The Vittorio Bottego monument in Parma is an excellent example of Italy’s reluctance to wrestle with its colonial past. [Read more…]

Indian scriptwriter Aastha Tiku’s film, Sherni, shares ideological resonances with a work-in-progress by a South Tyrolean museologist and researcher duo. [Read more…]

Mother-artists are visualising the heretofore invisibilised corporeal and emotional fatigue of care-giving through diverse materials rooted in embodied subjectivity. [Read more…]

On the morning of November 2, 2020, I received a text from Monika, my partner’s aunt that threw my day’s schedule into welcome disarray. Her sister, Maridl, was preparing to make sauerkraut. Did I want to help? It was professionally irresponsible of me to abandon my writing desk, yet none of my work seemed compelling enough to serve as a reason to decline. Deadlines would come and go. Sauerkraut, however, was made just once a year, in late autumn, so it could ferment in time to serve as a vitamin C reserve through the Alpine winter. I responded in the over-enthusiastic affirmative and rushed over. [Read more…]

Indeed, rejection has been a life-long companion, not only in my career, but also within the realm of my personal relationships. Growing up dark-skinned in a racist, casteist, patriarchal country, I, like so many others, internalised the emotional consequences of being rejected, always taking it personally, allowing it to affect my sense of self-worth. It was thanks to my best friend’s advice that I began to apply for things more audaciously. “Just submit and then forget about it,” was her sage command as she reminded me that in most instances, I lost very little by applying. [Read more…]

While going through the artist Jyoti Bhatt’s digitised archive on the Asia Art Archive website during research for a review I was writing on the indigenous artist, Bhuri Bai, I found myself grateful for the artistic investment he made in documenting diverse manifestations of Femmage traditions across India’s rural and tribal landscape. Besides his immense photographic archive, I was arrested by his own rangoli studies that concentrate on understanding the intricacies of the geometric patterning at the heart of rangoli. [Read more…]

Living with Beeton’s book, reading beyond its evangelical zeal for what was experienced by many as the drudgery of domestic work, the book alerted me to the category of the housewife; and how this persona was one that had to be necessarily shed as feminism became more mainstream. In fact, much of the consciousness raising in the West was centred around the oppressiveness of being a housewife, and not having the agency to choose other forms of work. [Read more…]

Perhaps it was the transparency of the gesture; the public sharing of what it means to choose motherhood while simultaneously hoping to maintain one’s authorial agency or artistic subjectivity. The image proposed a thesis about what it means to perform motherhood, and what it means to inhabit the dynamic of caring through feeding in a manner that doesn’t allow for the loss of one’s selfhood or its collapse within the domain of the maternal. [Read more…]

Mid-way through unwinding round 24, I had to pause to make diary entries. I had been reflecting on the phonetic similitude between the English ‘failure’ and the German ‘fehler,’ which meant error or mistake. I repeated them under my breath to study the assonance, “Failure—Fehler, Failure—Fehler.” The two words had begun to epitomise an empowering philosophy. [Read more…]

The most urgent function this collection of essays performs is to remind us of the need for more intersectional scholarship that can critically re-examine the ‘Company School’ nomenclature without being complicit in the same system of erasure that facilitated both the ‘postcolonial limbo’ and the coloniser’s neglect. [Read more…]

Every despicable detail about D’Annunzio’s life now in my consciousness, I gathered from my own reading. I made the intellectual investment because I was concerned by my visceral revulsion to the property. I had felt cognitive dissonance at the level of intuition. I would feel its opposite when, months later, I would visit Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh. [Read more…]

Wine is central to the Südtirolean ethos. This Alpine region, among Italy’s smallest, has been cultivating grapes for centuries. Frescoes abound, attesting to the pivotal role grapes occupy in Südtirol’s imagination and culture. Just above the entrance to my fiance’s home, for instance, was where I first encountered an old fresco of St. Urban of Langres, the patron saint of barrel makers, vine growers, vine dressers and vintners. [Read more…]

What was missing was more than just a revised, contemporary context that situated these works as having emerged from spaces of white, colonial, patriarchal privilege. What was absent in the non-controversial nature of the continued existence of museum spaces like Uffizi was the questioning of the status quo. Why, for example, is one of the largest collections of Egyptian objects located in Turin, Italy? What business does it have being there in the 21st century? [Read more…]

Before his immanent ‘discovery’ in 1980-81, he used to carry baskets of mud on his head. He also dug mud to fill other people’s baskets. They’d work in gangs and be away from the village for months. ‘Before the arrival of the museum team from Bharat Bhavan in Patangarh, Jangarh was already recognised for his painterly talent within his village and community. For them, there was no discovery,’ Jain recounts. [Read more…]