Pujan Karambeigi
Columbia University, Art History and Archaeology, Graduate Student
- I am PhD Candidate in art history at Columbia University. My research examines how decolonization and nation-building... moreI am PhD Candidate in art history at Columbia University. My research examines how decolonization and nation-building in the mid-20th century shaped art historical expertise through reforms in artistic training, museum practices, and the conceptualization of national heritage. I have received several prestigious fellowships, including the 2024–25 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium fellowship at MoMA, the 2022–23 Frieda B. and Milton F. Rosenthal Art History fellowship, the DAAD fellowship, and the German National Merit Foundation fellowship. Additionally, I serve as the editor of downtowncritic.net and my writing has been featured in ARTMargins, Jacobin Magazine, Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, Mousse Magazine, Artforum, and other publications. I have also curated exhibitions at ISLAA New York, the Wallach Art Gallery, and Felix Gaudlitz.edit
As an introduction into Alice Creischer's artistic practice, the text discusses Rancière's notion of the schoolmaster and applies it to Creischer's writings. As such, the text argues that the distinction between the ignorant and the... more
As an introduction into Alice Creischer's artistic practice, the text discusses Rancière's notion of the schoolmaster and applies it to Creischer's writings. As such, the text argues that the distinction between the ignorant and the emancipatory, as drawn by Rancière, is untenable. Instead, Creischer's text suggest to inscribe one into the other, and confuse the simple dichotomy.
Research Interests:
En plein air—literally painting outdoors—was a polemic against the white walls of the studio articulated by the French impressionists in the mid-nineteenth century. French sociologist Marcel Mauss took up the cause, calling for... more
En plein air—literally painting outdoors—was a polemic against the white walls of the studio articulated by the French impressionists in the mid-nineteenth century. French sociologist Marcel Mauss took up the cause, calling for practitioners to leave the atelier in order to observe life out in the open and formulating this as a fundamental requirement of ethnology. The ethnologist was supposed to come face-to-face with conditions in the field and in the process train their way of seeing. What would it mean to transfer this method into the digital realm? The digital is not constituted in opposition to the analogue, nor does it simply create an algorithmic structure. Its boundaries are constantly at stake, and digital practices are in a continual process of reinventing themselves. Engaging with the digital en plein air, the book brings together essays outlining the author’s experiences in interviews, recordings, poems, and collages working on semi-fictional and scientific texts.
Editors: Pujan Karambeigi, Anneliese Ostertag, Tabea Rossol, Pierre Schwarzer, Lukas Stolz
Contributors include:
Dirk Baecker, Antonia Baehr, Bryana Fritz, Orit Gat, Christian Grüny, Christiane Heidrich, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Martina Leeker, Ariane Müller, Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Leslie Thornton, Guilel Treiber, Max Wallenhorst, Simone Weil, a.o.
Editors: Pujan Karambeigi, Anneliese Ostertag, Tabea Rossol, Pierre Schwarzer, Lukas Stolz
Contributors include:
Dirk Baecker, Antonia Baehr, Bryana Fritz, Orit Gat, Christian Grüny, Christiane Heidrich, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Martina Leeker, Ariane Müller, Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Leslie Thornton, Guilel Treiber, Max Wallenhorst, Simone Weil, a.o.
Research Interests:
Since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, museum reformers have struggled to comply with the federal codes for accessibility. This essay accounts for the ambitions and limitations of these debates around access in... more
Since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, museum reformers have struggled to comply with the federal codes for accessibility. This essay accounts for the ambitions and limitations of these debates around access in the museum that were caught in the double bind between public expectation and private market forces, ultimately giving rise to a particular type of bottom-up reform organized around parametric gradients and attitudinal shifts. It does so by juxtaposing manuals for museum educators from the 1990s with artworks by New York City–based artists such as Carolyn Lazard, Jordan Lord, and Park McArthur who all worked with the incorporation of access into their artistic practice during the 2010s. The essay argues that these artistic practices force us to decouple the teaching of access from its narrow focus on shifting individual attitudes and instead belabor the form and content of stories about structural conditions.
Research Interests:
Torey Thornton (b. 1990) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice explores questions of communication, context and interpretation. The work introduced here for the first time, My Pet Tinder’s Blank Stare (Voyage Vanity) (charm 1),... more
Torey Thornton (b. 1990) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice explores questions of communication, context and interpretation. The work introduced here for the first time, My Pet Tinder’s Blank Stare (Voyage Vanity) (charm 1), consists of a series of photo objects which will exist in 57 printed and framed parts. For the photoshoot, which is not part of their work and took place in January of this year, Thornton collaborated with stylist Ai Kamoshita and photographer Liz Johnson Artur. The text was commissioned by the artist to reflect on the conceptual landscape of the work.
Research Interests:
Throughout his prolific career as a filmmaker, Harun Farocki grappled with a basic question: is it possible to represent violence without exploiting its victims?
Research Interests:
In the 1970s, Nil Yalter explored the place of identity in a fractured world. In this essay I look at her artistic practice in relation to questions of marginalization, in particular in relation to the so-called "guestworker crisis."
Research Interests:
Labor unions in the United States have had an unstable history. Only recently have workers turned to them again as a lifeline after decades of wage stagnation and a rapidly increasing wealth gap. In the last year alone, workers across the... more
Labor unions in the United States have had an unstable history. Only recently have workers turned to them again as a lifeline after decades of wage stagnation and a rapidly increasing wealth gap. In the last year alone, workers across the country and across sectors-from agriculture and food manufacturing to health care to museums and universities-have demonstrated the power of strikes and collective bargaining as the most effective tools for bringing about meaningful and urgent change in the workplace, especially in an economy ravaged by exploitative labor practices. Strikes are thus particularly potent gestures of dissent. Pujan Karambeigi, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, narrates his experience as a union organizer for the university's student workers, who went on strike last year and have, since the writing of this text, won a historic contract.
Research Interests:
The British artist Sarah Rapson began her career in the ’90s as a painter, creating hung works that indulged in an aesthetics of the negative, a refusal to make some- thing pictorial or pretty. Recently, Rapson exhibited a newer series... more
The British artist Sarah Rapson began her career in the ’90s as a painter, creating hung works that indulged in an aesthetics of the negative, a refusal to make some- thing pictorial or pretty. Recently, Rapson exhibited
a newer series of works in New York – a city she once lived in and left in 2004 – that included both paintings and video works, in which Rapson herself appears in disguise.
Editor and critic Pujan Karambeigi considers the legacy of Rapson’s often self-destructive work, much of which now focuses on her departure from the Big Apple, and the idea of escape more generally. Who could blame Rapson for meditating on what it means to be “not there”?
a newer series of works in New York – a city she once lived in and left in 2004 – that included both paintings and video works, in which Rapson herself appears in disguise.
Editor and critic Pujan Karambeigi considers the legacy of Rapson’s often self-destructive work, much of which now focuses on her departure from the Big Apple, and the idea of escape more generally. Who could blame Rapson for meditating on what it means to be “not there”?
Research Interests:
Often considered to be one of the crucial voices of queer postconceptual art, Henrik Olesen’s retrospective at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid stages various episodes of a drastic shift in the artist’s attitude, moving from polit- ical... more
Often considered to be one of the crucial voices of queer postconceptual art, Henrik Olesen’s retrospective at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid stages various episodes of a drastic shift in the artist’s attitude, moving from polit- ical awareness-raising ever deeper into the intricacies of the self.