After Midnight: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, 1947/1997

The symposium After Midnight: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, 1947/1997 was the precursor to the exhibition The Rising Phoenix: A Dialogue Between Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, the first full-scale exploration of Indian artists and their legacy curated by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala scheduled to open at the Queens Museum of Art in 2014-2015. The exhibition and symposium both contemplate and compare two critical moments of Indian history. First, the period immediately following Indian independence in 1947, which sees the rise of the Progressive Artists Group, self-declared 'moderns' of Indian art. Second, the exhibition examines the globalization of Indian art that picked up momentum in the 1990s, and saw mid-career Indian artists exhibiting in large-scale international exhibitions, and biennales with 1997 as a critical year, which not only commemorated 50 years of Indian Independence, but also witnessed a significant rise in the number of Indian artist's that year that exhibited all over the world.

The symposium, which was held on October 26-27, 2012, examined these two moments in a jump-cut: modern/progressive and global/contemporary. It also drew from the interim space the sustained questions about modernity and globalization viewed from multiple perspectives, as opposed to western narratives, in the regions of Africa, East Asia and Latin America.

Participants included: Dr. Rakhee Balaram, Visiting Scholar at Washington University, St Louis; Rina Banerjee, artist, New York; Dr. Rebecca Brown, Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University; Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University; Luis Camnitzer, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Old Westbury/artist; Doryun Chong, Associate Curator of Painting and Sculptures, MoMA; Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Cornell University; Parul Dave-Mukherji, Professor in Department of Visual Studies, School of the Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dr. Salah Hassan, Associate Chair of the Department of History of Art and professor of African and African Diaspora, Art History and Visual Culture, Cornell University; Geeta Kapur, art historian/curator, New Delhi; Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala, Founding director/curator at Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai; Dr. Saloni Mathur, Associate Professor of Art History, UCLA; Naeem Mohaiemen, artist, writer; Dr. Ajay Sinha, Professor of Art History, Mount Holyoke College; Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi; Vidya Shivadas, Curator at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.