Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy (ACUA), Vadodara invites Curatorial Concepts for the Third in the Series of Five Workshops:
Curating Indian Visual Culture: Theory and Practice
[An India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bangalore initiative, funded by Sir Jamsetji Tata Trust]
Venue:
Department of Fine Arts, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad – 500 046.
Dates:
12th to 17th September 2011.
Thematic Focus: Interfaces of Art History, Museum Practices and Popular Visual Culture: A Curatorial Enquiry
Concept Note: In the field of artistic production, museological and art historical practices function as validatory mechanisms and disciplinary apparatuses. The political history of museology and museum practices illustrates the role these institutional mechanisms have played in validating the construction of particular histories as ‘real’ in nature and ‘universal’ in dimension. It is equally important to scrutinize the role of art history’s institutional discursive practices, which often corroborate these claims while dealing with the larger hermeneutical enterprises at their disposal. Keeping in mind these larger paradigms, this workshop aims to address the contemporary challenges in curatorial practices within museums due to the paradigmatic shifts in the very idea of both the museum and of curatorial practice itself. One of the significant questions this workshop attempts to address is about the conceptual implications of the entry of popular visual culture into the pristine/elite spaces of the museum in the context of curatorial practices. This is especially so, given that the museum’s ideological entrenchment and canonical status and art history’s professional practices – connoisseurship and art criticism – constantly try to naturalize the existing differences; and its commensurability renders them into a universal frame of reference. Here, the museum’s notion of ‘Art’ had been playing a central role in fulfilling the social function of totalizing and legitimating social differences.
One of the focuses of the workshop will be to explore the ways in which non-Euro-American historical cultures – of the tribes and folk; and of the non-Christian ‘high’ traditions – have been tamed to fit within the Enlightenment project of commensurability. This workshop also focuses on the changing notions and roles of museums in our contemporary context and seeks to examine new challenges that such changes bring into the realm of curatorial practices. On the one hand, the socio-political dimensions of such changes seek a radical revision of existing curatorial practices, and on the other hand open new imaginative horizons for critical curatorial practices. This workshop seeks to explore the role of newer discursive formation around the question of popular visual culture in the radical transformation of museum and curatorial practices. It aims to analyze the dialectical relationship between the conceptual and practical aspects of curation by exploring the complex interplay of these mutually dependent and enriching paradigms. However, for analytical purposes, this workshop may also analyze practices in terms of conceptual frameworks and the practical aspects of display in their own terms as well, which may enable a critical reflection upon fresh curatorial proposals in the context of museums. Moreover, it is an initiative to facilitate interactions between and among workshop participants and subject experts, in order to conceptually and pragmatically enrich such projects of historical and contemporary art – including those which are ‘conventionally’ bracketed within the realm of popular cultures.
The last date for receiving the curatorial concept notes, along with CVs, carrying a postal address and contact number, is 2nd August, 2011.