Atreyee Gupta – författare

A revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South  Modernism’s peak in the interwar and postwar decades coincided with the eruption of antifascist and decolonization movements globally, including the League against Imperialism, the Bandung Asian-African Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Viewing artistic practices through the lens of the radical intellectual possibilities that these epoch-making events prompted, Atreyee Gupta uncovers a modernist internationalism incongruous with Westernist cultural hegemonies. Modernism, she shows, cannot be separated from concepts of freedom and autonomy generated by Third World political struggles. Gupta mobilizes concepts including liberation, anti-imperialism, development, and modernization as essential analytic categories for art history, reorienting our understanding of both global modernism and Indian art.  Intertwining stories of art and liberation, aesthetics and decolonization, and intellectual practices and political revolution in the Third World, or what is now known as the Global South, Non-Aligned follows the far-flung interwar and postwar networks in which Indian artists and intellectuals such as Mulk Raj Anand, Dhanraj Bhagat, Francis N. Souza, Jagdish Swaminathan, and Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore participated alongside interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Octavio Paz, André Malraux, and Le Corbusier in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This riveting account is beautifully illustrated with rarely published artworks.

Two generations after the exultation of Independence and the concurrent horrors of Partition, contemporary artists mine the uneasy history of photography in India as a means to challenge outmoded narratives, share hidden stories, and make personal connections with tradition. Taking history into their own hands, figures such as Nandan Ghiya, Gauri Gill, Jitish Kallat, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya, Pushpamala N., Raqs Media Collective, Vivan Sundaram, and Surekha draw on a diverse range of sources, from ethnographic photographs made at the height of the British occupation to hand-painted studio portraits and stills from Bollywood movies. Weighing the influence of the global against the draw of the local, these artists embrace tradition and innovation as covalent rather than competitive forces. Marking the US debut of several of the featured artists, Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India deepens our understanding of the legacy of colonialism and celebrates new and socially engaged modes of image-making in South Asia. It is published in association with the San Jose Museum of Art.

Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself. Focusing on modernist artists, artist collectives, and architects central to dissonant regional traditions, as well as influential exhibitions and patronage systems, the contributors produce a new understanding of emergent postwar global art. Provoking new ways of thinking, engaging, and narrating art history, Postwar Revisited is essential reading for those interested in debates on global art history and global modernism, the intersections between art and decolonization, the cultural aspects of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, and modern and contemporary art more generally.Contributors. Iftikhar Dadi, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick Flores, Hal Foster, Boris Groys, Atreyee Gupta, Elizabeth Harney, Jennifer Josten, Vivian Li, Tara McDowell, Alexandra Munroe, Nada Shabout, Terry Smith, Jenni Sorkin, Ming Tiampo