The Q seminar

Thesis defense: Radical Nuisance? Contemporary Art Practices and Reimagined Globality

Mansi Kashatria, PHD student, Tema Q

Friday 23rd of October, 9:15

Opponent: Swati Arora, Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies School of the Arts, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Committee: Dilip Menon, Professor of History, Dept. of International Relations, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, Diana González Martín, Associate Professor School of Communication and Culture-Spanish, Aarhus University, Denmark, and Meike Schalk, Professor in Urban Design and Urban Theory, KTH School of Architecture, Sweden

Contemporary art is often understood as a shared now, a space where diverse visual practices coexist. Yet, beneath this apparent simultaneity lies a persistent hierarchy of temporalities. Tying the global north and the global south in a hierarchical relationship of coloniality, globalisation, and modernity, the existing frameworks to read contemporary art and its institutions are spatially and temporally locked. Calls to reimagine and find alternate futures shuttle between digging a past or rescuing a future, often lapsing the one thing that needs to stay under the critical eye – the present.

Through multi-site field research, I follow the histories and practices of two contemporary art institutions: Konsthall C in Stockholm and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, one located in the presumed periphery of the ‘global north’ and the other in the ‘global south’ of the contemporary art world. From tracing the curatorial text to using storytelling as a valid mode of inquiry, I investigate how they are building a sense of being locally rooted as well as globally situated, albeit with different formal, scale, and material concerns. Critiquing the comparative approach to read differences, the study focuses on these institutions’ distinct methods of producing a site and reproducing the present. However, the research reveals a flawed foundational understanding of the global that connects them.

Radical Nuisance? Contemporary Art Practices and Reimagined Globality then interrogates this unchallenged foundation of the global by questioning how contemporary art is practiced when there are deep trenches existing between the institutional, artistic, and curatorial practices. By arguing for the artworks as the site where not only contradictions of how histories are remembered, or whose pasts are not reimagined, but also where the societal (relational) conditioning of caste and race is constantly mediated and translated, the book effectively provides a referential framework for reading the imaginative potential of contemporary art.