19 research outputs found
Making the invisible visible: how we depict COVID-19
No full textHow do you depict a microscopic bundle of proteins that in just a few months transformed the world? Sria Chatterjee (Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut) looks at how the virus has been visualised in different contexts, and how new ways of tracking and seeing its spread have profound implications for individual freedom
Making the invisible visible: how we depict Covid-19
No full textHow do you depict a microscopic bundle of proteins that in just a few months transformed the world? Sria Chatterjee (Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut) looks at how the virus has been visualised in different contexts, and how new ways of tracking and seeing its spread have profound implications for individual freedom
NATURING THE NATION: ART AND DESIGN IN INDIA, 1870s-1970s
No full textNaturing the Nation: art and design in India, 1870s-1970s probes the relationship between art, design and the politics of nature in colonial and postcolonial India. It examines two art and design institutions - Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan-Sriniketan project (established in early 1900s British India) in Bengal, and the National Institute of Design funded by the Indian government and the United States-based Ford Foundation (established late 1950s, after independence in 1947) in Ahmedabad. Taking into account the transregional and transnational networks of ideas, agents, and institutions around them, it unpacks art and design’s deep relations to colonial and modern science and anthropology between colonial rule and the Cold War. A focus on the relationships between plant neurobiology, agricultural science, art and art theory, as well as exhibition-making allows the chapters to investigate the co-production of ‘nature’ and ‘nation’ as malleable constructs within art and design historical discourse.
It reveals, for instance, how the entanglements of art and science were caught up in the articulation of a new Hindu metaphysics by a particular nationalist elite in early twentieth century Bengal. Through the work of artists and art theorists, it traces the crucial relationships of this Hindu metaphysics with the Pan-Asian movement and European vitalism. Through transnational and transregional networks of artists, writers and designers, it identifies a ‘Long Arts and Crafts Movement’ and the paradoxes and ramifications of it between Great Britain, India and the United States of America, investigating the functions of craft, design and rural reform between Victorian socialism of the late 1880s, Indian nationalisms, and American development-oriented aid programmes of the 1950s. Examining the emergence of design, and new ways of seeing, in the 1960s, it investigates how the representation of ‘nature’ and ‘nation’ were reconfigured through a nexus of art, politics, and technology, and the conflicting demands of ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’
Black Atlantis: The Plantationocene
No full textConversation Piece coordinated by Sria Chatterjee on the subject of "The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis"
“Conversation Piece” is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question
Art Criticism and the Pandemic II - Safer Spaces
No full textA panel talk among other invited guests, Stella Nyanzi (Scholar and Human Rights Activist); Sria Chatterjee (Editor, British Art Studies) and Ariane Sutthavong (Curator). In this talk I spoke about ongoing and active campaigns, throughout the global pandemic, for equal reproductive rights in Northern Ireland, a crisis that could be historically contextualised by a number of artists’ and independent films over the past four decades
Visualizing the Virus
No full textReview: Visualizing the Virus is a cross between an online repository of original content and bibliography of existing resources. The purpose of the international and interdisciplinary project is to showcase both how the COVID-19 pandemic has been visualized and the inequalities it has revealed. The project was founded and is led by Dr Sria Chatterjee, an art historian and environmental humanities scholar who is the Head of Research and Learning at the Paul Mellon Centre in London
Concerning Circulations: Cybernetic Stewardship & Planetary Engineering
No full text"Our age of climate crisis brings with it intimate, acute relations between informational environments and real ecologies. Technoscience has understood ecological change, environmental crisis, and human and non-human climate migrations through imagery — circulated through scientific publication, popular media, our devices, networks and imaginations as photographs of fieldwork, and an iconography of starving polar bears. Applied scientific powers attempt to regulate real, situated natures through inversions of this imagery as visual rubrics and illustrations. Pixels and CO2 molecules, data streams and jetstreams, abstract diagrams and engineering practices amalgamate. What results is a vision of elemental automation, planetary machinic worlding and technological care that authorises real conservation and geoengineering practices, growing green in Silicon Valley and explicitly trying to bring about »Gaia 2.0.«.
»Concerning Circulations« is articulated through two media streams, one ongoing and the other summative, culminating at the end of the web residency. Collaborative, online-research recovers the image-ecosystem of new regimes of planetary scale management of nature, such as carbon markets. The project reposts, contextualises and critiques the circulation of images and diagrams of control, creating a visual archive of contemporary cybernetic attentions. This archive, continuously updated in instagram-like fashion, in turn creates materials for three, narrated short essay-films, confidentials of the stories that new ecological engineering and climate innovation propaganda propagates.
From Mars to Venus: Activism of the Future
No full textA collaboration between the Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre and Autograph ABP.The arts have long been concerned with highlighting the ongoing histories of resource extraction and its repercussions. This symposium asks: what next? By bringing together researchers, artists, designers and activists from a range of backgrounds, this event will consider local projects in intersectional, granular detail, to collectively re-evaluate the relationship between the arts, extraction and activism, both historically and in the present.The two days are framed around three broad themes: Colonial and extractive histories, Reparative and fragile ecologies, Environmental justice and legal rights.Confirmed speakers and participants include: Ignacio Acosta, Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Tobah Aukland-Peck, Eline Benjaminsen, Nancy Demerdash, Radha D'Souza, Francisco Gallardo, Hit Man Gurung, Sasha Huber, Elias Kimaiyo, Syowia Kyambi, Adrian Lahoud, Godofredo Pereira, Marie Petersmann, Julian Posada, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Gabriela Saenger Silva, Sakiya, Audrey Samson, Marie Smith, Jonas Staal, Gerald Torres, Wilfred Ukpong, Rahul Ranjan and others.The symposium is convened by Sria Chatterjee (Paul Mellon Centre), Mark Sealy (Autograph/University of the Arts London) and Bindi Vora (Autograph).</p
