In an important article of 1990 Kobena Mercer referred to the “burden

of representation” that black artists were forced to carry, an expectation

that cast them as spokespersons for a culture in its entirety.1 In Mercer’s
view this predicament was grounded in a misguided notion of culture
“as a fixed and final property of different racial groups.”2 Mercer’s
observation registers an important shift in the concerns of art historians
and cultural theorists, which had centered on the asymmetrical relations
of power that determined the terms of visibility of non-Western art in
institutional spaces and intellectual discourses of the West. While the
access, or rather its absence, of non-European artists to global exhibition
circuits and their presence within stories of
Monica Juneja art in the West were a central issue of con-
tention in the 1980s,3 visibility itself was no
Global Art History
longer an issue when Mercer wrote his piece.
and the ”Burden of Following the Magiciens de la terre show of
Representation” 1989, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the
Centre Pompidou in Paris—its controversial
assumptions notwithstanding—the prolifer-
ation of exhibitions and biennials in and
beyond Euro-America have contributed to
showcasing artists from across the world within these displays.4 This
visibility has been buttressed, in turn, by a booming market for non-
Western art.
The concern of art-historical and art-critical writings has instead
shifted to the conditions that make visibility possible, to the structures
and individuals who ensure entry into global art circuits and exhibition
spaces. The critical gaze has been directed to selection processes and the
values which underpin them and work as a filter for works that come
from the non-European world. The “burden” in Mercer’s words is
part of a politics of cultural identity wherein the terms of inclusion of
the “other” are contingent upon notions of “authenticity” and recogniz-
able ethnic origins. However, this too changed, according to Mercer,
by the turn of the century.5 Today global markets marked by “multicul-
tural commodity fetishism” and “exhibitionism”6 have created condi-
tions of “hyper-visibility”7 for non-European art and have resulted
in a “trade-off” wherein younger artists evade issues of identity and
political engagement having gained access to “an art world in which eth-

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nicity was admitted through an unspoken policy of integrated casting.”8

Juneja • Global Art History

In the following I address the issues of identity and representation
brought into focus in the globalized world of contemporary art from the
perspective of the challenges they pose to the disciplinary and concep-
tual scaffold of art history. Drawing upon the practices of a sampling of
modern/contemporary South Asian artists, this essay undertakes a
search for other positions and analytical categories to furnish art history
with an architecture of agency which can adequately narrate ways in
which art negotiates locality and deploys it to disrupt notions of authen-
ticity.
Art in the contemporary world enjoys an unbounded space in ways
that are unprecedented. The notion of art itself has undergone an explo-
sion of sorts. Today the list of artifacts and media that have entered the
domain of art appears to be infinitely elastic: it includes everyday con-
sumer goods, wrapped monuments, digital images, synthesized sounds,
animal performances, human embryos, and acts of self-mutilation. This
expansive usage is shared by communities of viewers across the globe
and is sustained by contemporary practices of collecting, curating, dis-
playing, and writing which proliferate through biennials, art journalism,
and the art market and work to facilitate this ubiquitous understanding
of the concept of art. Writings on globalization have attempted to find
theoretical models to describe this phenomenon. One of the most influ-
ential voices hailing a world without boundaries is that of Arjun
Appadurai, whose theory of global flows involves a rejection of local-
ized, bounded cultures. A term used by him and others is “deterritorial-
ization,” or the transcending of the political and territorial frontiers of
the nation-state in the wake of the highly accelerated media connectivity
of the present as well as of transnational migrations of peoples, com-
modities, and cultural products.9
Yet the notion of permanent flux and unboundedness does not permit
us to look more closely at the dialectic between the dissolution of certain
boundaries and the reaffirmation of other kinds of difference, of how
deterritorialization is invariably followed by reterritorialization.10 In the
case of art, the consensus about what makes a kitchen utensil or a starv-
ing stray dog kept captive in exhibition space a work of art is dependent
on certain shared knowledge and values, all of which rest on the author-
ity of particular institutions, individuals, theories, and expertise, which

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then mediate to ratify objects as “art.” The boundary which exists today
is not between the ways individual nations or cultures view contempo-
rary art, but cuts across national and geographic divisions. Today we
encounter a new divide between those who enjoy access to authoritative
knowledge about art and share the values of autonomy and transgression
ascribed to it, and those who do not. This boundary cuts through a
transnational and connected art world: it is often produced by fissured
constellations within the locality, can generate conflict, controversy, and
censorship, which in turn become global issues. The Danish cartoon
controversy, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the assaults on
the Indian artist M.F. Husain, or the forced detention of Ai Weiwei are
all examples of conflagrations that have erupted within fractured public
spheres where today’s global vocabularies about autonomous, interven-
tionist art do not find a uniform resonance.
The cartography of contemporary art, which encompasses several
continents and encounters with diverse visual cultures, poses a substan-
tive challenge to art history, a discipline whose academic practice hinges
on geographically discrete definitions of culture invested in notions of
nationality and ethnicity. The unprecedented mobility and global con-
nectivity of contemporary art and artists demands more than a simple
extension of scholarship beyond regional frames to explore global
dimensions of artistic production. It calls for explanatory paradigms that
meaningfully address issues of multiple locations, palimpsestic tempo-
ralities, and processes of transcultural configurations, all of which chal-
lenge existing models of binarism and diffusion where culture is seen to
flow from metropolitan centers of the Western world to absorptive
peripheries. The increasing fluidity of visual modes in contemporary art
practice has at the same time pluralized languages with which artists
address audiences at different locations as they underscore their right to
create new and transgressive languages with which to speak. Obstacles
encountered in the form of publics divided according to the possession
of cultural capital with which to access and decode, respond to, and
question this multiplicity of artistic idioms necessitate new ways of the-
orizing locality beyond its role as a mere marker of identification or a
site of retrogressive nostalgia.
Scholarly responses to these challenges have come from various disci-
plinary and theoretical positions. The lead has been taken by anthropol-

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ogists, cultural theorists, and practitioners from the emergent field of

