Old Routes, New Journeys: Ethnography and Contemporary Art Practice in Ladakh: A presentation by Abeer Gupta | Project Showcase@IFA | January 19, 2022

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
invites you to
Old Routes, New Journeys:
Ethnography and Contemporary Art Practice in Ladakh
A presentation by Abeer Gupta

Wednesday, January 19, 2022 | 06:30 PM – 07:30 PM IST | Zoom and Facebook Live

Can the objects in an ethnographic museum give us new perspectives on our globalised present? To investigate this question, Abeer Gupta created an exhibition, Old Routes New Journeys, at the Chansa or the Ladakhi Kitchen at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS), Bhopal, in 2017.

Join us to listen to Abeer speak about how his curatorial intervention led to a subsequent installation at the Spindle Art Studio and Café in Old Town Leh and contributed to the making of his forthcoming exhibition Is there a Contemporary in Ladakhi Art? as part of the 2022 Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) Fellowship, Khoj International Artists’ Association & Goethe Institut, Delhi. The presentation will look at notions of memory, materiality, identity and the intersections that connect these journeys. This will be followed by a conversation between Abeer Gupta and Latika Gupta, who is a co-tutor of this edition of CISA.

Abeer Gupta is currently the Director of the Achi Association India. He has made documentary films and curated art, education and community media projects. His research and practice are based in the western Himalayas in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir around oral histories, material cultures, and visual archives.

Latika Gupta is a curator and art historian based in New Delhi.

The IGRMS in Bhopal is one of the only ethnographic museums in the country. Established in 2005, the museum has indoor and outdoor galleries spread over 220 acres.

Abeer Gupta received a fellowship from IFA in 2016-17 to work with the IGRMS, Bhopal under the Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative, made possible with support from Tata Trusts.

This session has been organised as part of the Project Showcase @ IFA, a series of online presentations to showcase, discuss, and engage audiences with the diverse projects we support and implement across programmes.

Photograph of installation by Chemat Dorjay.

Click here to register for the discussion on Zoom.

The discussion will also be streamed live on our Facebook page, for which no prior registration is required.