Worlds Apart, Strangers Together | Atreyee Gupta on The Non-Aligned Movement
In a 1965 poem dedicated to the avantgarde Indian painter Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994), Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998) connected dissonant temporal and spatial arcs of decolonisation through an astounding juxtaposition: the blue-black Indian Indigenous mother goddess who was first assimilated into the Brahmanical canon as Kali in the 5th century only to emerge in the 8th century as the principal deity in esoteric Tantra and the dark-skinned Aztec fertility goddess Tonantzin whose transformation into the fair protectress Virgin Mary of Guadalupe occurred in the 16th century after the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. Paz’s words cipher deeply felt, albeit transhistorical, attachments that conjoined far-flung countries of India and Mexico in the wake of the 1955 Asian-African conference at Bandung, Indonesia.
In this lecture, art historian Professor Atreyee Gupta suggested that this emotive slant produced particular aesthetic effects that provoked a rejection of the frailties of the Third World political project in favour of an anterior time that, once imaginatively actuated, returned to the third world avant-garde all the revolutionary energies allegedly lost to the 1960s North Atlantic neo-avant-garde.
This programme took place on 24 March 2024 as part of the symposium “Worlds Apart, Strangers Together”.
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About the Speaker
ATREYEE GUPTA is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Gupta’s books include "Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India, ca. 1930-1960" (Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2025), which focuses on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it, and "Postwar-Towards a Global Art History, 1945-1965" (coedited with late Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2025). Tentatively titled "One Hundred Years in Present Tense: Art in South Asian America, ca. 1893-1993", her current book project links Third World political, artistic, and cultural currents to trace the long diasporic arc of South Asian art in the United States.
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About the Symposium
Held alongside the exhibition “Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America”, “Worlds Apart, Strangers Together” was a two-day symposium held on 23-24 March 2024 that expressed South-South solidarities and reconsidered the conception of the “Global South,” both within the legacies of modernism and in light of post-colonial debates.
The programme included a diverse range of lectures, screenings, performances, talks and dialogues, featuring artists, thinkers, and art historians including Manthia Diawara, Solange Farkas, Atreyee Gupta, Yuki Kihara, Partha Mitter, Eisa Jocson, and Venuri Perera.
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About “Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America”
“Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America” explores the vibrant narratives of artists, dreamers and writers who challenged conventions and fostered solidarities across these two regions. Their unwavering quest to reclaim their rightful position within the story of art forms the core of this exhibition. Featuring over 200 artworks, it is the world's first large-scale exhibition to take a comparative approach between artistic expressions from Southeast Asia and Latin America.
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Disclaimer This video has been edited for clarity and concision. The opinions expressed in this video may not represent the views of National Gallery Singapore. Every effort has been made to obtain permission for the material in this video. Copyright within this video belongs to its respective owners and shall not be reproduced without permission.
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6 окт 2024
