Nancy Adajania
Encyclopedia
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic
and independent curator
based in India
.
, where she read Politics for her BA, the Sophia Polytechnic, Bombay, where she took a diploma in Social Communications Media, and the Film and Television Institute of India
(FTII), Pune, where she studied film.
Adajania has written and lectured extensively on contemporary Indian art, especially new media art
and its political and cultural contexts, at international venues such as Documenta
11, Kassel; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe; the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the Transmediale
, Berlin; the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, Copenhagen; Lottringer 13, Munich, among others.
As Editor-in-Chief of Art India (2000–2002), Adajania developed a discursive space singlehandedly, in an Asian context, for emergent new-media and interactive public art practices and social projects on a global level. She has contributed essays and reviews to Springerin (Vienna), Metamute (London), Art 21 (Paris), Public Art (Minneapolis), Art Asia Pacific (New York), X-Tra (Los Angeles) and the Documenta 12 Magazine (Kassel, 2007).
Adajania's film, 'Khichri Ek Khoj' (In Search of Khichri) (1999), weaves the documentary and the global meta-narrative forms together to "unveil the workings of a failed postcolonial welfare state", and has been screened at various venues in India and internationally, including the Mumbai International Film Festival (Bombay, 2000), in 'First Story: Women Building: New Narratives for the 21st Century' (Galeria do Palacio Cristal, Porto, 2001) and during the international symposium, 'Capital and Karma: Conversations between India and Europe' (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, April 2002).
The focus of Adajania’s writing, research and curatorial interests is the relationship between the artistic imagination and the technological resources and potentialities available to it in any particular society and period. Her method thus lays specific emphasis on the need to historicise cultural practice attentively, a method seen to advantage in her theoretical and curatorial engagements with the digital practices of representation and image-making that have been informally developed by subaltern cultural producers operating within the complexly layered metropolitan centres of the formerly colonized world. She has proposed several conceptual tools with which to examine the consequences of newness across various sectors of cultural production, including the concepts of the 'new folkloric imagination', ‘new context media’, and 'mediatic realism'. Adajania has reflected, in several essays and lectures, on the aesthetic and political effects of what, following the theorist Paul Virilio
, she terms dromomania, an obsession with speed produced by the globalisation of communicative and distributive processes. In another strand of her engagement with the politics of cultural acts, Adajania has addressed the question of redefining public art within the particularity of regional public spheres.
Adajania has also been preoccupied with the gradual usurpation of participatory democracy by the televisual media and the connection between media-created consciousness, virtual-reality participation and the process of democratisation, especially in a society like India, which is wrestling both with postcoloniality and globalisation. In a recent essay, engagingly titled 'The Sand of the Coliseum, the Glare of Television, and the Hope of Emancipation', which has appeared in the Documenta Magazine No: 2/ Life! (2007), she has formulated a critique of the televisual media.
Adajania was co-curator for the exhibition 'Zoom! Art in Contemporary India' (Lisbon, April 2004) and curated 'Avatars of the Object: Sculptural Projections' (Bombay, August 2006). She was also contributing curator for 'Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves' (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Summer 2007). In 2011, Adajania was appointed Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale
(Korea, 2012).
As the first coordinator of the newly founded crafts research department of the National Centre for the Performing Arts
(NCPA), Bombay during 1994-1995, Adajania organised a cycle of symposia and workshops that explored the tension between contemporary art emerging from an urban milieu and the present-day manifestation of the traditional crafts. Intended by her to revisit and update the debates surrounding this tension, and to generate a new discourse in the field, this cycle of meetings included the national-level seminar, ‘Should the Crafts Survive?’, which dramatized the rival claims on the terrain of the contemporary, made by academy-trained metropolitan artists and artists of rural, tribal or folk background articulating their own modernity (1995).
