Talks

Research as Practice 1.5

Work in Progress: Methodologies
A lecture by Grant Watson

17 December 2021 | 6.00 PM IST

Zoom Webinar ID: 842 8406 5799
Live on Zoom, Facebook and YouTube

17 December 2021

In a context where curating is still defining itself as a field and like the broader culture, often struggling to meaningfully address intersecting contemporary crises, this lecture will look at how experiments in curatorial methodology might be used to pursue questions, sustain research projects and navigate changing and depleted infrastructures. The topic will be addressed in relation to Grant Watson’s work which involves both long-term interview and exhibition strands. Interviews including How We Behave (2012 –) and Folded Life: Talking Textiles Politics (2021-) examine radical life practice within the framework of a collective politics. Exhibitions have reflected on left histories, the politics of textiles, modern and contemporary Indian art and the transcultural, through collaborations with artists and critical readings of archives. Notable examples are Santhal Family: positions around an Indian sculpture (2008) Nasreen Mohamed: Notes (2010) Textiles Art and the Social Fabric (2009) Keywords (2014) and the international research project bauhaus imaginista (2016 – 2019). 

‘Research as Practice’ lecture series invites researchers, curators and artists to share and discuss their individual research practices, inventive forms and manifestations of research; To address the complexities of research-forms, be it as ‘research-exhibition’, creative research, curatorial, artistic or post-institutional research, or artworks as knowledge-systems. Through this series KNMA surveys various forms, formats, historiography of research practices in South Asia art, as well as infrastructures of research and research networks that enable/form/push a coming together of certain groups, questions and methodologies.

Grant Watson is a Tutor in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London and Theory Tutor at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem.

Akansha Rastogi is Senior Curator of exhibitions and programming at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi. She was the Associate Curator of India Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Her recent curatorial projects at KNMA include "Right to Laziness..." (2020), “Smell Assembly” (2019), “What Place is Kitchen? What Place Community?” (2018); “Hangar for the Passerby” (2017); conversation series “Invitation for a Coup” (2016); “Zones of Contact: Propositions on the Museum” (co-curated, 2013); and the performance series “Inhabiting the Museum” (2011–2015). She is an active member of artists-led initiatives, forums, and collectives in Delhi, including WALA.