Juneja • Global Art History

curatorial studies. Their writing has primarily focused on institutional
structures, on the power of those who make up the “artworld”11 and
wield authority, expertise, and resources to be able to control the inclu-
sion and exclusion of objects in/from the domain of “art,” a power
which further exists as part of a nexus with the expanding art market. A
spate of investigations of biennials and mega-exhibitions during recent
years has analyzed curatorial strategies and the formation of value judg-
ments both constituted as well as transmitted by media and scientific
writings on art.12 An early and influential work has been that of John
Clark who coined the notion of the “curatoriate” to designate a network
of curators who exercise absolute power while creating circuits of
exchange, determining conditions of access to shows, and establishing
international canons.13
Research on hierarchies and forms of dependence created by global
institutions has further directed its attention to artistic responses and
forms of capitulation to spectacles of exotic difference built into the
visual culture of global capitalism. A frequent observation, made from a
variety of theoretical positions, is the charge that institutional structures,
together with the art market, have promoted a tendency to self-oriental-
ization among artists from outside of the West. Our attention is drawn
to the nexus between the logic of global circulation of contemporary art
and the recourse artists seek to the local as a space of authenticity and
nostalgia. For international success would appear to demand both a use
of contemporary genres and media as well as restaging of “traditional”
concerns easily recognizable and consumable as authentic ethnic mark-
ers.14
These questions remain a challenge to art history; at the same time
they call for a readjustment of perspective from exclusively focusing on
institutional structures at the expense of artistic agency. While artists do
participate in broader contemporary dilemmas and enter into dynamic
relationships with a host of institutions and practices, art history is com-
mitted to a deeper engagement with their specific intellectual and emo-
tive trajectories. Locating artistic processes within a historical longue
durée framework is an aspect which disciplines like anthropology and
sociology have tended to leave unexplored. However, the disciplinary
strengths of art history lie precisely within the field of the pictorial and

277
in engaging with strategies of the visual, dependent though the discipline
may be on synergetic relationships with other scholarly practices. To
what extent is art history itself complicit with practices of inclusion and
exclusion within the art world? Can it be “globalized,” and if so, how
and by whom?
While there have been several responses to the call to make art history
“global,” taking stock of these is a slippery exercise for there are as many
interpretations of the term global as there are people who use it. A recent
collection that records the proceedings of an art seminar is a good exam-
ple of the babel of voices and positions.15 Global art history, as it
emerges from these interventions, has been variously read: as a discipline
to be practiced uniformly across the globe, one that would subsume
“local” art, alternatively as an inclusive discipline—also labeled world
art history—that would encompass different world cultures, or one that
searches for the lowest common denominator to hold together humans
across time and space who have been making art for millennia “because
our biological nature has led us to do so.”16 The epithet “global” is at
times equated with conceptual imperialism, at others with multicultural
eclecticism. Among the more established positions in this emergent field
is the concept of world art history which resonates with that of “world
literature” as it has been charted by scholars such as David Damrosch
and Franco Moretti.17
Constraints of space prevent me from a fuller discussion of the differ-
ent positions and publications that have appeared to date under the
rubric of world art history;18 at this juncture I will confine myself to a
summary of two important recent articulations in the field. The first is
the ambitious survey of 707 pages authored by David Summers, Real
Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism19, which
aims, in the words of John Onians, “to put the world in a book.”20 Dis-
carding chronology as an orienting principle of his work, Summers
organizes six out of the seven of the book’s chapters around thematic
concepts—places, space, facture, planarity, virtuality, and images—
which he considers universally applicable to all art irrespective of its
geographical and cultural location. These abstract notions serve as a lens
through which selected (inevitable in spite of the book’s volume) studies
from across the world are assembled into a masterful synthesis. The
attempt to bring together an array of culturally diverse experiences

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within the framework of concepts—with genealogies that go back to

Juneja • Global Art History

classical antiquity and Immanuel Kant—whose histories and underpin-
nings remain unquestioned ends up being one more variant of a master
narrative, this time expansively charted to include the “world” within its
fold.21 As a methodological and pedagogical move expansion does not
by its analytical intent undermine the frameworks it seeks to transgress,
or at best does so only tangentially.
James Elkins’ critique of the Eurocentric premises of Summers’ mag-
num opus establishes his credentials as belonging to a school of thought
sensitive to the epistemological violence that the use of “Western” con-
ceptual frames inflicts on non-European cultures. Instead, Elkins advo-
cates the use of each tradition’s core concepts, “indigenous terms,”
whose incommensurability and untranslatability are assumed. He
extends this relativist position to even argue that interpretive frame-
works that draw on the disciplines of psychoanalysis, literary criticism,
feminism, semiotics, linguistics, or anthropology are in view of their
“Western” origins not equipped to write histories of non-European cul-
tures; these histories would need to draw on “indigenous” disciplinary
and theoretical models. Not without arrogance Elkins proceeds to
demonstrate how this could be best put into practice.22
Taking a translated excerpt from the seventh-century Sanskrit text
Vishnudharmottara Purana, to cite one example, Elkins reads this lexical
fragment as the source of a universally valid definition of the image in
Indian art for all times to come.23 Alterity, in true Orientalist fashion,
ends up as frozen and ahistorical. Overlooking norms of serious
research that would be stringently applied to any study of concepts in
European art history, Elkins in this case does not consider it necessary to
problematize the genealogical history of this particular text fragment,
made accessible by Orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth century and
then read through the nativist-nationalist perceptions of Ananda Ken-
tish Coomaraswamy. Nor does he address the problems specific to this
genre of writing in the Indian context. The Indian textual tradition sur-
rounding art chiefly consists of writings which prescribe the formulae
and processes for the correct making of things. The Silpa Sastras, from
which the translated fragment of the Vishnudharmottara Purana used
by Elkins has been drawn, offer normative principles for a range of prac-
tices; they are inchoate in themselves, though they can be usefully mined

279
for the nuggets that discuss those objects and practices which interest
scholars of art. A socially and historically embedded understanding of
this tradition of texts—their reception, interpretive shifts over centuries
and across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent, their variegated trans-
lations into everyday artistic practice—is a primary requirement for
research.
A number of questions beg to be answered: How reliable is the
explanatory potential of partial and individual lexical representations,
singled out without explanation from a vast body of texts and read as
standing for an undifferentiated “tradition”? Do concepts not need to be
recovered from a broader dynamic between text and practice that have
evolved historically? More seriously, Elkins’ extreme relativism does not
take account of the ways disciplines and concepts themselves have trav-
eled beyond their points of “origin” and in the process grown beyond
their parochial roots. Transcultural histories—of concepts, disciplines,
and art practices—unfortunately do not find a place within a program to
write an additive world art history by placing entire “cultures” or “civi-
lizations,” both terms whose nineteenth century genealogies remain
unquestioned, next to each other as distinct units, treated as incommen-
surable.
More recently, Hans Belting has proffered a definition of “global art”
that provides a useful impulse to reexamine the foundations of the disci-
pline of art history. According to Belting, the category “global art” can
be meaningfully deployed to include those contemporary artistic pro-
ductions emanating from the non-Western world which become pub-
licly accessible through exhibitions and mega-shows.24 The collapse of
canonical certainties which the very visibility of such works and the
modes of their framing and reception induce, the progressive disjunction
between a plurality of art forms and practices, and the focus of a disci-
pline and its values which claim universality, become an important
source of reflexivity for investigations through art history, beyond the
confines of the contemporary. While art history in the West has been
practiced as a grand Hegelian narrative of progress, a narrative that
emerged with the Enlightenment and the industrial nation-states of the
nineteenth century and evolved in tandem with museums to construct a
model history of Western heritage, the newly independent postcolonial
nations of the non-West assiduously cultivated a narrative framed by the

