Private Collections, Public Lives
VIEW EVENT DETAILSFriday, 8th October, 6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. IST
Located in the South Mumbai precinct of Breach Candy, Cymroza Art Gallery chronicles a rich history as it paved the way in support of artistic endeavour in the seventies in India. Dr. Pheroza J. Godrej founded the gallery on 20th October 1971, as a young artist, when she was only in her 20s. Over the last five decades Cymroza has celebrated and shown contemporary works of art across media and forms, and has been a pioneer in supporting experimental and emerging artists..
Dr. Godrej’s personal journey as a collector and gallerist has been the foundation for a far richer life in the arts - as an art historian, patron, philanthropist and policy-maker. As someone who has firmly supported the public responsibility of private art institutions in India, her work and life serve as a useful anchor to think about broader questions around practices of collecting and collection-building in India and, more broadly, South Asia today. With inadequate governmental focus on the arts, what is the role of private collections? How can we think critically about the public-facing aspects of private collections? Why is it important to extrapolate the connections between private collections and their public lives? In recent years, several private museums have cropped up across the region, with collectors making a conscious effort to create public platforms for their private collections, even as public infrastructures for art are finding it difficult to sustain themselves. What, then, is the future of art collections and the people that engage with them?
To commemorate fifty years of Cymroza Art Gallery and its extraordinary legacy, we present a discussion with Jay A. Levenson, director of the international program at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Ranjit Hoskote, curator, art critic; and Mortimer Chatterjee, co-founder of Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai as they delve into these ideas. Joyoti Roy, head of marketing and strategy at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai, will moderate the panel.
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This panel has been conceived in collaboration with Ranjit Hoskote, Mortimer Chatterjee and Eve Lemesle as part of Cymroza@50, a series of programmes presented in honour of the golden jubilee of Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai.
SPEAKERS
Jay A. Levenson has since 1996 been the Director of the International Program at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he coordinates the museum’s relations with institutions in other countries. Prior to that he was Deputy Director for Program Administration at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where he helped prepare such major exhibitions as Africa: The Art of a Continent and China: 5000 Years. He has served as guest curator for a number of exhibitions, including Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (1991) and The Age of the Baroque in Portugal (1993) for the National Gallery of Art, and Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries (2007) for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, which was also presented at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, and awarded a Ph.D. in art history by the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, he has held positions both as a curator and museum administrator and as an attorney.
Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is also a leading Indian poet. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018; in the UK by Arc as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020, a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation), and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König, 2010) and Atul Dodiya (Prestel, 2014). He has translated the poetry of the celebrated 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic Lal Ded as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011) and is the editor of the annotated critical edition, Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012).
Hoskote was the curator of India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). His curatorial projects include two monographic surveys of Atul Dodiya (Bombay: Labyrinth/ Laboratory, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, 2001; and Experiments with Truth: Atul Dodiya, Works 1981-2013, NGMA New Delhi, 2013), as well as a retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala (NGMA Bombay, 2005 & NGMA New Delhi, 2006), a retrospective of Sakti Burman (NGMA Bombay, 2017), and a retrospective of M F Husain, Horses of the Sun (Mathaf Museum, Doha, 2019). Hoskote has curated three transhistorical and trans-genre exhibitions for the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa: Terra Cognita? (2016), Anti-Memoirs (2017), and The Sacred Everyday (2018). For the constellation Cymroza@50 (2021), he has curated two exhibitions: The Cymroza Chronicles, an archival exhibition, and Mapping the Lost Spectrum: The Jamshyd & Pheroza Godrej Collection, a selective survey. With Nancy Adajania, Hoskote has co-curated the iterative exhibition, No Parsi is an Island (NGMA Bombay, 2013 & NGMA New Delhi, 2016), and the retrospective, Mehlli Gobhai: Don’t Ask Me About Colour (NGMA Bombay, 2020), reprised as Mehlli Gobhai: Epiphanies (Chemould Prescott Road, 2021).
Hoskote was a member of the jury for the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He is a member of the international advisory boards of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the Bergen Assembly, Norway; and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is also an advisor to the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) and Research and Curatorial Consultant to the Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
Mortimer Chatterjee received his MA in the History of Indian Art and Architecture from SOAS, London, and co-founded Chatterjee & Lal with his wife, Tara Lal, in 2003. Based in Mumbai’s Colaba art district, the gallery is focused on contemporary art and historical material. In 2010, Chatterjee co-authored a publication on the art collection of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), along with curating an exhibition of that collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. He is currently editing a major publication on modern and contemporary art from the Indian subcontinent, due to be published in 2022.
Joyoti Roy heads Strategy and Marketing at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. She is interested in the social and civic role of cultural organizations and believes that arts institutions have the key responsibility to shape and reflect people's futures. She has been working in the field of museums, conservation and culture for over eighteen years. Up until 2017 she was heading the Outreach Department at the National Museum, Ministry of Culture, Government of India and has worked for both government and non-government institutions in India. Joyoti has been a Charles Wallace India Trust Awardee for the year 2008 for a fellowship programme in conservation of contemporary art at the Tate Gallery, London. She was the Clore Leadership Fellow for Culture representing India to the UK in 2017–18 and worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London for their upcoming museum and collection research facility in East London. She has coordinated several national and international exhibitions on art. Currently she is coordinating and visualising the prestigious CSMVS-Getty Ancient Worlds gallery project which aims at presenting the inclusive and diverse ancient world for the public of today through museum objects from India and other parts of the world. Joyoti is also one of the founding members of Achi Association India, and its current honorary director. Achi Association India is a not-for-profit initiative that works for the conservation of Himalayan heritage. She is a trained Hindustani singer and a theatre person, a Trustee of the Studio Safdar Trust, Delhi and Tram Arts Trust, Mumbai. She has worked with the street theatre group Jana Natya Manch for several years before she moved to Mumbai.
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