'Archiving the studio', NGMA talk, Mumbai, June 14, 2012
sharada srinivasan
The Mohile Parikh Center in association with India Foundation for the Arts presents,
Exhibitions as Text: Archiving the Studio
The Curatorial Digest Series
Date: Thursday, June 14, 2012
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai
Speaker: Akansha Rastogi
Discussants: Zasha Colah and Ashok Sukumaran
Archiving the Studio is an ongoing curatorial experiment that explores archiving as a form of writing, by attempting to archive spaces of artistic production. As a recipient of the IFA-KHOJ Curatorial Grant 2011, Akansha Rastogi curated an exhibition titled 'Parenthetic Exercises: Archiving Ranbir Kaleka's studio'. This exhibition was conceptualised as a text in parenthesis while circumventing the main text. The curator inhabited and archived the artist Ranbir Kaleka's studio during the two-month residency period. In the process she created five documents/ exhibits. Each exhibit was an appendix to the artist's practice, studio space, his body of work and sites of artistic production. Positioning the curator as an artist, researcher, archivist and parasite, the exhibition played on the idea of archival exhaustion, with artist as material.
In her presentation Exhibitions as Texts, Akansha will re-look at her curatorial proposition and discuss the challenges undertaken and yet to be addressed.
Akansha Rastogi is a researcher working on Indian modern and contemporary art. She is currently an Associate Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. She has previously worked as a researcher and assistant curator with Osian's Connoisseurs of Art, and Delhi Art Gallery on the publication and exhibition of the artist Chittaprosad.
Zasha Colah is interested in cultural sovereignty and projects that encourage collaborative arts practice. She co-founded blackrice in 2008 in Nagaland, and the Clark House initiative in Mumbai in 2010, after studying art history at Oxford university and curatorial studies at the RCA, London. She was the curator of modern Indian Art at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation at the CSMVS museum and was head of Public Programs at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.
Ashok Sukumaran is a media artist and architect. He studied at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and has a masters in media art from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work, which explores the interaction of digital technologies and physical spaces, often imagines a "what could have been" between the disciplines of interactive art, cinema and architecture.
The Curatorial Digest Series is a discussion series initiated by the Mohile Parikh Center that will explore curatorial ideas, research and practices in contemporary art. Through particular exhibitions and projects, this series will unravel what curating means in different contexts, including private and public spheres. While connecting the visual, conceptual and performative aspects of exhibitions, this series will examine curatorial approaches as an ongoing process interlinked with contemporary art history.