TrAIN

Jai Mahal (Water Palace), Jaipur, Deborah Cherry 2010

The British Academy has awarded TrAIN a grant for a major international conference to be held at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on 29 and 30 April.
For more information or to reserve tickets please contact Eva Broer:
e.broer@chelsea.arts.ac.uk

The conference brings together leading scholars from South Asia, Europe and North America to debate the status and survivals of key markers in the colonial and post-colonial histories and spaces of South Asia. It also offers 2 international studentships for graduate researchers based in South Asia to attend the conference.

The conference will address how monuments have been reinvented and transformed for a succession of presents, for changing audiences and diverse communities. As one of our participants identifies, ‘the memorial can only survive through reinvention’. The conference is particularly timely. Current events as well as the reassessment of past histories are putting pressure on historic and recent monuments; relocated replicas are highly controversial. Architecture, sculpture, popular culture – monuments are multi-dimensional and multi-media, and speakers are from anthropology, art history, media studies, architecture, the museum world, and contemporary artistic practice. The period considered is from 1850s to the present. Viewing monuments as performative and richly subject to change and contestation, the conference will interrogate the prevailing ‘memory model’, which connects monuments and memorials primarily to memory. The larger purpose is to scrutinise the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia in the past and the present, and to test whether and to what extent South Asian examples demand not only a challenge to western paradigms but the creation of new conceptual models and theories. The programme has three strands. The first explores the after-lives of monuments, considering how, where, when and why monuments were remodelled, reused, re-sited, remade, destroyed or abandoned to accommodate changing political and social climates. A second strand reflects on materiality. Whereas colonial monuments were often fabricated in enduring materials and sited at critical junctures of the colonial city, the sub-continent has long fostered a lively culture of ephemeral and temporary monuments, constructed in fragile materials and making inventive interventions into local spaces. The third investigates the emergence and afterlives of counter-monuments in the sub-continent’s contested political, cultural and religious histories.

Keynote lectures by Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) and Zeynep Celik (Distinguished Professor of Architectural History, New Jersey Institute of Technology) will be accompanied by papers and presentations by Dr Hilal Ahmed, Centre for Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr Tracy Anderson, University of Sussex; Sutapa Biswas University of the Arts London; Adam Hardy, Welsh School of Architecture; Dr Sudeep Dasgupta, University of Amsterdam; Sona Datta, Curator South Asia, The British Museum, London; Dr Clare Harris, School of Anthropology and Curator for Asian Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; Dr Raminder Kaur Kahlon, University of Sussex; Partha Mitter (Professor Emeritus, University of Sussex and Fellow Wolfson College Oxford); Dr Saloni Mathur, UCLA; Pratap Rughani, University of the Arts London; and Gayatri Sinha, curator and critic, New Delhi. The conference also offers 2 international studentships for graduate researchers based in South Asia to attend the conference.

The conference is generously sponsored by the British Academy, the Nehru Centre, the University of the Arts London and TrAIN

Links

• Nehru Centre