143 research outputs found
Thresholds: Professor Rupali Gupte and Dr Megha Rajguru in Conversation
No full textIn this podcast, Professor Rupali Gupte and Dr Megha Rajguru discuss the boundaries and meanings of the home and critically engage with spatial practices and theoretical approaches to understanding the domestic built environment
Locating Modern Living:Charles Correa, Asia and the Third World
Full text linkThis chapter traces national and international networks of individuals and institutions, ideologies and processes of advocacy that influenced policies of living standards in India between the mid-1970s and late-1980s. It examines the interior spaces of two housing projects in Bombay/Mumbai, designed by architect Charles Correa: Belapur, also known as Artists Village, and Kanchanjunga apartments, completed in 1986 and 1983, respectively. While the former resembled an Indian rural idyll, the latter was informed by the International Style, highlighting two frameworks of ideologies that were subsumed in modern housing during this period. It reveals a complex history of modern living, inflected by class divisions, Third World development agendas, Asian spirituality, and international aesthetic trends, highlighting the role of the architect as a channel of transnational ideologies, as well as professional power. This essay, therefore, challenges the oft-narrow interpretation received by these two housing projects as regional, and places them within a transnational context, underscoring wider networks that influenced notions of modernity and lifestyles of the residents in the post-colonial Indian city
South Asia and Design History Research
No full textThis podcast has been produced for the South Asian Heritage Month 2020 and showcases research into South Asian heritage and design at the Centre for Design History.Dr Megha Rajguru, Hajra Williams and Monna Matharu in conversation, discussing their individual research and positionalities as South Asian researchers. This podcast is for the first South Asian Heritage Month taking place between 18 July 2020 - 17 August 2020 with the British Council and Manchester Museum. Dr Megha Rajguru is a member of the Centre for Design History and Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her research focusses on South Asian design and she currently writing on the history of modern housing and the production of interiors in Mumbai, with particular attention to government policy and design in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Hajra Williams is a PhD student at the University of Brighton. Her research focusses on the barriers to museum participation faced by the South Asian community in the UK, analysing the processes museums employed in exhibition design and development in order to reduce these barriers. Prior to her Ph
From Shrine to Plinth : Studying the Dialectics of Hindu Deities Displayed in the Museum through Artworks and their Exhibition
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Indian Living Cultures: Collected, Exhibited and Performed
No full textThis book chapter has developed from a panel co-convened by Nicola Ashmore and Megha Rajguru ‘Exhibiting South Asia, 1901- 2012’, for the Design History Society’s 2013 conference Towards Global Histories of Design: Postcolonial Perspectives, hosted outside of Europe for the first time at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. Ashmore’s co-authored paper led to the development of this chapter continuing this collaboration with Rajguru. The paper gives consideration to the influence of global politics on the critique of the representation of India through performance and art commissions in regional museums in the UK. This paper is in the proceedings of the 2013 Annual Design History Society Conference made available to a larger public through its online publication. This book chapter critiques the representation of India through performance and art commissions in regional museums in the UK and through museum displays in India. This body of work incorporates the study of the impact of cultural diversity policies on practices of commissioning artists in regional museums in the UK from 1997 onwards. It also considers the influence of the rise in Hindu fascism in this same period when interpreting art commissions and displays. Of the literature available that attends to the interaction between government policy and curatorial decision-making (Crooke, 2008; Appleton, 2001) it is Ashmore and Rajguru that focus on art commissions and performance rather than conventional museum collections. This contribution compares displays in regional museums in both the UK and in India. It expands upon both authors’ previous publications. Rajguru’s (2013), (2012 and (2011) and Ashmore’s publications (2015) and (2011). Ashmore’s previous publications provide new insights into two of the crucially important cases of representation of source communities in regional museums, at Manchester Museum and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The publications are ‘Commissioning artists: community engagement, ethnographic collections, and changes in curatorial practices from the 1990s to 2000s in the UK,' Museum History Journal, Vol. 8, (2015) and ‘Making for museums: commissioning living cultures,’ Journal of Museum Ethnography (2011). Significantly the relationship not only between curatorial staff and source communities is addressed in these publications, but the mediation within that relation by an artist. Ashmore continues to investigate contemporary art practice to illuminate how meaning is constructed and held in material form to reveal local and global political issues. She is currently researching remakings of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, which have been created collaboratively as a form of political activism