280
nation, with their museums buttressing through their displays the idea

Juneja • Global Art History

of unique and incomparable achievements of ancient civilizations, now
cast as the nation’s heritage. Both positions are mutually constitutive and
rest on similar canonical premises. Both these variants of art historical
writing are framed within discrete cultural units—be they national or
civilizational—and subsume experiences of cultural braidedness under
the taxonomic categories of “influence,” “borrowing,” or “transfer.”
Here a notion of “global art history” conceptualized as transcultural can
provide a way to rethink existing disciplinary frameworks.
A transcultural history of art goes beyond the principle of additive
extension and looks instead at the transformatory processes that consti-
tute art practice through cultural encounters and relationships, whose
traces can be followed back to the beginnings of history. Casting art his-
tory in a global/transcultural frame would involve questioning the tax-
onomies and values that have been built into the discipline since its
inception and have been taken as universal. To begin with, this would
necessitate a closer and more critical empirical examination of artworks
labeled “Buddhist” or “Islamic” or “Renaissance” or “Modernist,” and
require constituting new units of investigation that are more responsive
to the logic of objects and artists on the move. In this and other senses a
transcultural history of art rejects a principle of mere inclusion to argue
instead for a change of paradigm. Rather than postulate stable units of
investigation which exist next to each other and are connected through
flows or transfers, the problem of how these units themselves are consti-
tuted needs to be systematically addressed. If we proceed on an under-
standing of culture that is in a condition of being made and remade, his-
torical units and boundaries cannot be taken as given; rather, they have
to be constituted as a subject of investigation, as products of spatial and
cultural displacements. Units of investigation are constituted neither
mechanically following the territorial-cum-political logic of modern
nation-states nor according to civilizational categories drawn up by the
universal histories of the nineteenth century, but are continually defined
as participants in and as contingent upon the historical relationships in
which they are implicated. This would further mean approaching time
and space as non-linear and non-homogeneous, defined through the
logic of circulatory practices.
Looking at the world through a transcultural lens would mean bring-

281
ing back excluded materials and questions to center stage: in what ways
did the presence of objects, not always categorized as “art” from the
regions of Asia, Africa, or South America, within collections of Euro-
pean elites, artists, or museums and their modes of reception, reuse, sale,
and display prove to be constitutive of cultural achievements associated
with major art movements such as the Renaissance, Rococo, or Cubism?
Such a view has the potential to destabilize many of the values that
underpin the discipline of art history and as such have remained unques-
tioned for too long. The modernist elevation of “originality” to measure
creativity and the ensuing dichotomy between the “original” and
“copies” or “derivations,” for instance, continues to be a cardinal value
that informs scholarship in the field. However, a view of historical
processes over centuries brings out the centrality of imitation/emulation
as a site of cultural practice across regions. Imitation can be a creative
form of relating to migrant objects, forms, and practices, of dealing with
difference, of acknowledging authority, or of dialogical practice.25
The conceptual category of modernism itself, for long viewed as a
quintessential European phenomenon which then “spread” to the rest of
the world, has undergone critical scrutiny in recent years. Studies of
modernism “from the peripheries” have questioned its monolithic
nature and argued for an expanded definition that would include the
artistic experiments of modernist artists in Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer-
ica.26 The engagement with visual practices beyond the metropolitan
centers of the West raises further questions: How is our understanding
of modernist and avant-garde art practices reconfigured if viewed as
emanating from networks of multiple centers across the globe, adding
New Delhi, Bombay, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, or Tokyo to Paris,
Berlin, and New York? To what extent can we explore transcultural
fields of artistic production as emerging from a multipolar and yet
entangled modernism that was generated in Europe and beyond, often
cutting across the colonizer–colony divide to connect with critical cur-
rents that were pan-Asian, too?
Recasting modernism as a global process involves going beyond an
“inclusive” move to question the foundations upon which the notion of
the modern has been constructed and to undermine the narrative that
hinges upon a dichotomy between the West and the non-West and
makes the latter as necessarily derivative, or views it as a series of distant,

282
“alternative” modernisms. Instead of coining a host of modernisms—

Juneja • Global Art History

Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan—all understood as parallel streams
that never meet and bring in national or ethnic units through the back
door, a global view of modernism regards these as enmeshed with the
others, which allows us to begin asking to what extent such entangle-
ment was constitutive for a Western avant-garde. Can European mod-
ernism be historically studied without situating it within the larger, com-
plex political and cultural determinations of colonialism and global
connections that made its emergence possible? Dismantling the master
narrative of modernism would mean fixing anew its chronological sign-
posts which in the present discourse depend on the gap between the
already developed modern and the “not yet,” trapped in a perpetual
effort to “catch up.” Instead it is in the “elsewheres” and the “not yets”
that a global modern could be sought and found.27
In challenging an approach that takes national cultures as units to be
juxtaposed, compared, or connected through transfers, the agenda of
global art history is to fashion narratives on art movements such as mod-
ernism out of a specific national art history in which they have been con-
tained, theoretically as well as institutionally, in the very structures of
academic disciplines and university departments. Yet the histories of col-
onized regions of the world inevitably bring back the nation as one
frame within which modernism’s critical edge has been appropriated.
Modernism was imposed on the non-Western world as a form of Euro-
centric universality that made up the hegemonic operations of imperial-
ism. At the same time the critical, affirmative, and reflexive potential of
the concept energized anticolonial resistance that pluralized, inflected,
and translated its metropolitan meanings within the frame of an emer-
gent national culture. To become legible, the idea of the avant-garde
requires a set of preexisting powerful codes and institutions, cast as out-
dated and academic against which to rebel. In sites without such estab-
lished structures, modernism involved at the same time creating new
institutions such as artists’ collectives, exhibition spaces, journals, and a
language of art criticism. The nation also played an important role as
locality, as a site or territory to be wrenched back from the global con-
stellation of empire.
On the other hand, nation building in South Asia during and follow-
ing decolonization was torn apart by dilemmas which in many ways

