Talks

Zones of Contact/Contactless-ness: Propositions on the Museum

23 September 2020

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents Zones of Contact/ Contactless-ness: Propositions on the Museum with Vidya Shivdas, Deeksha Nath and Akansha Rastogi. In 2013, the three speakers co-curated ‘Zones of Contact’ at KNMA Noida. They will revisit the exhibition and several propositions made on the institution of the museum, in the current time of contactless-ness and countless contacts, and discuss shaping of their curatorial approaches.

Vidya Shivadas is a curator, and director of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in New Delhi. FICA is a not-for-profit organization that supports creative practitioners, researchers, curators and educators working in the field of contemporary art alongside developing education and outreach programmes. Since 2005, Shivadas has curated exhibitions at Vadehra Art Gallery, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, Edinburgh Arts Festival and Serendipity Arts Festival. Shivadas has been a visiting faculty at School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi, since 2013.  

Living between Geneva and New Delhi, Deeksha Nath has curated for museums, foundations, art fairs and galleries worldwide. She is currently Artistic Director of Terrain.art (to launch soon), desk editor at Art AsiaPacific, Hong Kong and she sits on the Board of Artreach India. She has previously worked at the Tate Galleries, London and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. She has published widely on contemporary Indian art and co-authored the Inscription of Ramlila on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. She was visiting faculty at Ashoka University; is a Charles Wallace scholar and recipient of the 2015 India Foundation for the Arts Museum Fellowship.

Akansha Rastogi is an artist and senior curator of exhibitions and programming at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi. She has served as associate curator of India Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and participated in curatorial residencies and visitorship programs. Her research focuses on exhibition histories of modern and contemporary Indian art, which she relays through lecture-performances and essays. She has curated several exhibitions at KNMA since 2011 including “Hangar for the Passerby” in 2017 that experimented with exhibitionary formats to explore ideas of collectivity, collective and collaborative practices. Rastogi has been an active member of formal, informal and short-lived artists-led initiatives, forums, and collectives in Delhi, such as WALA (with Paribartana Mohanty and Sujit Mallik). WALA has been making public art performances and projects since 2009.