Remaking Picasso's Guernica as a banner
No full textRemaking Picasso's Guernica is a collective that has, since 2012, been working together to re-create a contemporary version of Picasso's Guernica in the form of a textile banner. This conference paper titled 'Remaking Picasso's Guernica: a work of art, an act of protest' was developed during the processes of making the banner and undertaking research on this collective project. It was delivered at the "Subversive Stitch Revisited: the Politics of Cloth" conference, 29-30 November 2013 at the V&A in London. The conference was organised by Jennifer Harris, Deputy Director, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Pennina Barnett, writer and curator, and Althea Greenan, Curator of the Women’s Art Library, Special Collections, Goldsmiths College, University of London, in collaboration with the V&A and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). The conference was dedicated to the memory of Roszika Parker's groundbreaking feminist book 'The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine' published in 1984. In this co-authored paper, Dr Rajguru and Dr Ashmore examined the problem of the lone female stitcher, raised by Rozsika Parker in 'The Subversive Stitch', as well as contemporary debates about art, craft, and activism. In Gijs van Hensbergen's words, Picasso's Guernica is a twentieth century icon. It has been widely reproduced in different media, including Goshka Macuga's monumental tapestry, exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2009. This paper examined this current project to 're-make' the painting in fabric form, which Megha Rajguru has contributed to, alongside Louise Purbrick and Nicola Ashmore. The Remaking Picasso's Guernics Collective is formed of Brighton-based activists and artists representing Amnesty International Brighton and Hove; Brighton Anti-Fascists; Brighton Voices in Exile; Gatwick Detainee Visitors Group; Migrant English Project; Palestine Solidarity Campaign Brighton and Hove; University of Brighton; and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The banner’s construction embodies an anti-fascist position and contains many unnamed individuals’ stitches regardless of their nationality, race, age, sex and religion. In this paper, we discussed processes of collective making; traced the life of the Guernica banner from one public sewing event to another; and finally, reflected upon the stitch as a form of protest. The full conference paper is available in the public domain as part of the conference proceedings in the form of a podcast
Remaking Picasso's Guernica, a banner:display at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK
No full textThe exhibition Re-making Picasso’s Guernica at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK (8 November 2014 – 15 February 2015) displays the large scale textiles project Re-making Picasso’s Guernica, a collective, collaborative activist art project. On display is the protest banner created by the collective through a series of public sewings. Nicola Ashmore, Louise Purbrick and Megha Rajguru in the College of Arts and Humanities from 2012 have collaborated on this project with representatives of Amnesty International, Brighton Anti-Fascists, Gatwick Detainee Visitors Group, Migrant English Project, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Between July 2013 and October 2014, this collective have held fourteen public sewings in: Jubilee Library, Friends Meeting House, Phoenix Art, National Institute for Design in Ahmedabad, India, Brighthelm Centre, Working Class Movement Library, V&A, University of Brighton, Cowley Club Social Centre, Phoenix Brighton, 198 Gallery, and Pallant House Gallery. The textile work has also been displayed at three community meetings and it has been carried in protests since April 2014. Its presence at protests connects historic and current events, developing connections between old and new fascisms and past and present attacks on civilian populations. The Remaking Picasso’s Guernica banner has a blog, which enables the on going interaction between the project and members of the public who participated in the public sewings. It facilitates users to keep up to date with the project; it can be followed, commented on and shared. Purbrick has presented this project at two symposia (Working with Monica Ross, University of Brighton, 14 March 2014; Object or individual? Phoenix Brighton, 24 May 2014). Ashmore and Rajguru have delivered two academic papers on the project at