Performance theorist Rustom Bharucha delivers a lecture on his unique research into the friendship between the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and Japanese curator Okakura Tenshin. This talk is part of research project Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures, a partnership between Iniva and Goldsmiths, University of London, which looks at Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s legacy in relation to cultural translation, curatorship, education, and historical precedent.
Adrian started his working life in the Department of Fine Art at Portsmouth Polytechnic working with art students as well as history and cultural studies students and architects. He finished in Art Writing at Goldsmiths with an episode as professor of Fine Art at the University of Leeds and then of Visual Culture at Middlesex between these two points.
His web site and blog are at [eee.gai-savoir.net]. A collection of some thirty of his essays from BLOCK to the present day, edited and with an introduction by Steve Edwards will appear later this year with Brill, entitled ‘Communards and Other Histories’; while a collection of essays in dialogue with his work, ‘Intersubjective Encounters, Visible and invisible in the work of Adrian Rifkin’, edited by Dana Arnold, will soon appear with I B Tauris.
( COLLECTION_TROPENMUSEUM_’De heer Soerjoadipoetro houdt een voordracht over de school van Tagore voor o.a. kwekelingen van het Nationaal Onderwijs Instituut ‘Taman Siswa’ te Bandung Java’ (Mister Soerjoadipoetro is lecturing about the school of Tagore for a group of students who will become teachers in the National Educational Institute ‘Taman Siswa’, in Bandung, Java)
The Otolith Group is an award winning artist led collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. The Group’s work explores the legacies and potentials of liberation struggles, tricontinentalism, speculative futures and science-fictions. Recent solo exhibitions include In the Year of the Quiet Sun at Bergen Kunsthall, Medium Earth at RedCat, Los Angeles and AuViCo 2109-2110 at Project 88, Mumbai. Group exhibitions include The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, (2013); ECM: A Cultural Archaeology, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Death of Life and Fiction: Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2012) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). In 2010, The Otolith Group was nominated for The Turner Prize.
Rabindranath Tagore at Boulogne-Billancourt, 1926/7, France, short film presented in March by Shanay Jhaveri. This is the garden were a famous photograph of Tagore among flowers was taken, and later emulated by Satyajit Ray.
The first session focused on the question: How we might understand Tagore’s legacy as relevant for contemporary art practice and curating? By this, we don’t mean to insist on a relation or any relevancy, but to use Tagore’s ideas (which might be understood to be futurological, as well as ideological and arcane) as a springboard to engage in discussions about contemporary curating and artistic practice.
[PDF] Notes from Workshop 1.
The workshop ended with a performance by Ansuman Biswas and guests
Shanay Jhaveri is the editor of Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design (Thames and Hudson, 2013) and Outsider Films on India: 1950 -1990 (The Shoestring Publisher, 2010). He curated the exhibition Companionable Silences at the Palais De Tokyo, Paris and film programmes at the TATE Modern, INIVA and the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine, and is currently a Phd. candidate at the Royal College of Art, London.
