Re-take of Amrita
Title | Re-take of Amrita PDF eBook |
Author | Vivan Sundaram |
Publisher | |
Pages | 60 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Photography, Artistic |
ISBN |
Re-take of 'Amrita' is a book of 38 digital photomontages by Vivan Sundaram, with a preface and annotation by the artist-author. These montages are the result of a collaborative photographic project: between Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954), the 'essential' photographer (who took numerous self-portraits), and Vivan Sundaram, who orchestrates with a digital wand, archival photographs of the Sher-Gil family. Vivan enters the space of the Sher-Gil homes and makes the members of the family enact (and re-enact) moments of radiating desire under his direction. The 'encounters' generated in this process of re-casting the family in new roles elaborate into a fictional narrative. The central axis of the cinematic plot is the relationship between the father, Umrao Singh and the artist-daughter, Amrita (1913-41).Vivan Sundaram was born in Shimla in 1943. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda, and at The Slade School, London, in the 1960s. He returned to India in 1970 and continued his painting. Since 1990 he has turned to making artworks as sculpture, installation, photography and video. Vivan, himself a member of the Sher-Gil family, has been engaged with the Sher-Gil project over a thirty-year period, as curator, editor, archivist. Re-take of 'Amrita', a series of digital photomontages made in 2001, has been exhibited in museums and galleries in India and abroad. Vivan has also collaborated with Kumar Shahani on the script for a proposed film on Amrita Sher-Gil.Revelling in the multitude of meanings inherent in his digitalized photomontages and his writing, the artist assembles his cast of characters, all close family members, each one singled out for his or her unique history, and repositions them in a fictive composition. The design and layout certainly culls from the best traditions of art book publications.The Art News Magazine of India
Amrita Sher-Gil
Title | Amrita Sher-Gil PDF eBook |
Author | Anita Vachharajani |
Publisher | Harper Collins |
Pages | 316 |
Release | 2020-05-07 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9352774744 |
An artist? A dreamer? A rebel? Who exactly was Amrita Sher-Gil? She was a little bit of all these things, really. Amrita grew up with a great sense of mischief and adventure in two very different worlds, in a village near Budapest, Hungary, and among the cool, green hills of colonial Simla. She defied headmistresses, teachers, art critics and royalty to make her own determined way in the world of grown-ups and art.Join her on a journey through her life, a journey that takes her family through World Wars and political turmoil as they travel in pursuit of love, a home and a modern, artistic education for Amrita!
Camera Indica
Title | Camera Indica PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Pinney |
Publisher | Reaktion Books |
Pages | 329 |
Release | 2013-06-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1780231520 |
A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.
The Triumph of Modernism
Title | The Triumph of Modernism PDF eBook |
Author | Partha Mitter |
Publisher | Reaktion Books |
Pages | 282 |
Release | 2007-11-15 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1861896360 |
The tumultuous last decades of British colonialism in India were catalyzed by more than the work of Mahatma Gandhi and violent conflicts. The concurrent upheavals in Western art driven by the advent of modernism provided Indian artists in post-1920 India a powerful tool of colonial resistance. Distinguished art historian Partha Mitter now explores in this brilliantly illustrated study this lesser known facet of Indian art and history. Taking the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta as the debut of European modernism in India, The Triumph of Modernism probes the intricate interplay of Western modernism and Indian nationalism in the evolution of colonial-era Indian art. Mitter casts his gaze across a myriad of issues, including the emergence of a feminine voice in Indian art, the decline of “oriental art,” and the rise of naturalism and modernism in the 1920s. Nationalist politics also played a large role, from the struggle of artists in reconciling Indian nationalism with imperial patronage of the arts to the relationship between primitivism and modernism in Indian art. An engagingly written study anchored by 150 lush reproductions, The Triumph of Modernism will be essential reading for scholars of art, British studies, and Indian history.
Narrating Race
Title | Narrating Race PDF eBook |
Author | Robbie B.H. Goh |
Publisher | Rodopi |
Pages | 283 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9401207089 |
Preliminary Material -- INTRODUCTION: WRITING RACE AND ASIA-PACIFIC MOBILITIES - CONSTRUCTIONS AND CONTESTATIONS /Robbie B.H. Goh -- VIVAN SUNDARAM'S “AMRITA”: TOWARDS A STYLE OF THE BODY /Tania Roy -- THE RETURN OF THE SCIENTIST: ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL TRIBALISM IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE AND THE CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME /Robbie B.H. Goh -- ETHNICITY AND THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN DIASPORA IN LI-YOUNG LEE'S THE WINGED SEED /Walter S.H. Lim -- NARRATING RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN R.K. NARAYAN'S THE PAINTER OF SIGNS /Chitra Sankaran -- CHINESE ETHNICITY IN POST-REFORMATION INDONESIAN WOMEN'S FICTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO NOVELS BY AYU UTAMI AND DEWI LESTARI /Harry Aveling -- RESI(G)NIFYING THE CHINESE AND FILIPINO IN CINEMATIC NARRATIVES /Caroline S. Hau -- PERFORMING ETHNICITY, ETHNICIZING HISTORY: THE EURASIANS OF SINGAPORE IN REX SHELLEY'S THE SHRIMP PEOPLE /Lily Rose Tope -- PERFORMING THE SELF: RACE AND IDENTITY IN TWO HONG KONG ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PLAYS /Kwok-Kan Tam -- BORDER CROSSING: PLACE, IDENTITY AND DIS/LOCATION OF THE SELF IN XU XI'S THE UNWALLED CITY /Terry Siu-Han Yip -- HYBRID BROWN GAIJIN IS A “DISTINGUISHED ALIEN” IN SAKOKU JAPAN /Julie Mehta -- UGLY AMERICANS AND LITTLE BROWN BROTHERS: SPECTACLES OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE DRAMA /Judy Celine Ick -- DISAPPEARING RACE: NORMATIVE WHITENESS AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN AUSTRALIAN REFUGEE NARRATIVES /Wenche Ommundsen -- RACE IN ASIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: ETHNIC, NATIONAL AND COSMOPOLITAN REPRESENTATIONS /Agnes S.L. Lam -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX.
A Fragile Inheritance
Title | A Fragile Inheritance PDF eBook |
Author | Saloni Mathur |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 156 |
Release | 2019-10-22 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1478003383 |
In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.
Postdate
Title | Postdate PDF eBook |
Author | Jodi Throckmorton |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 162 |
Release | 2015-04-13 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0520285697 |
Catalog of an exhibition held at the San Jose Museum of Art, California, February 5-August 2, 2015 and the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas, September 12-December 15, 2015.