Beyond the Classroom : Art Practice and Pedagogy in India

Gauri Gill's Photograph by Esra Klein 2022

In a recent conversation with Asia Society India Centre, artist Gulammohammed Sheikh highlighted how art practice and education went hand in hand in newly Independent India --

“Professor N. S. Bendre, Dean of Faculty at M. S. University (1959-66) asked me if I would you teach art history. I was not trained as an art historian, I was trained as a painter. As I was still in the second year of my Masters in Painting, I hesitated and asked how I would manage it; to which he responded “So what? Teach in the junior classes and learn in the senior.” Given that art history was taught as part of the syllabus, I decided to finish my second year of MA and taught for two more years. I enjoyed teaching, particularly bonding with students... I learned a lot while teaching because I had to prepare.” 

- Gulammohammed Sheikh, artist and Asia Art Vanguard Awardee 

This overlap of learning and teaching at MSU Baroda in 1950s India points at something that became characteristic of that moment in Indian art history - the blurring of lines between art practice and art history, student and peer, and the building of communities and "bonding" as a core part of education in the arts. This idea has been foundational in the making of modern India and an important aspect of thinking about what art education means today. With tectonic social, cultural, economic and ecological shifts in India and across the world over the past few decades, artists, academics and students have built and adapted new modes of learning (and a simultaneous un-learning) to imbibe and communicate the history and context of art and art-making.  

Taking off from Asia Society India's on-going exhibition Around the Table: conversations about milestones, memories, mappings, developed in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), and the legacy of a generation of the artists including the late Akbar Padamsee, Arpita Singh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah, Jyoti Bhatt, Krishen Khanna and Vivan Sundaram - who have also been educators or mentors through their decades of practice, we present a public conversation that explore the relationship between art practice and pedagogy in a contemporary context.  

Panelists Roobina Karode, Chief Curator and Director of KNMA, and Gauri Gill, photographer and artist, will offer reflections on questions like: What has been the place of pedagogy, formal and informal, in the lives of modern Indian artists? What does art education, or art as education, mean in the Indian context? What has been its formal history and what is its legacy today? What conventional and unconventional infrastructures for teaching and learning exist right now? And as we commemorate 75 years of India’s Independence, how can art be a pedagogical medium for leaning about the making of modern India? The discussion will be moderated by Sneha Ragavan, Senior Researcher & Projects Lead at Asia Art Archive in India.

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This in-person panel discussion is the third and final session of Art+ | Season 2 developed in partnership with Bloomberg: a series of conversations that critically engage with unique perspectives on contemporary art from South Asia, featuring artists, curators, art historians, and cultural practitioners from across the world.  

Venue: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, No. 145, DLF South Court Mall, Saket, New Delhi, Delhi 110017. 

Date: 24th November 2022, Thursday 

Time: 6:30 - 7:45 pm 

Note: We request you to be seated by 6:15pm for the panel discussion; due to limited space, the seating will be on first-come-first-serve basis. 

SPEAKERS

Roobina Karode is the Director & Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, India, since it opened its doors in 2010. She has post-graduate specializations in Art History and in Education. 

As an art educator, writer and curator, Karode has extensively contributed to the field, teaching Art History, both Indian Modern and Western art from 1990 to 2006, at various institutions in Delhi, mainly the School of Arts & Aesthetics in JNU, the National Museum Institute and the College of Art. Steering a rigorous program at KNMA, Karode is focused on collaborations and partnering with other significant institutions to consolidate the global presence and relevance of contemporary Indian and South East Asian art.   

Karode has curated numerous significant exhibitions both within India and abroad, focusing on the art of under-represented intergenerational artists whose contribution has been crucial within the discourse of modern and contemporary Indian art. She has also been focused on women artists and their representation in KNMA Collection. In 2020, she curated a landmark exhibition focused on seven South Asian Women and Abstraction titled Scripting Time, Memory and Ecology, with a solo dedicated to Zarina’s practice. 

Gauri Gill (b. 1970 Chandigarh, India) is a Delhi based photographer. She has exhibited within India and internationally including the 58th Venice Biennale; MoMA PS1, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kochi Biennale 2016, 7Th Moscow Biennale and Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography. Gill’s first major survey exhibition is currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and will later travel to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek. Two forthcoming artist books on Acts of Appearance and Fields of Sight will be published by Edition Patrick Frey at the end of 2022. Various ongoing projects highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. Gill’s work addresses the Indian identity markers of caste, class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in it there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival.

Sneha Ragavan is Senior Researcher and Projects Lead for Asia Art Archive in India, based in New Delhi. Since 2012, Ragavan has worked with colleagues at AAA to research and digitise artist and scholarly archives, build online bibliographies, and organise workshops and symposia on art histories from the region. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and an MA in Art History and Aesthetics from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda.

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