Manjari Sihare shares details of a lecture series on Pakistani art hosted by the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi

New Delhi: From March 20-25, 2013, the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University will be hosting a series of public lectures by well-known US based artist, curator and academic, Prof. Iftikhar Dadi.  This lecture series is part of the School’s Distinguished Visiting Professor programme supported by the Getty Foundation. Dadi is an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of History of Art, and is chair of the Department of Art. He received his Ph.D. in history of art from Cornell. He is also artist and art historian broadly interested in the relation between art practice in the contexts of modernity, globalization, urbanization, mediatization, and postcolonialism. He has many scholarly works to his credit, the most recent being, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, a book tracing the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to the region’s intellectual, cultural, and political history. Read more here.

Interest in Pakistani Art is on the rise, and this lecture series is a stellar opportunity to learn more about the genre as Prof. Dadi is indeed an authority on the subject. Here is a schedule for the talks and a brief extract for ease of reference:

MODERNISM IN MUSLIM SOUTH ASIA:
ART IN PAKISTAN
five lectures by Iftikhar Dadi
Venue: School of Arts & Aesthetics, JNU

Modernism in South Asian Muslim Art 20/3/2013, 4:30 pm
On historical and methodological parameters for modern art associated with “Pakistan” and the emergence of artistic subjectivity with reference to the frameworks of nationalism, modernism, and tradition.

Chughtai: Mughal Aesthetic in the Age of Print 21/3/2013, 4:30 pm : On the works and writings of Chughtai and his critics, and Chughtai’s nostalgia for an earlier Islamicate and Persianate cosmopolitanism that deemphasizes identification with modern nationalism.

Three Mid-century Modernists 22/3/2013, 4:30 pm
On three pioneering modernists in Pakistan, Zainul Abedin, Zubeida Agha, and Shakir Ali, who are foundational in shaping a fully modernist artistic subjectivity for themselves, and by their institutional labor, for subsequent artists.

Sadequain and Calligraphy 23/3/2013 4:30 pm
This talk explores the career of Sadequain, whose later work relays tropes of subjectivity in Urdu poetry into the visual. It traces his reformulation of calligraphy as a visual “tradition” open to the modern, in parallel with calligraphic abstraction by West Asian and North African artists.

Ethnicity in Urdu Cinema 25/3/2013, 4:30 pm
On the question of ethnicity in Pakistani Urdu cinema across 1971, by comparative analysis of the social film Arman (1966), and the comedy Anari (1975).