Date with The Archive | Between Fact and Affect: The Visceral Archive | A Presentation by Nancy Adajania | October 07, 2022
India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
invites you to
Date with The Archive:
Between Fact and Affect: The Visceral Archive
A Presentation by Nancy Adajania
Friday, October 07, 2022 | 06:30 PM – 07:30 PM IST | Zoom and Facebook Live
How does ‘affect’ travel when one witnesses the stories of the history of the Indian women’s movement in the present moment? How do forms of resistance by women, Dalit, Adivasi and queer communities inform the work of Indian women artists, and evolve into a visceral archive?
Join us for a conversation with Nancy Adajania, as she takes us through her curated exhibition, titled Woman Is As Woman Does (WIAWD), that brings together works by 27 Indian women artists, activists and filmmakers across five generations.
Organised by the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in collaboration with Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF), it contextualises the contributions of women artists against the background of the large-scale women’s movement that was galvanised in the 1970s with the Mathura rape case and gathered further momentum through successful protests for legal reform in the 1980s. The show’s title foregrounds female agency by referencing a seminal book that Nancy read in her early twenties – Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing, which historicised the Indian women’s movement across the 19th and 20th centuries. The emphasis in this exhibition is on female artistic and activist labour—‘doing’ interpreted as achieving the impossible, whether incrementally or through radical gestures.
Photograph: Artist Sharmistha Ray by Bikramjit Bose, Commissioned by Elle India magazine for their feature #Ungender, 2015
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, in 2012, and has curated a number of major research-based exhibitions, including, most recently Woman Is As Woman Does (JNAF and PR Gallery, CSMVS Museum, Bombay, 2022).
Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from 372 projects online at https://www.theifaarchive.org/
Date with The Archive is a series of talks by artists across different practices who have used archives extensively for their creative work, to bring to focus the potential of the archive as a significant resource for artistic explorations.
The IFA Archive is built with support from Indorama Charitable Trust.
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.