JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION
The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in collaboration with the Peabody Essex Museum presents
Mind the Dash: The Modern/Contemporary & the ‘In-Between’ in Indian Art
A Talk Series | 11, 18, 25 September 2020
This series brings international scholars and seminal public collections together, exploring connections and continuities through Modern & Contemporary Indian Art – to bridge divides and imagine a future. These conversations are aimed towards a nuanced (re)looking at art historical terms, exploring two key collections along the way.
Wo/Man & Myth
A conversation with Zehra Jumabhoy, Siddhartha V. Shah, Puja Vaish
Myth and the Everyday: The Art of Storytelling / Puja Vaish
Delving into the representation of fact/fiction, Vaish will review the idea of the local, the narrative and the abstract in art practice, through artworks from the collection.
(Wo)Man of the People: Mothers, Machismo & Modernism? / Zehra Jumabhoy
This talk will pivot around the idea of the masculinity, desire and Mother Goddesses in the work of MF Husain, Bhupen Khakhar and Nalini Malani.
Myth and Modernism / Siddhartha V. Shah
Returning to the Herwitz Collection, Shah examines the abstraction of mythic forms in telling the story of India - past, present and future.
Discussion and Q & A
Puja Vaish is a curator, artist and the Director of the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai, India. Between 2013 – 2019, Vaish worked as a curator at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Previously, she was a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, Delhi College of Art and the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi institute of Architecture. Vaish completed her Bachelors and Masters at Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda.
Dr. Siddhartha V. Shah is Curator of Indian and South Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts – the oldest continually-running museum in the United States that is home to the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection of post-independence art from India. He has spent the past two years reinterpreting and reinstalling the collection which opens to the public in November 2020. He earned his BA in art history at Johns Hopkins University, an MA in Hindu philosophy and psychoanalysis from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a PhD in South Asian Art at Columbia University.
Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy is a UK-based art historian, writer and curator specializing in modern and contemporary South Asian art. She was the Steven and Elena Heinz Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she completed her doctorate on contemporary Indian art and nationalism and was an Associate Lecturer. She continues to lecture on Asian art and theory on undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes at various universities in the UK and South Asia.She Guest Curated an exhibition on Bombay’s Progressive Artists’ Group at the Asia Society Museum in New York (2018-2019). She has been a consultant on the Peabody Essex Museum’s rehang of its Herwitz collection.