This publiction accompanies the interdisciplinary project body.city: new perspectives from India, realized by the House of World Cultures, Berlin, in September-November 2003, and developed in close cooperation with the Indian curators Geeta Kapur, Jyotindra Jain, Anuradha Kapur, Ravi Vasudevan and, from Germany, Sandeep Bhagwati. The body.city project provides the House of World Cultures with a platform for encounter and dialogue, generating discussion on the key themes in Indian art and culture today. While the 1992 Indische Festspiele centred on the classical arts, the aim here is to present contemporary forms and to place them within the context of global-level debates on political, cultural and aesthetic issues. Body.city has deliberately selected urban centres as a key emphasis, reflecting the myriad relations between globalization, local traditions and newly-designed living spaces in a particular way, consciously choosing the interface where the social and political conflicts that are central concerns in the artists’ works are at their most virulent. This approach allows a new point of departure for the understanding of contemporary Indian art: a setting where not only do the most modern technologies and the oldest forms of art collide and merge but where artistic issues can be debated, as also intellectual concerns about globalization and nation-states, or colonialism and post-colonialism. Body.city mirrors the way these political and social conflicts are registered in the (urban) body and how artists transform their own bodies into a medium to reflect social relations: this young, vibrant art finds its themes in globalization as neo-colonialism or imperialism, on the one hand, or in criticism of the new, regenerated Hindu nationalism, on the other. It proves to be the seismograph of a society locked into a transformation process, establishing its own positions to confront a discourse of modernity determined by the west.
There are no reviews yet.