ART HISTORY AS GLOBAL HISTORY – A NEW DISCIPLINE
Lecture / Discussion / Tour / Films
Framing the exhibition IN ORDER TO JOIN −
Political in a Historical
Moment
Curated by Swapnaa Tamhane and Susanne Titz
Sunday, 16 February, 2014
11:30am Exhibition tour with curators Swapnaa Tamhane
and Susanne Titz
12:30pm Break in the Museumscafé
1:00pm Lecture and Discussion with Prof. Dr. Monica
Juneja – Writing Parallel Histories?
4:30pm Leave with shuttle bus for Filmwerkstatt in Düsseldorf
6:30pm Fearless: The Hunterwali Story (1993), Dir.
Riyad Vinci Wadia, 60 Minutes,
English with German subtitles
8:30pm The World Before Her (2012), written and
directed by Nisha Pahuja, 60 Minutes,
English with German subtitles
LECTURE
Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History at the
University of Heidelberg, will frame the
exhibition “In Order to Join” into a larger narrative
of contemporary art as an event not to be
understood as a single episode. Her talk will query
the conditions which have made visibility for gender and hitherto marginalized
cultural practices possible in contemporary global circuits. What does this
mean for the way we think about terms such as “Modernism” and “Conceptualism”
in art? Can we rethink the premises of these concepts in the light of new
cultural geographies? Juneja will also speak about the discipline of art
history, and of ways of writing about regions for long labeled the “non-West”
and therefore continuously in a state of being compared.
Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the
Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence Asia
and Europe in a Global Context since since
January 2009.
Her areas of
research include practices of visual representation, the disciplinary trajectories of art history in South
Asia, gender and political iconography in modern France, the interface between Christianisation,
religious identities and cultural practices in early modern
South Asia.
FILMS
“Fearless: The Hunterwali Story” is a documentary
about Mary Evans (1908-1996), and her
life as India’s most popular stuntwomen. She played
the masked and cloaked ‘Fearless Nadia’ in
“Hunterwali” (1935), a Hindi stunt film in which she
chased and defeated evil characters. She
starred in 40 films until her career ended in the late
1950s. Evans was born in Perth, Australia, in
1910, and came to India because her father was
transferred in the military.
While she began her career as a theatre artist and
working in the circus, her fortune changed when
she met the famous Jamshed Wadia, the director of
stunt and action films in Bombay. The artist
Pushpamala N., included in “In Order to Join”, has
selected this film because it has been a huge
influence on her, and she has quoted the appearance of
Nadia in her early photo-romance series,
Phantom Lady.
“The World Before Her”, a documentary written and
directed by Nisha Pahuja, considers two
varying positions of the modern Indian woman in the
world’s largest democracy in transition.
The documentary contrasts boot camps for Miss India
beauty pageant contestants and the Durgha
Vahini, a
militant Hindu fundamentalist training camp with first person accounts by the
young
women involved. While they share opposite views, they
ultimately share a similar desire to shape
the future of India. This documentary is a fascinating
portrayal of the contradictions of both skewed
ideas of tradition and religion and what being “modern”
is or could be. This documentary has been
selected by Swapnaa Tamhane, co-curator of “In Order
to Join”.
Admission for Museum Abteiberg and Filmwerkstatt is 12
Euros, which includes the shuttle bus,
entry into the museum and the films, while the symposia
is free.
Please register with Museum Abteiberg for the Shuttle
bus leaving from Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf at 10:30 am to come to Museum Abteiberg.
mail@museum-abteiberg.de
Registration is not required for the lecture or the
films.