283
provide a counterexample to Benedict Anderson’s thesis that the modern
nation is a universal, secularized formation.28 Violent exclusions and
conflicts, the drawing up of new maps by administrative authorities par-
titioning South Asia into individual nation-states, as well as physical,
rhetorical, and symbolic struggles, all provided a site and a host of sub-
jects for a passionate body of works that make modern art outside of its
metropolitan centers a set of complicated, contradictory, and variegated
experiments working both within the nation and using modernist reflex-
ivity to lay bare the fissures within the mythical imagined community.
During the phase of nation building, both during the anticolonial
struggle and the euphoric years following decolonization, the identity of
the artist on the Indian subcontinent was modern and secular. The
nation provided an ancient past, a body of myths, and iconic anchors
which could be invoked and successfully translated into modernist
idioms to occupy a secular aesthetic space, as we see for instance in the
art of M.F. Husain and his peers of the Progressive Artists Group,
founded in 1947.29 Modernity then existed in symbiosis with a tradition
which, through its invocation of sacred myths and symbols, was
invented as a part of nationalist resurgence and therefore secularized.
Discussions of a distinctive Asian modernity are indeed framed within
this discourse of a relationship, at times harmonious, at times tense,
between “modernity” and “tradition” that is then used to demarcate the
“Asian” from the “Western” avant-garde—the latter reduced to a well-
worn opposition between tradition and modernity.
Tradition continues to be effectively deployed in relation to more
recent contemporary art, in strategic operations which fuse notions of
“authenticity” with a consumerist commoditization of cultural differ-
ence, sustained by the “biennial effect” and the pulls of the art market.30
This brings us back to Kobena Mercer’s “burden” with which this essay
opened. For Asian artists the quandary of being modern could be a dou-
ble bind; where living up to the demands of being avant-garde and trans-
gressive goes hand in hand with the compulsion to be recognizably other
or national. The need to establish such credentials is as powerfully sus-
tained from within: by the anxiety to reaffirm national identity in rela-
tion to the colonial past as well as to the homogenizing fictions of con-
temporary globalism. Indeed, cultural essentialisms of various sorts are
nurtured by forces that work in mutually constitutive ways to make tra-

284
dition a fraught term, also in view of its appropriation by right-wing

Juneja • Global Art History

nationalist or fundamentalist forces.
And yet the approach to this constellation can be further complicated
through bringing back agency, autonomy, and artistic experiments with
both subjecthood and form center stage. The latter dimensions, all too
frequently subordinated via a Foucauldian analysis to the overweening
power of institutions and curatorial strategies, often enact a difficult
process of working out antinomic relations between the self and society.
The refusal by artists of available and easy ideological positions prompts
a fuller exploration of the meanings and possibilities of tradition, per-
ceiving it as a carrier of memories which could be reinterpreted to
reimagine the past and create new analogues for conceiving the future.
Terms such as “hybridity” or “in-betweenness,” often used in scholarly
writings to theorize non-Western artistic practices, are not very helpful
here, given their inflationary use and overall imprecision. More impor-
tantly, taking refuge under the cover of a “seamless multiculturalism,”
they do not come to grips with the quality of unhinging or disintegration
that mark agency when used to disrupt the stability of familiar signifiers
of tradition.31
One important matrix for the comprehension of individual subjectiv-
ity and how it addresses the world is location, seen as a complex accre-
tion of factors ranging from gender, language, class, and education to
memories, routines, and visions. Together these afford an individual a
measure of belonging, of containment in bounded spaces which remains
in tension with the desire to transcend the limits of historical location
and to address the world. As opposed to the scapes of Appadurai that
presume a polarity between complete spatial flux and bounded local
spaces, a transcultural intersection of the two allows one to transcend
this opposition and to identify new spaces that come into being as a
result of crossing older boundaries while redefining them. Such spaces
make cultural difference more sharply focused and liveable in specific
ways and create a way for the artists to problematize these questions
within the work of art itself. While locality stands for rootedness and
memories, it is precisely the transcultural mobility of the actors which
engenders a new awareness of location on the interstices of spaces, cul-
tures, and practices. It allows freedom from straightjackets of national,
antiimperialist, or communitarian consciousness in which artists have

285
found themselves locked, and shows the way to question the ethics of
the nation-state itself.32 This awareness of location means viewing the
site as both a space to enact aesthetic practice and a discursive field; this
is an enabling position that opens the way for self-reflexive agency. It
becomes the site where what Okwui Enwezor terms “the will to global-
ity” can unfold.33
In the remaining part of this paper I will draw upon the works of a
necessarily small sample of South Asian artists whose practice is part of a
search to make the world a home so that location and mobility can
morph more freely. The examples span a century, beginning with the
early decades of the twentieth century, when artists had begun to engage
systematically with modernism. The period traversed is one of dramatic
social and political change, from decolonization, the onset of euphoric
developmental politics following independence, the emergence of the
mass media, through to economic liberalization and the heightened
global connectivity of the present; at the same time it bears witness to the
exacerbation of ethnic, political, and religious violence. All of these
impinged on the different ways in which artists grappled with the mod-
ern, how they inflect and reconfigure tradition, and deploy location as a
powerful tool to contextualize the creative process as embodied experi-
ence. The lives of some of the artists whose work I look at span more
than one generation and highlight thereby the need for different chrono-
logical signposts across the globe to demarcate transitions from the
modern to the contemporary. That the examples I have chosen are
women artists is not entirely fortuitous. Changing national formations
in South Asia, the more lively aspects of global culture make a space for
the inclusion of gender discourses from which to critique the nation and
its violent exclusions. Feminist scholarship’s holistic critique of univer-
salizing positions has allowed women artists to deploy their praxis to
dismantle the politics of representation beyond a critique of “woman as
image” to address core questions about aesthetics and representation.
The first artist, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), belongs to the early
phase of Indian modernist art and has posthumously become a leg-
endary figure in historiography, which casts her as a founder figure of
Indian modernism. During recent years Sher-Gil’s oeuvre has gained
international visibility, through exhibitions at the Tate Modern in Lon-
don and then at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Sher-Gil’s life has all the