the conference: Subversive Stitch revisited: The Politics of Cloth, 29-30 November 2013, London. A podcast of which is now available. And at the Designs for War and Peace, Design History Society annual conference, Oxford 4-6 September 2014, which will be podcast through Oxford University’s continuing education programme. The banner is currently displayed alongside the Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War exhibition at Pallant House Gallery (8 November 2014 – 15 February 2015). Rajguru, worked most closely with the exhibition’s curator to support the involvement of the banner. An article by Nicola Ashmore, Maude Casey, Louise Purbrick and Megha Rajgura, appears in the 2014-15 publication of the Pallant House guide. The impact of the Remaking Picasso’s Guernica project has been considerably widened through its exhibition at Pallant House Gallery. In the first six weeks the exhibition was opened there were 6786 visitors, a total of 59,988 visitors to the Gallery for the year. Following the Pallant House display the banner's next exhibition is at the 2015 annual Len Crome Memorial conference of the International Brigade Memorial Trust titled Guernica: the destruction of a town the creation of a masterpiece. The banner will be accompanied by Nicola Ashmore and two other collective members
Leisure for the Modern Citizen: Swimming in Singapore
Full text linkIn the years following Singapore’s independence, swimming was embraced as a national strategy for modernising both the city and the citizen. During this period, more public pools were built than ever before, and in efforts to boost public fitness, new government organisations promoted swimming as a mass participation activity. The pools themselves drew on earlier traditions of leisure architecture, embedding qualities of novelty and spectacle within the new public housing estates. This helped to demonstrate the successes of the government’s urban development programmes in improving quality of life, but it also reflected greater ambitions than just the material embellishment of the new city. It was hoped that swimming would promote values of physical strength, commitment, and perseverance, thus strengthening a new industrial workforce and shaping a communitarian national character.
This essay discusses the social and political functions of swimming in republican Singapore. It looks at the architecture of public swimming, urban development, public sporting campaigns, and the planned effects that swimming would have on both individual and civic bodies. The intention is to trace the role of swimming in the modernisation of Singapore’s landscape, economy, and citizenship
Visions of modernity: architectural vignettes and modern living in urban India 1975-1990
Full text linkThis article examines the discourse of housing and urban planning between 1975 and 1990 in India. It approaches this subject within the context of international and national development agendas, which aimed to improve living conditions of the poor. Architects Balkrishna Doshi and Charles Correa, commissioned to design houses and towns during this period, are the focus of this study. Their studios produced a body of visual material: drawings, serigraphs, watercolours and photographs for publications, presentations and exhibitions, sharing utopian visions of modern living. They also published essays and interviews, which, along with the visual material, have been instrumental in the shaping of the modern housing discourse. This article undertakes an inter-textual analysis of this material and applies Doreen Massey’s approach to space ‘as a product of interrelations’ to examine the geopolitics of the houses and towns they designed during this period. While the architects’ ambitions were rooted egalitarian ideologies of clean and open spaces for all, this study highlights that in reality, they were constrained by development agendas and the market, and their designs reproduced social hierarchies. The outdoor space became a focus of debate during this time. It was controlled and regulated by the architects and the developmental agencies, alike
Trash or Treasure. The East Asian Sherd as Material and Medium
No full textWith a view to characterizing what might be called ‘sherd culture’ as a phenomenon with a history and specific modes of consumption, this chapter will introduce various ways in which sherds of East Asian ceramics have been used and consumed in global contexts, and explore the consequent impact on the conceptualization of these fragments as both material and medium. Structured around the question of how we experience the materiality of the sherd when it is used as a medium, the chapter will situate the sherd within four material contexts: archaeology, architecture, contemporary art and craft, and restoration. Examples from each of these contexts will illustrate a series of transformations: from archaeological waste to museum object; vessels to tiles; fragments to whole pieces; vessels to sculpture/garments and broken to restored, demonstrating how the sherd has a materiality that transcends its own composition and fragmentary state
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