Thursday, February 14, 2019

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
352 Haines Hall

For his multi-media project titled Trash (2005-2009), the Delhi-based contemporary artist, Vivan Sundaram, transformed actual garbage collected from the streets of Delhi into complex assemblages and digital media forms. Drawing from a decade-long engagement with the project, and from interdisciplinary discussions between art history and anthropology, my presentation will situate the artist’s approach to garbage within the long history of avant-garde investments in the discarded form. It will further highlight the relevance of the artist’s intervention to issues of environmental consciousness, the crisis of urban poverty and the slum, and the new social ecology of the city itself, its inclusions and exclusions from the sphere of citizenship and rights.

Saloni Mathur is Professor of Art History at UCLA. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research (1997. She is author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (UC Press, 2007), editor of The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Yale University Press/Clark Art Institute, 2011), and co-editor (with Kavita Singh) of No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (Routledge, 2014). Her current book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, is forthcoming with Duke University Press (Sept 2019).

Sponsor(s): Culture, Power, and Social Change Group