The Parliament of Bodies: Matter Form Facture
with Geeta Kapur and Natasha Ginwala

JUL
10
Talk and discussion
8–10 pm
Fridericianum, Friedrichsplatz 18, Kassel
Live stream available

The choice of the title, Matter Form Facture, signals my continued engagement with a materialist aesthetic that counterbalances the disdain with which conceptual, mediatic, and textual forms of contemporaneity treat the object of art: because objecthood is seen in a compact with a suspect iconicity; because object, desire, and fetish wear a tainted aura. Bricolage, which attained a range of theoretical and materialist meanings from the 1920s into the 1960s, still commands significance—most famously with Thomas Hirschhorn’s abject, subversive, and absurdly constructed “monuments.” But arguably all “making”—labor, craft, or manufacture and even their surreal reversal in debris, refuse, and fragment—anything that produces an aesthetic bond between subject and object tends to be considered already commoditized and therefore both compromised and overdetermined.

My propositions about materiality are based on abbreviated references to a Marxist-materialist aesthetic that shaped revolutionary “formalism” in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. My main argument is situated in the mid-twentieth century when a succession of countries gained and processed their experience of cultural liberation; when productive materiality and a decolonized understanding of aesthetics coalesced. By drawing on indigenous, subaltern, and situated radicalisms, this unfolding aesthetic engages with historical, indeed historicized, contradictions. Such forms of political agonism—as we find in mid-twentieth-century Brazil—deal almost effortlessly with Western canons and thence generate alternative trajectories for the avant-garde. I discuss this in relation to artists’ practice contextualized by the hard-bitten realities of countries “elsewhere” in the world, especially contemporary India.

—Geeta Kapur

Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz, STOPOVER, 2012, granite, enamel paint, installation view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Fort Kochi

Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism (2000), and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming). A founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas; former advisory member, Third Text; trustee and advisory editor, Marg; member advisory board ARTMargins. Curatorial projects include Dispossession, Johannesburg Biennale (1995); Bombay/Mumbai, Century City, Tate Modern (co-curator, 2001); subTerrain, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); Aesthetic Bind, Chemould, Mumbai (2013-14). Jury member: Biennales of Venice (2005), Dakar (2006), and Sharjah (2007). Member Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York; member advisory board Tate Research Center: Asia and London; and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. She lectures at universities and museums worldwide and has been a visiting fellow/faculty member at the Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Posted in Public Programs
Related

The Parliament of Bodies: The Strategy of Joy

with Ross Birrell, Nita Deda, Hendrik Folkerts, Dimitris Ginosatis, Natasha Ginwala, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitronica Gómez, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Candice Hopkins, iQhiya, Élisabeth Lebovici, Catherine Malabou, Joar Nango, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Paul B. Preciado, Ibrahim Quraishi, Roee Rosen, Dim Sampaio, and Adam Szymczyk

A paradox lies at the heart of contemporary democratic societies concerning the center of the politics of representations of their parliaments: They have gradually turned into ensembles joined by fear…

 More
Calendar

Unnatural Appetites and Numberless Victims. A Brief History of Starvation in South Asia.

with Madhusree Mukerjee and Natasha Ginwala

Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony…

 More
Calendar

Were the anxieties around immigration and globalization any different in antiquity?

with Dr. Naman P. Ahuja and Natasha Ginwala

There are fears that globalization is making different cultural identities homogeneous, yet it often enables a cosmopolitanism that enables different local practices to coexist although some differences…

 More
Calendar

In Memoriam: Lala Rukh (1948–2017)

by Natasha Ginwala

During a visit to Lahore in September 2015, we converged in Lala’s home; the door to her backyard garden lay open and a light breeze drifted in. I soon learned that this garden had been transformed into…

 More
Notes

The documenta 14 Reader and documenta 14: Daybook

with Ross Birrell, Moyra Davey, Natasha Ginwala, Hiwa K, Quinn Latimer, Isabell Lorey, Adam Szymczyk, and Katerina Tselou

Please join documenta 14 Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk and Editor-in-Chief of Publications Quinn Latimer in celebrating the publications of The documenta 14 Reader and documenta 14: Daybook (both Prestel…

 More
Calendar

Native Foreigners

with Natasha Ginwala, Kyrillos Sarris, and Cecilia Vicuña

Guests open up current forms and strategies of artistic self-determination beyond, behind, or within institutions. The program brings together fans and scholars alike across space and time, for discussions…

 More
Calendar