Taking Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point, this symposium, organized by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, will meditate upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industry, modernism and regionalism. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writing—created with the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years—and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the symposium seeks to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western Modernism.
Bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy, the symposium is conceived as a series of propositions linking Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. The Sunwise Turn is a sort of critical circumambulation around the philosopher, curator and historian. It picks up its name from an oft-overlooked bookshop—a place that Coomaraswamy not only came to be closely associated with, but also evoked as “the storm of the world-flow”—which became the centre of anarchist political thought in New York City just after the first World War.
ARTISTS
Allan Antliff
Charles Lim
Iftikhar Dadi
Jagath Weerasinghe
Kim Croswell
Mark Sedgwick
Nancy Adajania
Priya Maholay Jaradi
Samit Das
Simon Soon
Simryn Gill
Swati Chattophadyay
TK Sabapathy
SCHEDULE
9 February 2018, Auditorium
Taking Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s (AKC) seminal 1927 publication A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point, this symposium will meditate upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industry, modernism and regionalism.
Session 1: Introductions
10.00am: Introductory Remarks, Diana Campbell Betancourt
10.20am: Naming and Framing, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa
Session 2: Histories
11.00am: Kim Croswell [Archives] [AKC and Stella Bloch] [Bali]
11.40am: Nancy Adajania, [Historiography] [AKC and Ambedkar and Subramaniam and Havell] [India]
12:20pm: Swati Chattophadyay, [Urbanism] [AKC and Jorasanko] [India]
1:00pm: Respondent: Allan Antliff
Session 3: Cosmoplitanism
3:00pm: Allan Antliff, [Anarchism] [International Cosmopolitanism] [USA and Britain]
3:40pm: Iftikhar Dadi, [Artisan] [AKC and Crafts] [Britain and Ceylon]
4:20pm: Priya Maholay Jaradi, [Modernism] [AKC and Baroda] [India]
5:00pm: Mark Sedgwick, [Traditionalism] [AKC and Rene Guenon] [USA]
5:40pm: Respondent: Nancy Adajania
Session 4: Interventions
7:20pm: Simryn Gill, ‘Take a Tree’, 40mins, Lecture performance commissioned for DAS 2018
10 February 2018, Auditorium
Session 5: Archives
10:00am: Samit Das [Asia] [AKC and Tagore] [India and USA]
10:40am: Jagath Weerasinghe, [Archaeology] [AKC and Contemporaneity] [Sri Lanka]
11:20am: Simon Soon, [Region] [AKC and Redza Piyadasa] [Malaysia]
12:00pm: Respondent: Swati Chattophadyay
Session 6: Presence
1:30pm: TK Sabapathy, ‘Then There Was Coomaraswamy’, 60mins, a film-interview by Charles Lim and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, respondent Iftikhar Dadi
Session 7: Constructing a South-Southeast Asian Dialogue
3:00pm: Roundtable I, led by Simon Soon and Priya Maholay Jaradi
Session 8: Where do we go from here?
4:30pm: Roundtable II, led by Mark Sedgwick and Jagath Weerasinghe
Session 9
6:00pm: Concluding remarks by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa