didn't have the materials and so this kind of prehistory there's another book that someone could write about I'm tired not me someone else could write about the sort of the issue of material scarcity under socialism and the way that that actually becomes a kind of prehistory of this I know that that's fundamentally different from what you were asking about but I'm kind of doing that on purpose because what it points towards is a way from the kind of discursive problems which we tend to focus on and towards these kind of more everyday barriers to practice that are suddenly lifted in the 1990s to great sort of change so mean answer sorry I don't know why I'm mean to Hamad no one understands why I'm mean to Hamad yeah sorry I don't know if you yeah sorry I don't know if you answered this but you kind of said I think that a lot of artists decide to reject the kind of conversation or not reject like not really talk about caste or class struggles or anything so do any of these artists include or what were their class or kind of financial background or were they all kind of middle class enough I guess to afford this profession and did they mention any element of that in their work? Great question so the particular artists in the photograph are all elites sort of upper middle class homes and generally high caste or high class in any way you slice it basically Aisha Abraham not so much and her position was very different and so she's in the photo so sorry I meant the other four who were resident in India class becomes a very important marker in the other feminist artists work so someone like Novdut Altaf is working as a communist activist and is absolutely engaged with issues of class Shevachachi the rest of that series is not people like Urvashi Puthalia but is instead women from across the social spectrum and so you have in the sort of closer to activist sort of spaces at the same time other models for how to engage with a fuller understanding of what it is to be a woman so that's important caste on the other hand is still the most under engaged category within contemporary art in India full stop it is just it is engaged by very few people and in ways that are really belie its social importance and so that itself is there's a kind of discourse of quote Dullet art out quote and then there are other sort of movements inside of Dullet art that engage with caste but it is it's extraordinary just how few sort of practices have really engaged in important ways despite the fact that in the kinds of stories that I collect if people will talk to me about this which is a very big if then stories about slights what you know we will call in the West microaggressions would be like so one of the artists who I won't name because I don't think he's ever said this publicly who was living in the UK and then came back to India had a last name that like a caste name that had to do with working with his hands and he said you know all of these people think that that's why I'm good. Do you think that's changing the kind of not the microaggressions but I mean more kind of focus on caste and Dullet issues and Dullet artists as well. Absolutely I think that just in the last like three years. Actually yes I think in the last three years there has been spaces and this is one of the new projects that I'm interested in and that I'll I'm going to go and sort of start talking about next week I think that the artists around the circle of Sahej Rahul in Mumbai he's got a big large circle of left artists who are really deeply engaged in issues of caste and who engage also with Adavasi activists around things like already Mill Colony they had like this 75th anniversary exhibition in the Communist Party headquarters in Dada in Bombay where it was like the evenings were given over to hip-hop so you know there's stuff happening I just haven't been there because you know COVID and all that but there is stuff happening but just now Yeah exactly it's a kind of the last three years more or less But it's also not that people haven't necessarily been working in that mode it's more that a lot of kind of attention is now being sort of shifted there so it's not as if work hasn't been happening but it's more kind of where it is that the market has not paid attention to that work that exhibition area structures have not paid attention to that work and have not allowed it to grow Exactly but yeah also and this is important Sahej sort of rejects all people over 40 so you know I'm like but I'm over 40 and he says I guess you can come Anyway yeah Sarah has a question from our online audience Great we've got a question from Aparna Kumar ECL and Aparna says thank you for an enormously generative talk Karen I have a half formed question please take what is helpful from this I became very curious about your conception of infrastructure mapped onto the question of the archive in putting the story of these artists together did you find yourself thinking differently about how you put your archive together I guess I'm interested in thinking about how these ideas of infrastructure might map on to writing history as well or demands changes in the form of how you as the art historian write these history if that makes any sense It's absolutely brilliant great question not at all half formed it's fully formed so there are a number of ways to answer it one is that I don't rehearse it here but it's important for graduate students and others to know that what I'm thinking about here is the anthropology of infrastructure people like Brian Larkin who are working with the Hector Network Theory and the idea of actants being human and non-human so it's a kind of move across a sort of broad post humanist anti anthropomorphic like anti person anti human move methodologically and so what that means is that one of the things that I do in the writing is to try to treat people and things as being as having active agency okay so that's one in terms of the research and mapping onto the archive I think one of the things that's really interesting in the way that we do research now is the forms of digital mediation and digital archiving that we ourselves do in order to engage with the massive amount of stuff that we have to deal with when we work in the contemporary period and so that is you know what it means is that you build like file structures and keywords and tagging and all of these things that are sort of themselves in the period that I'm working in are being developed sort of metadata didn't exist at the first time in 1991 right because the internet was not being used in that way and so the idea of metadata emerges along with the historical period that I'm doing and so that really was very very rich in my thinking I tried in my writing to move across infrastructural forms humans and non-humans as I write in enough of a way to have it imitate the historical form of the time without it being completely impossible to understand I'm not like a sort of you know modernist writer where I'm really imitating the form but in the chapter that's really about the market I put too much in I overwhelm the system because that's what it was like and so my readers were like please god help me there's too much in this chapter so yeah thank you for the question person in the phone thank you I'm just looking around the room to see if there are any more questions because or online yeah I've got a question but it is really quite half formed but it picks up on what you've just started to talk about there about the kind of larger methodologies because I was thinking whether this is a push back against another kind of art history especially in art histories of South Asia and the contemporary as well and you've talked about the market and biennials and market you know exhibition histories which map a certain trajectory but thinking about infrastructures about social relationships you talked about friendship as form I'm just kind of trying to tease out here what kind of art history what kind of art historian you know you're gesturing here to something different and you know could you just kind of give us a sense of that as well yeah so what's at stake by thinking infrastructurally and through relationships and forms I know that the other series that you guys are doing now is on the 18th century and I think historians of 18th century art would have no problem whatsoever doing infrastructural analysis it's only in contemporary art where we bracket out everything material and pretend as if things just come it's there's this way that art criticism that the kinds of texts that were given through shows have a tendency to occlude all of the things that I include in my writing about this period now I have enough distance that I can do this without hurting people which is one of the things that I like you know so I'm very careful not to report on gossip that will hurt people particularly materially I don't want that that's not the point and so that you know additional 14 years between 2008 and now is instructive in allowing that to happen but it's in a very basic way it's just social history of art but applied to a period in which that's not allowed and it's not allowed because it's impolite people find it to be in bad taste this kind of writing which I of course as you can tell by my teasing of a mod I enjoy that kind of sort of subversion right like it's fun for me to actually violate some of these niceties and to talk about the way that you know gossip for instance was massively important in this period there were just like reputations were being made and broken constantly by you know people talking about money and about branding and about you know who's original who owns this and who owns that that kind of discourse is something that was that had so much historical force it was part of the work and the second thing that is important is that I have a lot of help here by working on artists who brought infrastructural form into their work themselves and of course the work on the cover is Vivan Sundaram and this is work that's about capitalism and about the processes of capitalism and is made from recycled goods and so there is no space that is his material he bought it in the market it is a ready-made except in the end part of the cycle not the beginning cycle which is what is typically used for ready-made so you know I've encouraged into this kind of analysis by the artists who made the infrastructure part of their work you know materially but thank you so I don't know if that answered what kind of art historian I want to be I think one that is impolite may be the correct answer on that note perhaps we we can say a big thank you and move to the next room for a glass of wine or something else and continue to be impolite excellent, sounds good thank you very much