286
ingredients for the making of a legendary figure: she was the first Indian

Juneja • Global Art History

professional women artist of the twentieth century; she was highly tal-
ented, stunningly beautiful, and died tragically at the age of twenty-
eight.34 Amrita Sher-Gil was of mixed parentage: her father Umrao
Singh Sher-Gil, a Sikh, belonged to the landed gentry of Punjab in
Northern India, her mother Marie Antoinette came from a Hungarian
middle-class educated family. Amrita was born in Budapest in 1914 and
spent the first eight years of her life there until the family decided to emi-
grate from war-ravaged Hungary to India in 1921. Sher-Gil’s biogra-
phers do not cease to point out that otherness was a lived experience for
the young artist. Trained in Paris, she was aware of being perceived as
exotic, referred to as “la petite princesse hindoue,”35 while at the same
time participating in the experiments and new idioms of artists of the
bohème. Her identity as woman introduced another source of marginal-
ity, especially in view of the deeply gendered language of the avant-garde
in its celebration of masculine genius and its representation of the exotic
female body. All these roles—as Eurasian, as artist, and as woman—gave
Sher-Gil’s art and her prolific correspondence a reflexive quality, a
reflexivity so intrinsic to the critical edge of a global modernism.
Many of these issues lie at the heart of the painting I look at, Self Por-
trait as Tahitian (1934) (see pl. X, this volume, p. XX). The work is now
on display in the new galleries of the National Gallery of Modern Art,
New Delhi. It was exhibited in the recent show at the Haus der Kunst in
Munich, curated by Chris Dercon.36 Surprisingly this work, often
reproduced for its striking visual power, has not received the closer
attention it deserves;37 it has been cited as an example of Sher-Gil’s fasci-
nation with Paul Gauguin’s art38 and dismissed together with her oeuvre
as derived from Western models.39 A more careful look at the painting’s
many layers and the difficulty in accommodating it within a national
artistic practice reveals the work as a bold intervention of a young female
artist, an attempt to locate herself within the global currents of avant-
garde modernism. The work could indeed be read as a critical engage-
ment with Gauguin’s art and a particular stream of the postimpressionist
avant-garde, which acclaimed him as a promethean artist and founder of
a new aesthetic. Gauguin appears in many of Sher-Gil’s letters; she trav-
eled to London to see his works in the National Gallery.40
As an artist, Gauguin was celebrated for his visualization of the

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“primitive, untouched feminine beauty” of Tahitian women as incorpo-
rating an ideal of purity that was posited against the hypocrisy and con-
strictions of European bourgeois society. His access to Tahiti—its land-
scape and its people—where he arrived in 1889 in search of an earthly
paradise was made possible by its annexation as a French colony shortly
before that.41 It is this imbrication between artistic genius and power to
recast the other in paint as exotic femininity, a power relationship that
admits of no reciprocity, that Amrita Sher-Gil’s self-portrait dressed as a
Tahitian confronts.
Sher-Gil locates herself squarely as both the exotic feminine other and
at the same time reclaims for herself the privilege—generally not avail-
able to a woman artist—of painting such subjects. Her act, then, unset-
tles familiar fashionable dichotomies between the European artist and
the exotic other, between artist and model, between masculinity and its
opposite. At the same time the portraiture of the self, proclaiming her
creative agency as artist, brings back prerogative and self-consciousness
into the act of representation. Her tactile physicality emerges from the
enveloping shadow of a male viewer; it contrasts also with the flimsily
sketched references to fashionable chinoiseries in the background, which
refer once again to the distancing of alternative civilizations into objects.
Many signs signal a distance from Gauguin’s images of exotic femininity
while it is being ironically invoked—above all, the absence of floral and
fruit metaphors which evoke ripe fertility and squarely locate the primi-
tive in the heart of unspoiled nature. The averted gaze of the model
would suggest that the exotic here does not erase personality, rather it
enhances it. Finally, the all-encompassing shadow of the implicit male
viewer becomes a foil against which her palpable bodily presence can be
placed. To create the shadow, Sher-Gil makes use of a technique she
learned and now appropriates from European oil painting, a visual ele-
ment not present in Indian pictorial forms before the coming of Euro-
pean art. By complicating the European celebration of an alien exotic,
the image we are confronted with threatens to destabilize the gender and
ethnic transactions built into metropolitan art practices.
With her articulate and passionate persona, Amrita Sher-Gil became a
legendary name as the first major woman painter in India, an iconic fig-
ure who gave a feminine face to the histories of modernism in South
Asia. However, after the 1930s, apart from a few rarely documented

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instances of women artists,42 it was only from the late 1980s onwards

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that women came to forcefully occupy a space in Indian contemporary
art. Their practice has broken new ground, as it has pushed artistic lan-
guage beyond the limits of the possible. In the work of Nalini Malani,
for instance, gender and history are two constituents of the same com-
pound; nationhood, sovereignty, and religious identities are viewed in
terms of their elisions and as articulations of the forms of violence into
which they translate in everyday lives. Born in 1946, Nalini Malani is an
active, practicing artist based in Mumbai, whose work has won consider-
able international visibility and acclaim, and who forms a generational
bridge of sorts between the “modern” and the “contemporary.” Malani’s
work combines ethical resistance with a disavowal of universalisms, be
they national or global; it confronts the entire force of icons and alle-
gories and refracts the “burden of representation” by giving it an ironic,
at times scathing profile.
I will confine myself to but one example chosen from Nalini Malani’s
very diverse work, an oeuvre which draws upon narratives and figures
from cultures in and beyond the home—Medea, Mad Meg, Sita, or
Alice—to create a new form of cosmopolitanism which, though having
recourse to myth or tradition, incisively prizes it open to confront it
with the rawness of lived experience. A video installation of 2003 enti-
tled Unity in Diversity echoes the familiar slogan of nation building.43 It
shows a pleasant living room setting in an upper middle-class home—
with red walls and lamps exuding a gentle light—going back to the hey-
day of national sentiment signaled through the familiar framed photo-
graph of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi on the wall. The title
refers at the same time to a famous painting by Raja Ravi Varma of 1893,
The Galaxy, composed of three rows of sumptuously clad women in
regional dress, adorned with jewelry and displaying musical instru-
ments, all of which are redolent of regional diversity harmoniously fused
into a national symphony. This image of national virtue, of cultures liv-
ing in harmony, was the Indian showpiece exhibited at the World Parlia-
ment of Religions in Chicago in 1883. In Malani’s version of the theme
individual musicians are torn out of their orchestrated group portrait,
startled by the sounds and sights of a century later. They blend in and
out of a new collage composed of faces of our troubled present, scarred
by religious violence, showing an overlap between nation coming into

