Tate Modern|Symposia|Mapping Mumbai

Mapping Mumbai

Saturday 16 September 2006, 10.30–17.00

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Mumbai is an exciting, vibrant, diverse and contradictory metropolis. It is home to many artists and a burgeoning art scene with an increasing international presence. It is also the economic capital of a nation that is clearly emerging as a prominent player on the world stage.

This event seeks to map Mumbai, examining the role that the arts and culture have played in the regeneration of the city and how this has influenced some of the artists who live and work there.

The speakers include Girish Shahane, Rahul Srivastava, Sudhir Patwardhan, Shai Heredia and Ashok Sukumaran.

The symposium addresses:

The role currently played by the visual arts, film, literature, theatre and cultural industries in Mumbai
The relationship between traditional and contemporary art in India.
The role of the arts in defining a sense of national identity in today's India
The art market: where does the balance lie between the International art market and the growing Indian internal art market?
What effect has globalisation had on Indian artists working in Mumbai today?
The future of the arts in India

Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£15 (£12 concessions), booking required

For tickets book online
or call 020 7887 8888.

Programme:

10.30
Welcome and introduction (Caroline Brimmer)

10.45–11.30
Fifteen years ago, India embarked on a radical rethink of its economic policies, inaugurating a programme of liberalisation that integrated it with the global economy. Bombay, the financial and entertainment hub of the nation, was among the cities most radically affected by this change in direction. Girish Shahane looks back at landmark events in Bombay over these fifteen years, and examines how the city's creative industries have adapted to the changed environment.

11.30–12.15
Sudhir Patwardhan, Mumbai-based artist, gives an overview of the art scene in Mumbai and examines how it has developed in India's relatively short post-colonial history. His paper explores how four generations of artists have coped with different opportunities for working, showing, selling and finding a responsive viewership to their work. He also addresses some of the new opportunities and challenges thrown up by the changes in the art market since the 1990s.

12.15–12.45
Discussion (chaired by Cary Sawhney)

12:45–13:45
Lunch break

13.45–14.30
Rahul Srivastava, social scientist and cultural theorist, examines the relationship between pedagogic art institutions, art practices and the city of Mumbai. He explores the development of educational institutions in a historical and cultural context and places this against narratives about art practice that specifically evoke the city's political and cultural landscape.

This is informed by a perspective that is critical of art-teaching institutions as they have evolved in Mumbai, but also interrogates assumptions about the learning of art in a more general context.

14.30–15.15
Ashok Sukumaran, media artist and architect based in Mumbai, presents some of his recent projects. He addresses his own relationship to the city as well as exploring how his practice sits within Mumbai’s art scene.

15:15–15:45
Tea break

15.45–16.30
Shai Heredia presents on the development of Experimenta – the festival for experimental cinema in India – as a product of the city of Mumbai. She introduces the work of some rarely seen artists whose work she has shown, some of whom form part of the Cinema Prayoga programme being screened at Tate Modern. She leads us through the process by which the festival came into being and also explains its significance in the context of art and culture in the city.

16:30–17:00
Discussion (chaired by Francesco Manacorda)

Speakers:

Since 2003 Shai Heredia has been the Festival Director of Experimenta, the international festival for experimental cinema in India. She has rapidly developed the event into a significant new forum for artists' film and video internationally. Heredia holds an MA in documentary film from Goldsmiths college, London and has recently shifted from Bombay to Bangalore, where she has joined the India Foundation for the Arts – India's only arts philanthropic organisation – to make arts grants under the Extending Arts Practice programme.

Francesco Manacorda is a writer and a freelance curator based in London. He is curator of Sub-Contingent, an exhibition around the Indian Subcontinent for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (co-curated with Ilaria Bonacossa in June 2006). He is also a tutor in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London.

Girish Shahane is a freelance journalist based in Bombay. He studied English Literature at ElphinstoneCollege, BombayUniversity and the University of Oxford. He has written and lectured about contemporary Indian art for the past twelve years. He was Editor and later Consulting Editor of Art India magazine, the only periodical in India devoted to the visual arts. He currently contributes a column to the Bombay edition of Time Out.

Sudhir Patwardhan is a Mumbai-based painter. He has exhibited widely both in India and abroad. Most recently, his work, along with fellow Mumbai painter Gieve Patel, was shown at the Bose Pacia Gallery, New York. Patwardhan’s works can be found in the permanent collections of National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi and Mumbai, as well as many other prominent private and public collections in India and elsewhere. A monograph on 30 years of the artist’s work, written by Ranjit Hoskote was published in 2004. The city of Mumbaiand its surroundings have been a continuing source of inspiration for the artist. The social fabric of the city and the life of its inhabitants are deeply reflected in his work. Alongside this social dimension, the more personal aspects of the artist’s presence in his own work, and the problems of representation, have preoccupied Patwardhan over the years.

Cary Rajinder Sawhney is Head of Programmes at inIVA. He has 25 years' experience working across the arts in both the public and commercial sectors, pioneering a range of diversity related initiatives and programmes. His appointments have included South Asian Visual Arts Curator, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Curator of Film, National Museum of Photography Film and Television and Head of Diversity at British Film Institute, where he headed up diversity policy and developed some of the UK's largest Asian and African-Caribbean film and cross-arts projects such as, Imagine Asia and Black World.

Rahul Srivastava is a social scientist and cultural theorist. He studied social anthropology at Mumbai, Delhi and Cambridge (UK). He taught social anthropology at Wilson College, Mumbai and worked as the Director of PUKAR, Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research, Mumbai between 2002 and 2005. He is presently based in Goa and writes on urban issues and new knowledge practices.

Ashok Sukumaran is a media artist and architect based in Mumbai. His work explores the interactions of digital technologies and physical spaces, bringing together current and historical research, as well as low- and hi-tech approaches. It often imagines a ‘what could have been’ between the disciplines of interactive art, cinema and architecture. Much of his work takes place outside traditional gallery spaces and the art market and involves interactive public installations. Sukumaran’s work has received honours internationally, most recently the first prize of the 2005 UNESCO Digital Arts Award. In 2006 he is exhibiting large-scale outdoor work in the cities of San Jose, Pasadena (US), Lille (France) and at the Singapore Biennale.