Session Two:
Title: The Art of Documentation
Date & Time: February 27, 2015 | 12 – 2 pm
Location: Loria 351
Date & Time: February 27, 2015 | 2:30-4 pm
Location: Yale University Art Gallery
Session Leader: Kishwar Rizvi
Panelists: Iftikhar Dadi (Cornell University), Beth Citron (Rubin Museum, NYC)
Iftikhar Dadi’s research examines art as a global and networked practice from the late nineteenth century to the present. He engages with theorizations of modernity, contemporaneity, and postcoloniality to analyze the modern and contemporary art of Asia, the Middle East, and their diasporas. Another research interest is his study of media, crafts, and popular culture with reference to ongoing socio-aesthetic transformations in South Asia, seeking to understand how emergent urban publics forge new avenues of civic participation. Dadi’s curatorial projects and his work as a practicing artist have further served to enrich his academic scholarship. His publications include Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). He has co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (Ithaca: Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, 2012, Tarjama/Translation: Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Central Asia, and its Diasporas (ArteEast, 2009), a Catalog of exhibition Tarjama/Translation featuring 28 artists, and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading. (Netherlands Architectural Institute, 2001). He is currently working on two book projects, one on Urdu Cinema, 1947-1980 and the another entitled “Art, Publics, and Urban Popular Culture in Contemporary South Asia.”
Beth Citron is the Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Rubin Museum in New York. In 2014 she organized “Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India” and “Witness at a Crossroads: Photographer Marc Riboud in Asia.” For the museum, she also organized a three-part exhibition series “Modernist Art from India” (2011-13) and with Rahaab Allana of the Alkazi Foundation “Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia” (2013). She has contributed to Artforum, ArtIndia, and other publications, and published “Bhupen Khakhar’s ‘Pop’ in India, 1970-72” in the Summer 2012 issue of ArtJournal. She completed a Ph.D. on Contemporary Art in Bombay, 1965-1995 in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, and has taught in the Art History Department at New York University, from which she also earned a B.A. in Fine Arts.