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being and the post-nation. Malani consciously uses video and installa-
tion to reposition the figures, to use the play of sound, and the effulgence
of light to recreate the effects of loss, of memories, fears, and dreams.
Text fragments from Heiner Müller, Antonin Artaud, and the voice of an
Indian middle-class male speaking English all draw the viewer into the
struggle for survival. Like so much of Malani’s work, this too is
anchored in the reality of present-day India, in this case the genocide of
Muslims in Gujarat that had ripped apart the national fabric some
months earlier; at the same time it refers to violence unleashed by bel-
ligerent nationalisms across the globe, from Hiroshima to Kosovo.
While Malani’s practice strives to create a new poetics of materiality
through her use of video installations, painted glass, revolving Mylar
cylinders, and collaborative theatrical productions, the work of Nilima
Sheikh (born in 1945) privileges the delicacy of traditional idioms, espe-
cially the miniature—its detail, chromatic glow, and love of ornament.
Both Malani and Sheikh belong to the same generation and see their
work as a refusal of a hospitable national space. Both belong to a group
of those women artists who have learnt to use “the body as gesture”44 to
desacralize, break sexual taboos, and transgress the rules of modernist
aesthetic, both breaking open the female body and then making it whole
again in an act of profound reparation. Sheikh’s work is marked by an
abiding attachment to “the poetics of affection.”45 It is animated by the
belief in the potential of art to destabilize the symbolic buttresses of the
nation-state and to scramble and repudiate its territorial self-definitions.
The subject of Kashmir has figured centrally in Nilima Sheikh’s recent
work: a group of paintings executed on hanging scrolls, suspended from
the ceiling and reaching the floor, make up a continuing project exhib-
ited in various phases.46 The paintings have been conceptualized as a dia-
log with poetry, notably with the work on Kashmir of the young con-
temporary poet Agha Shahid Ali, who died in 2001. Kashmir, a location
caught in the crossfire of three contending nationalisms, a site of vio-
lence, dispossession, and loss, also becomes an object of desire, a dream,
and a path to reach back to and restore the utopian wholeness of pre-
nation-state geographies. Sheikh’s work is replete with references to
poetry, flashes of remembered images, the filigree effect of light piercing
through lattice screens, and musical modes which she recovers for her
work by following the premodern cultural flows across China, Tibet,

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Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, the trails of Buddhism, of

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glazed tiles and miniature painting, which held Kashmir and South Asia
within a larger loosely bounded Eurasian contact zone.
The Kashmir paintings entitled Firdaus [Paradise], though intended to
recreate the thangka, draw equally on a language of dense concentration,
reminiscent of manuscript painting; they are not controlled by compul-
sions of linear narrative and focus on affect rather than mimetic form. A
striking panel is Firdaus II (2004) (see pl. X, this volume, p. XX) in
which the central image is that of a group of three figures, welded into an
intimate group bonded by a shared melancholic longing. The central fig-
ure is androgynously rendered, the curving right arm and hands with
elongated fingers echoing a visual memory of the Virgin holding a child
in innumerable miniatures that made their way into Mughal albums.47
Gently, the figure bares its breast to reveal a vision that follows the shape
of the map of India and is dotted with lush, undulating landscapes,
mountains, flowing streams, Chinese clouds, a nestling village with the
shrine of a saint. The map itself could be read both as archive as well as
“counter archive of affect.”48 The power of the image, as it resonates
with subtle chromatic play, comes not only from the reference to the
breast as site of affect, but through the artist’s use of androgyny to create
both vulnerability and to place the image beyond the established regis-
ters of fixed gender identity.
I wish to conclude this essay with the example of an artist, whose
work powerfully underscores “the aporias of the self and the social”49 as
it goes to the heart of subjectivity and gendered identity, bypassing the
nation. I refer to Naiza H. Khan, a young artist (born in 1968) based in
Karachi for whom the realities of postcolonial Pakistan are refracted
through the prism of patriarchy and religious fundamentalism. The
fraught and even more contingent nature of the nation in Pakistan has
meant that modernist art here has not been fired by any kind of national
imaginary, and artists have sought other paths to negotiate the relation-
ship between mobility and locality. “The use of clothing in my work,”
says Naiza H. Khan, “began as a strategy to explore the emotional con-
tent of the body through attire. Lingerie, armour, straight jackets, and
other imagined pieces create multiple identities or personae. These
objects address contemporary anxieties and desires at a time when ideas
about the ‘self’ seem unstable and rapidly shifting.”50

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 Naiza H. Khan’s professional practice includes teaching, curating,
running artists’ workshops, and creating an Internet platform for Pak-
istani artists living across the world. Vasl, an artists’ collective she leads,
works to provide exhibition spaces in a setting where the infrastructure
for art practice has to be created from scratch.51 Here I will cite one
example from Khan’s diverse range of works that shifts the location of
art from the exclusive space and reception of the gallery to an urban non-
site, which the work of art reclaims in a gesture challenging women’s
exclusion from such spaces. The project Henna Hands (1997–2003)
involves drawing fragmentary silhouettes of the nude female figure in
various positions deploying stencils of henna patterns (see pl. X, this
volume, p. XX). The latter are a mass-produced commodity sold in the
bazaars of South Asia which have become a modern shortcut to the tra-
ditional and time-consuming practice of adorning hands with henna, an
art practiced by women on ritual and festive occasions.52 Henna Hands
moves between the sequestered world of feminine time and aesthetic
skills of the past and the raw urban fabric of present-day Karachi. The
patterns, which evoke memories of lattice screens in traditional elite
homes and tombs of Sufi saints, are now transferred to the peeling walls
of the city, which they share with advertisements for male hairdressing
saloons, computer training courses and cigarettes, handbills for political
demonstrations, surrounded by debris and decay.53 The bleakness of the
contemporary setting works as a powerful vehicle to render art both an
object in urban space as well as a mode of address that constitutes that
space. The mechanically reproduced stencil pattern, implicated in mem-
ories of women’s time and bonds, is the mode of a non-nostalgic femi-
nine journey into the heart of a gendered public space. The combination
of the non-traditional and traditional builds a relationship with the past
in a move of destabilization: feminine bodily art practices intrude upon
and reclaim public space, urban culture, and the skin of the city itself as a
site for artistic interventions.
This selection of examples of artistic practice presented here shows
the path chalked out by artists towards a critical rearticulation of tradi-
tion that in the end breaks with existing tropes of both the avant-garde
and the world of commoditized cultural difference. Confronted today
with the politics of “hyper-visibility” referred to at the beginning of this
article, the artists discussed have retained the notion of identity at the

