The Anant Curatorial Forum is a space dedicated to curatorial practice, inviting the experiences and perspectives of practitioners engaged in dynamic, critical and meaningful explorations within the arts.
As the curatorial role extends its relevance beyond the arts into allied fields and disciplines, the Forum asks what timely re-evaluation looks like in practice. With a particular attentiveness to the South Asian context, each edition brings together voices from across the region and beyond to examine the questions shaping contemporary practice today.
Edition Overview
The inaugural edition of the Anant Curatorial Forum, held on 15 and 16 March 2024 at the India International Centre, New Delhi, brought together practitioners from across South Asia and beyond for two days of generative conversation. Six panels examined some of the most pressing questions in contemporary curatorial practice — institutional templates and their subversions, the history of the curatorial figure in India, the artist-curator, textile and craft, interdisciplinary arts practice, and the framing of contemporary photographic practice.
06 Panels |
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25 Practitioners |
DAY 1 · PANEL 1
In Conversation with Institutional Templates
This panel undertook an examination of the multifaceted exhibition practices that shape contemporary curatorial methodologies. Delving into the historical underpinnings of curatorial interventions, it investigated the intricate interplay between curator and institution — a relationship that serves as both a conduit for subversion and collaboration within the broader socio-cultural milieu. The panel examined various settings, including museums, galleries and private foundations, and the methodologies utilised by curators to question dominant beliefs while forming alliances with institutional players.
DAY 1 · PANEL 2
History of the Curatorial Figure in India: Pre-globalisation
This panel brought to the surface the personal, improvisational, less visible, and independent ways in which the curatorial figure encountered context during the pre-globalisation period. Spanning almost a century, it foregrounded diverse and specific histories — from 19th century exhibitions at the Indian Museum in Calcutta, to proto-curatorial practices of women practitioners premised on self-organisation, to the figure of the curator through independent cinema and the film society movement in post-independence India — towards a more nuanced story of Modern art in South Asia.
DAY 1 · PANEL 3
Alternative Framework of the Artist Curator
The hyphenated nomenclature of the Artist-Curator has a considerable history, one that has pushed in the direction of expanding the field of art production and circulation. Within the South Asian context, with its underdeveloped art institutions, artists have often built and willed spaces into being via their curatorial propositions. The panellists focused on their current impetus for curating within the South Asian context — reflecting on the fluid identities of practitioners as they work with research, organising, curating, writing and art making, and thinking strategically about what their curation makes possible.
DAY 2 · PANEL 1
On Textile
Textiles are ubiquitous — they cover our bodies and adorn our homes. Yet despite this ubiquity, textile theory continues to be an underexplored area of academic inquiry. This panel attempted to unpack the importance of textiles in the contemporary art context of India. Through deeply embedded individual practices, the panellists provided historical, academic and contemporary overviews of textiles today — from exhibition histories and curatorial intent, to questions of design, narration and representation of textile makers, to collections, curation and institution building.
DAY 2 · PANEL 2
What is an Interdisciplinary Arts Practice?
This panel sought to bring attention to interdisciplinarity by presenting it as a dynamic creative engine. The speakers highlighted its select nuances, while exploring the relationships between curatorial and interdisciplinary practices. As art practices increasingly engage and intersect with other disciplines to produce more specialised and complex knowledge, interdisciplinarity becomes a transformative tool. The panel articulated the impulse to engineer with interdisciplinarity within artistic and curatorial realms, cultivating a conversation where creative practice and problem-solving converge — and where curatorial practices can emerge as sites for co-articulation, co-calibration and collective change.
DAY 2 · PANEL 3
Framing Contemporary Photographic Practice
The session scrutinised dimensions of how the personal is embedded within socio-cultural trajectories of curatorial practice as the speakers cited recent exhibitions or spaces of engagement, drawn from and around the South Asian region and beyond. ‘Framing’ was reimagined via modes of translation and transcoding artworks and motivations which create new affective sites for exploring post-coloniality, history and memory. The panel proposed how discourse generated via such curatorial practices in the present have an unpredictable yet transformative capacity.
AFA TALKS
Anant Curatorial Forum, 2024
The Anant Curatorial Forum is a platform for unpacking curatorial practice through the perspectives of practitioners engaged in some of the most vital explorations within the arts.