In 2004-2005, Adajania was awarded an Independent Research fellowship by Sarai CSDS, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS), New Delhi (2004–2005), under which she studied the popular use of digital manipulation techniques of imaging in metropolitan India. She has since presented her research in the form of an archive-installation, 'In Aladdin's Cave,' exhibited at 'On difference 2/Grenzwertig' (Wuerttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, February 2006) and 'Building Sight' (Watermans Arts Centre, London, Summer 2007).
Adajania has also been developing an account of transcultural artistic practice, with its political and ethical referents as well as its institutional conditions. Adajania's specific concern is with situating the 'entanglements' (she uses the art theorist and curator Sarat Maharaj's term) between regional histories of artistic and intellectual production and a global system that is structured in terms of a Western art-historical understanding. Some of this writing has emerged from a collaboration with Ranjit Hoskote
.
Adajania has held an Associate Fellowship with Sarai CSDS, and is in the process of establishing, jointly with Ranjit Hoskote, a new journal of critical inquiry in the visual arts. She has served as a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong. Adajania is currently joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2012).
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
and independent curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
based in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
.
Biography
Nancy Adajania was educated at the Princess Alexandra School, Elphinstone CollegeElphinstone College
Elphinstone College is an institution of higher education affiliated to the University of Mumbai. Established in 1856, it is one of the oldest colleges of the University of Mumbai. It was exalted as a prestigious seat of learning during the British Raj and is generally observed for its vibrant alumni...
, where she read Politics for her BA, the Sophia Polytechnic, Bombay, where she took a diploma in Social Communications Media, and the Film and Television Institute of India
Film and Television Institute of India
Film and Television Institute of India , is an autonomous Institute under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. It is fully aided by Central Government of India. It is situated in the premises of the erstwhile Prabhat Film Company in Pune, India...
(FTII), Pune, where she studied film.
Adajania has written and lectured extensively on contemporary Indian art, especially new media art
New media art
New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology...
and its political and cultural contexts, at international venues such as Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
11, Kassel; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe; the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the Transmediale
Transmediale
transmediale is an annual festival for media art and digital culture taking place for one week in February in Berlin, Germany. The festival engages in reflective, aesthetic and speculative positions in between art, technology and culture...
, Berlin; the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, Copenhagen; Lottringer 13, Munich, among others.
As Editor-in-Chief of Art India (2000–2002), Adajania developed a discursive space singlehandedly, in an Asian context, for emergent new-media and interactive public art practices and social projects on a global level. She has contributed essays and reviews to Springerin (Vienna), Metamute (London), Art 21 (Paris), Public Art (Minneapolis), Art Asia Pacific (New York), X-Tra (Los Angeles) and the Documenta 12 Magazine (Kassel, 2007).
Adajania's film, 'Khichri Ek Khoj' (In Search of Khichri) (1999), weaves the documentary and the global meta-narrative forms together to "unveil the workings of a failed postcolonial welfare state", and has been screened at various venues in India and internationally, including the Mumbai International Film Festival (Bombay, 2000), in 'First Story: Women Building: New Narratives for the 21st Century' (Galeria do Palacio Cristal, Porto, 2001) and during the international symposium, 'Capital and Karma: Conversations between India and Europe' (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, April 2002).
The focus of Adajania’s writing, research and curatorial interests is the relationship between the artistic imagination and the technological resources and potentialities available to it in any particular society and period. Her method thus lays specific emphasis on the need to historicise cultural practice attentively, a method seen to advantage in her theoretical and curatorial engagements with the digital practices of representation and image-making that have been informally developed by subaltern cultural producers operating within the complexly layered metropolitan centres of the formerly colonized world. She has proposed several conceptual tools with which to examine the consequences of newness across various sectors of cultural production, including the concepts of the 'new folkloric imagination', ‘new context media’, and 'mediatic realism'. Adajania has reflected, in several essays and lectures, on the aesthetic and political effects of what, following the theorist Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....
, she terms dromomania, an obsession with speed produced by the globalisation of communicative and distributive processes. In another strand of her engagement with the politics of cultural acts, Adajania has addressed the question of redefining public art within the particularity of regional public spheres.
