From film poster to gallery art, from micro cinemas to film festivals, from vernacular to international architecture, ecologies are ubiquitous in contemporary visual cultures of India. These art practices offer a rich sensory experience of our rapidly changing environments that have been undergoing transformations in the age of economic globalization and digital formats. An obvious point for our consideration are films and video that profess and overt commitment to the environmental crises that besiege us. Equally vital, are works that perform such transformations by offering dynamisms that we are yet to comprehend through a human centered lens. Yet another perspective considers multi-media art practices as proffering a different ecology in which sensations of plants, animals, rocks and machines animate. Our guide to this robust scene will be a range of writings, documentations of art shows, and screenings of moving image works that call attention to the place of environment through their various practices.
Required Texts/Reading:
1.Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
2.Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice. Eds. Aileen Blaney and Chinar Shah
3.R. Srivatsan, Conditions of Visibility: Writings on Photography in Contemporary India. Calcutta: Popular Prakasham, 2000.
4.Essays on Dayanita Singh (Reader), Pushapamala, Sonia Khurana
5.Sugata Ray, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geo-aesthetics in the Land of Krishna. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2019.
6.Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India.
7.Sheldon Pollack, A Rasa Reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
8.Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.
9.Amit Rai, Jugaad Time: The Pragmatics of Everyday Hacking in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
10.Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
11.Ranbir Kaleka. Ed, Hemant Sareen. Berlin: Kerber Art, 2018.
12.Anand Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.
13.Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
14.Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Videos
15.NishthaJain, City of Photos.
16.Amitabh Chakraborty, Bishar Blues.
17.Soudhamini, Pitruchaya
GRADES
Grades for this class will avail of the plus/minus grading system: A, A-, and so on. Please note that this course has a substantial writing component and final grades will be based on the following written assignments:1. 40%: Based on 8-10 page paper to be submitted in two parts, two 5-7page papers. 2. 20%: Class presentation of a theoretical essay. 3. 40%: Journals: Journals are due every 3 weeks.