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heart of their practice, while infusing the latter with a sense of ethical

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responsibility. The creation of new global networks around the drive to
undermine both the histories and geographies of authenticity and in turn
disrupt the aesthetics of global multiculturalism has been outlined by
Ranjit Hoskote, whose “biennials of resistance” provide an alternative
vision to Clark’s all-powerful “curatoriate.”54 Located in transitional
societies, such low-budget biennials are no longer a space of spectacular
display, according to Hoskote, but a discursive environment, “a kind of
theatre which allows for a staging of arguments and investigations of our
shared, diversely veined and demanding contemporary condition.”55
This argument is sustained by Okwui Enwezor’s belief that an alterna-
tive culture of mega-exhibitions would produce a new kind of spectator
whose gaze is “counter-hegemonic” or “counter-normative,” in that it
deviates from spectatorial totality and brings forth alternative and empa-
thetic ways of reimagining and rearticulating art.56 While this ideal
might still underestimate the power of global commoditization that fis-
sures societies across the world, it is evident that both expressive practice
and future vision have moved beyond the politics of packaged ethnicity.
The burden now lies with art history to sharpen its conceptual tools and
create a language to provide these practices with a disciplinary anchor.

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Notes
1 Cf. Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” in: Third Text: Third
World Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, 10, vol. 4, Spring 1990, pp. 61–78.
2 Ibid., p. 63.
3 Cf. Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain, exhib. cat.,
Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London, 1989.
4 On Magiciens de la terre cf. Rasheed Araeen, “Our Bauhaus Others’ Mudhouse,” in: Peter
Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspec-
tive, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007, pp. 150–162; as well as reviews in Third Text: Third World
Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, 6, vol. 3, Spring 1989, special issue Magiciens de
la terre.
5 Cf. Kobena Mercer, “Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-based
Blackness,” in: Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, 49, vol. 13,
Winter 1999/2000, pp. 51–62.
6 Ibid., p. 57.
7 Ibid, p. 56.
8 Ibid., p. 55.
9 Cf. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in:
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, London, 1996, pp. 27–47.
10 For a critique from the perspective of social theory, cf. Josiah McC. Heyman and Howard
Campbell, “The Anthropology of Global Flows: A Critical Reading of Appadurai’s ‘Disjunc-
ture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’,” in: Anthropological Theory, vol. 9,
no. 2, June 2009, pp. 131–148.
11 The term was coined by Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” in: The Journal of Philosophy,
vol. 61, no. 19, October 1964, pp. 571–584.
12 An excellent anthology is Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The
Biennial Reader, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2010.
13 Cf. John Clark, “Biennials as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspec-
tive,” in: Filipovic / van Hal / Øvstebø 2010, pp. 164–183. An earlier version of this article was
published as “Histories of the Asian ‘New’: Biennials and Contemporary Asian Art,” in:
Vishakha N. Desai (ed.), Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century, Clark Studies in the
Visual Arts, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT, 2007, pp. 229–249.
14 Cf. Irene Below and Beatrice von Bismarck (eds.), Globalisierung, Hierarchisierung. Kul-
turelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte, Jonas, Marburg, 2005; Gennifer Weisen-
feld, “Reinscribing Tradition in a Transnational Art World,” in: Transcultural Studies, 1, 2010,
available online at: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/transcultural/article/
view/6175, accessed 07/19/2011.
15 Cf. James Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global?, Routledge, London, New York, 2007; James
Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim (eds.), Art and Globalization, Pennsylvania
State University Press, University Park, PA, 2010.
16 John Onians, “Introduction,” in: John Onians (ed.), Atlas of World Art, Lawrence King, Lon-
don, 2008, p. 11.
17 Cf. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ,
2003; David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi (eds.), The Princeton
Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Pre-
sent, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009; “Introduction to World Literature,”
available online at: http://learner.org/courses/worldlit/, accessed 07/19/2011; Franco Moretti,

294
 Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, Verso, London, 1998; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures

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on World Literature,” in: New Left Review, 1, January/February 2000, pp. 54–68; Franco
Moretti, “More Conjectures,” in: New Left Review, 20, March/April 2003, pp. 73–81. I am
grateful to my colleague Rudolf Wagner for the latter two references. Cf. also “Stanford
Literary Lab,” directed by Matthew Jockers and Franco Moretti, available online at:
http://litlab.stanford.edu/, accessed 07/19/2011.
18 This was a concern which went back to the early twentieth century and merits closer study.
Cf. Ulrich Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000),” in:
Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (eds.), World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and
Approaches, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2008, pp. 69–89. I have addressed these issues at some length
in “Kunstgeschichte and kulturelle Differenz: Erweiterung oder Paradigmenwechsel?” in:
Kritische Berichte, theme issue “Universalität der Kunstgeschichte,” ed. by Monica Juneja,
Matthias Bruhn, and Elke Werner, 2012 (forthcoming).
19 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism,
Phaidon, London, 2003.
20 John Onians, as quoted from: Elkins 2007, p. 42.
21 Cf. James Elkins, review of David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of
Western Modernism, in: The Art Bulletin, vol. 86, no. 2, 2004, pp. 373–381.
22 Cf. James Elkins, “Different Horizons for a Concept of the Image,” in: On Pictures and the
Words That Fail Them, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al., 1998, pp. 188–209.
23 Cf. ibid., pp. 200–208.
24 Cf. Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in: Hans Belting
and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums,
Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2009, pp. 38–73; Hans Belting, “Was bitte heißt ‘contemporary’?” in:
Die Zeit, 21, 05/20/2010.
25 For a nuanced study of the migration of material objects and the multiple practices that ensue
from mobility, cf. Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and the Medi-
eval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009. For a
global perspective on the appropriation and translation of the notion of the “classical” in
monumental architecture of modern world capitals, cf. Monica Juneja, “The Making of New
Delhi. Classical Aesthetics, ‘Oriental’ Tradition and Architectural Practice: A Transcultural
View,” in: Rudolf G. Wagner and Sally Humphreys (eds.), Modernity’s Classics, Springer,
Heidelberg, 2011 (forthcoming).
26 A recent study from the perspective of South Asia is Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Mod-
ernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde 1922–1947, Reaktion Books, London, 2007. Cf.
also the important collection of essays by Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism? Essays on
Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2001.
27 These issues figured in the lecture series, “Multi-Centred Modernisms—Reconfiguring Asian
Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries,” organized at the Cluster of Excellence
“Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows” at Heidel-
berg University during the summer term of 2011. Its proceedings are being published, cf.
Monica Juneja and Franziska Koch (eds.), “Multi-Centred Modernisms—Reconfiguring
Asian Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries,” in: Transcultural Studies, 1, 2010,
available online at: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/transcultural/article/
view/6181/1764. To date, the published articles include contributions by James Elkins, Gen-
nifer Weisenfeld, and Hiroyuki Suzuki (1, 2011). Cf. also Rebecca M. Brown, “Response [to
Partha Mitter]: Provincializing Modernity: From Derivative to Foundational,” in: The Art
Bulletin, vol. 90, no. 4, 2008, pp. 555–557.
28 Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of