Adajania has also been preoccupied with the gradual usurpation of participatory democracy by the televisual media and the connection between media-created consciousness, virtual-reality participation and the process of democratisation, especially in a society like India, which is wrestling both with postcoloniality and globalisation. In a recent essay, engagingly titled 'The Sand of the Coliseum, the Glare of Television, and the Hope of Emancipation', which has appeared in the Documenta Magazine No: 2/ Life! (2007), she has formulated a critique of the televisual media.
Adajania was co-curator for the exhibition 'Zoom! Art in Contemporary India' (Lisbon, April 2004) and curated 'Avatars of the Object: Sculptural Projections' (Bombay, August 2006). She was also contributing curator for 'Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves' (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Summer 2007). In 2011, Adajania was appointed Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale
Gwangju Biennale
The Gwangju Biennale, which started in September 1995 in the city of Gwangju in the South Jeolla province of South Korea, was Asia's first contemporary art biennale. The purpose of Gwangju Biennale is globalization of art and it respect diversity rather than uniformity...
(Korea, 2012).
As the first coordinator of the newly founded crafts research department of the National Centre for the Performing Arts
National Centre for the Performing Arts
National Centre for the Performing Arts may refer to* National Centre for the Performing Arts * National Centre for the Performing Arts...
(NCPA), Bombay during 1994-1995, Adajania organised a cycle of symposia and workshops that explored the tension between contemporary art emerging from an urban milieu and the present-day manifestation of the traditional crafts. Intended by her to revisit and update the debates surrounding this tension, and to generate a new discourse in the field, this cycle of meetings included the national-level seminar, ‘Should the Crafts Survive?’, which dramatized the rival claims on the terrain of the contemporary, made by academy-trained metropolitan artists and artists of rural, tribal or folk background articulating their own modernity (1995).
In 2004-2005, Adajania was awarded an Independent Research fellowship by Sarai CSDS, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies is an Indian social sciences and humanities research institute. It was founded in 1963 by Rajni Kothari and is largely founded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research...
(CSDS), New Delhi (2004–2005), under which she studied the popular use of digital manipulation techniques of imaging in metropolitan India. She has since presented her research in the form of an archive-installation, 'In Aladdin's Cave,' exhibited at 'On difference 2/Grenzwertig' (Wuerttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, February 2006) and 'Building Sight' (Watermans Arts Centre, London, Summer 2007).
Adajania has also been developing an account of transcultural artistic practice, with its political and ethical referents as well as its institutional conditions. Adajania's specific concern is with situating the 'entanglements' (she uses the art theorist and curator Sarat Maharaj's term) between regional histories of artistic and intellectual production and a global system that is structured in terms of a Western art-historical understanding. Some of this writing has emerged from a collaboration with Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is a contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator.-Early life and education:...
.
Adajania has held an Associate Fellowship with Sarai CSDS, and is in the process of establishing, jointly with Ranjit Hoskote, a new journal of critical inquiry in the visual arts. She has served as a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong. Adajania is currently joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2012).
Exhibitions Curated
- ‘Zoom! Art in Contemporary India’ (Culturgest Museum, Lisbon, April 2004. Artists: Anita Dube, Atul DodiyaAtul DodiyaAtul Dodiya is an Indian artist.Atul began exhibiting and selling his work in the early 1980s following his graduation from Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree...
, Baiju ParthanBaiju ParthanBaiju Parthan, a painter, born in 1956 in Kerala, India is known as a pioneer of intermedia art in India. While elaborating the workings of a mysterious inner universe through his paintings, Parthan has combined his painterly concerns with his explorations of cyberspace to produce a series of...
, Dayanita SinghDayanita SinghDayanita Singh is an Indian photographer, lives and works in New Delhi and now also is partly based in Goa, who is known for her portraits of India's urban middle and upper class families...
