Artworks

This seminar series is an invitation to explore the ways in which a new aesthetic category of ‘design’ breaks free of the epistemologies of the colonial art establishment to emerge as an independent field of pedagogy, practice and creative livelihoods in twentieth century India. It hopes to lay out a chronology of design initiatives, design education and policies, and the making of the profession of designer, in different institutional sites, in areas ranging from printed texts to textiles, from architecture to animation, in post-Independence India. 

 

A number of questions lie open for reflection. While practitioners have repeatedly highlighted the continuum between the domains of art, craft and design, how do the more established entities of ‘art’ and ‘craft’ extend or get morphed into new practices that take on the name of ‘design’? What enables the transitions between these related-but-separate creative circuits, in which ‘artists’ take on the vocation of ‘designers’? What are the various idioms of modernism in India’s design movements that draw as powerfully on contemporary international vocabularies as on the nation’s handicraft and folk-art traditions? In proceeding from the Nehruvian to the post-liberalization era, to what extent is this design history embedded in the patronage of state and industrial capital, in the mobilization of foreign expertise, and in the expansion of the manufacturing economy? How does this design history both feed into and define a new era of middle class tastes, life-styles and consumptions, alongside the expanding industry of publicity and advertising? Can we mark out a present conjuncture, in which histories of design are becoming a new focus of archiving, collecting and exhibiting?

 

On Zoom and we will also be streaming live on Emami Art’s Facebook page