295
 Nationalism, Verso, London, 1996.
29 On the history of the Progressive Artists Group, cf. Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of
Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, New York, 2001;
Geeta Kapur, “Dismantled Norms: Apropos an Indian/Asian Avantgarde,” in: Kapur 2001,
pp. 365–414. On the work of M.F. Husain, cf. Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Barefoot Across
the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, Visual and Media Histories, ed. by
Monica Juneja, 1, Routledge, London, 2011.
30 Cf. Weisenfeld 2010.
31 Cf. Kapur 2001, pp. 395–399.
32 Cf. Geeta Kapur, “Globalisation and Culture,” in: Third Text: Third World Perspectives on
Contemporary Art & Culture, 39, vol. 11, Summer 1997, p. 30.
33 Okwui Enwezor, as quoted from: Ranjit Hoskote, “Biennials of Resistance: Reflections on
the Seventh Gwangju Biennial,” in: Filipovic / van Hal / Øvstebø 2011, p. 312.
34 A recent biography of Amrita Sher-Gil is Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, Pen-
guin Books India, New Delhi, 2006. Cf. also Mitter 2007, pp. 45–65; Kapur 2001, pp. 4–15;
Vivan Sundaram (ed.), Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings, 2 vols., Tulika
Books, New Delhi, 2010.
35 Mitter 2007, p. 51.
36 Amrita Sher-Gil. Eine indische Künstlerfamilie im 20. Jahrhundert, Haus der Kunst, Munich,
October 3, 2006 – January 7, 2007.
37 While mentioned in Kapur 2001, it is ignored in Mitter’s account (Mitter 2007). A very recent
study of this work—which overlapped with the writing of this article—is Saloni Mathur, “A
Retake of Sher-Gil’s Self Portrait as Tahitian,” in: Critical Enquiry, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp.
515–544.
38 Cf. Dalmia 2006, p. 30, pp. 148–150, p. 194.
39 An excerpt from a panel discussion which featured the artist’s works exhibited at the Haus
der Kunst in Munich and broadcast on the TV channel 3sat was the subject of a presentation
made by Chris Dercon at the ZKM Summer Academy “Global Studies: Art and Visual Media
Today” at ZKM | Karlsruhe, June 18–20, 2010. The tenor of the panel reinforced the view of
the derivative nature of Sher-Gil’s art: “Es scheint mir, alles vom Westen abgekupfert zu sein.”
[It seems to me that it is all copied from the West.] This paper has grown out of a presentation
I made at the ZKM Summer Academy, where I responded to the terms of that discussion.
40 Cf. Sundaram 2010, vol. I, p. 108.
41 Cf. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Intervention of Primi-
tivist Modernism,” in: Art in America, vol. 77, no. 7, July 1989, p. 125.
42 The work of Sunayana Devi (1875–1962) has been discussed by Mitter; cf. Mitter 2007, pp.
36–44.
43 Some visuals of this multimedia installation are reproduced in the exhibition catalogs Global
Feminisms and New Narratives. Cf. Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin (eds.), Global Femi-
nisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, exhib. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn,
NY, Merrell, London, New York, 2007, pp. 80f.; Betty Seid, with contributions by Johan
Pijnappel, New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India, exhib. cat., Chicago Cultural Cen-
ter, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2007, pp. 76–78.
44 The term has been used by Geeta Kapur as the title of chapter 1, cf. Kapur 2001, pp. 3–60.
45 Ibid., p. 39.
46 A recent show was held in New Delhi at the Lalit Kala Akademi in August/September 2010.
Among earlier exhibitions was the itinerant show curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, Edge of
Desire: Recent Art in India. Nilima Sheikh’s Kashmir paintings have been discussed by
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir, University of

296
 Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2009, chapter 6.

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47 The transcultural journeys of this motif have been discussed in my article, “The Breast-feed-
ing Mother as an Icon and Source of Affect in Visual Practice—A Transcultural Journey,” in:
Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (eds.), Rituals and Emotion, Routledge, New Delhi, 2011
(forthcoming).
48 Kabir 2009, p. 199.
49 Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art
of Muslim South Asia, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2010, p. 177.
50 Naiza H. Khan, as quoted from: Salima Hashmi (ed.), Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from
Pakistan, exhib. cat., Asia Society, New York, 2009, p. 98.
51 Cf. www.naizakhan.com, accessed 07/20/2011.
52 Cf. Dadi 2010, p. 202; Naiza H. Khan, “Naajo Mehndi and Henna Hands,” in: Saima Zaidi
(ed.), Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009,
pp. 132–139.
53 Reproduced in Dadi 2010, p. 202. Cf. also Naiza H. Khan, “Naajo Mehndi and Henna
Hands,” in: Saima Zaidi (ed.), Mazaar, Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, Karachi, 2009, pp. 132–139.
54 Cf. Hoskote 2011, pp. 306–321.
55 Ibid., p. 308.
56 Cf. Okwui Enwezor, Großausstellungen und die Antinomien einer transnationalen globalen
Form, Berliner Thyssen-Vorlesung zur Ikonologie der Gegenwart, Fink, Munich, 2002;
reprinted as “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” in:
Filipovic/van Hal/Øvstebø 2010, pp. 426–445.

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