, Jitish KallatJitish KallatJitish Kallat is an Indian artist who works in varied media. He was born in 1974 in Mumbai . He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai in 1996....
, Nalini Malani, Navjot Altaf, Ranbir Kaleka, Reena Saini Kallat, Shantibai, Shilpa Gupta, Sonia KhuranaSonia KhuranaSonia Khurana is an Indian artist. Currently living in New Delhi, Khurana studied at Delhi College of Art followed by studies at Royal College of Art in London. In 2002, she did a 2-year Research residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work encompasses photography, video art,...
, Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan ShettySudarshan ShettySudarshan Shetty is a contemporary Indian artist who has worked in painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. He has exhibited widely in India and more recently he has become increasingly visible on the international stage as an important voice in contemporary art. His work...
, Sudharak OlweSudharak OlweSudharak Olweborn on March 19, 1966 is a Mumbai-based documentary photographer whose work has been featured in national publications and exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi, Malmo, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Washington and Dhaka....
, Tallur L N, Tejal Shah, The CybermohallaCybermohallaCyberMohalla is a collaborative initiative of The Sarai Programme at CSDS and Ankur, a Delhi based NGO for the creation of nodes of popular digital culture in Delhi....
Project, TV SanthoshTV SanthoshTV Santhosh is an artist based in Mumbai.Santhosh was born in Kerala, India. His paintings are based on images taken from the news media which Santhosh renders in solarised colour schemes, in reference to photographic negatives...
, Vivan SundaramVivan SundaramVivan Sundaram is an Indian contemporary artist. His wife is eminent art historian and critic Geeta Kapur.-Training:Vivan Sundaram was educated at The Doon School, the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S...
) - ‘Avatars of the Object: Sculptural Projections’ (National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay, August 2006. Supported by the Guild Art Gallery. Artists: Anita Dube, Jehangir Jani, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Mithu Sen, Navjot Altaf, Pooja Iranna, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh GuptaSubodh GuptaSubodh Gupta is an artist based in New Delhi. He was born in Khagaul,land famous for ancient mathemetician Aryabhatta in Patna. He studied at the College of Art, Patna in 1983 - 1988, before moving to New Delhi where he currently lives and works. Trained as a painter, he went on to experiment...
, M S Umesh) - 'To See is To Change: A Parallax View of 40 Years of German Video Art' (a re-curation of the globally circulating Goethe-Institut collection, '40 Years of German Video Art', as a 2-day annotated screening cycle and symposium by a group of theorists, artists and enthusiasts: Nancy Adajania, Shaina Anand, Ranjit Hoskote, Ashok Sukumaran, Kabir Mohanty, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Kaushik Bhaumik, Devdutt Trivedi and Rana Dasgupta; Jnanapravaha & Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay, 14–15 November 2008). CONCEPT, DESCRIPTION & SCHEDULE ARCHIVAL VIDEO
- 'The Landscapes of Where' (Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Bombay, April-May 2009. Artists: Mriganka Madhukaillya, Pooja Iranna, Prajakta Palav Aher, Prajakta Potnis, Sonal Jain) CURATORIAL ESSAY
External links
- Nancy Adajania, ‘From One Crisis to the Next’
- Nancy Adajania, ‘Songs from a broken past
- Nancy Adajania, ‘Between static and ghost image: art as transmission’
- Nancy Adajania, ‘Pictorial vocabulary’
- Nancy Adajania, 'Landing on Your Feet: Fault-lines in Contemporary Indian Art'
See also
- Baiju ParthanBaiju ParthanBaiju Parthan, a painter, born in 1956 in Kerala, India is known as a pioneer of intermedia art in India. While elaborating the workings of a mysterious inner universe through his paintings, Parthan has combined his painterly concerns with his explorations of cyberspace to produce a series of...
- Ranjit HoskoteRanjit HoskoteRanjit Hoskote is a contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator.-Early life and education:...
- Paul VirilioPaul VirilioPaul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....