Art and Activism in India | Lecture by Deeptha Achar

​Art and Activism in India​ By ​Deeptha Aachar ​​Saturday, ​1​6th ​September 2017 at 6 pm ​The popular is a site that has been endorsed in the recent past as a field fit for art activity; since then the popular has taken many shapes, has performed many functions within the province of art. One of the key functions of the popular in art has been to set up alliances between art and what might be broadly designated as the arena of activism. However, the conceptual fit between art and activism, globally as well as nationally, has a short history. Art making practices that carried a self-conscious and evident ideological positioning in the first half of the twentieth century were derisively dismissed as propaganda. Posters and films which rendered the political aesthetic during the World Wars played a significant role in such characterizations. It is only when the identitarian movements of the 1960s and 70s took shape that the ideological weight of art production, even in the domain of "high" art, came to be acknowledged without embarrassment. The new forms of collective action devised by the these movements and also the loose alliances they forged between the popular and elite helped construct art that was self-consciously political and that was recognized as being a part of concerted ideological action. Side by side, new readings of the popular in art have emerged alongside activist moves within the domain of art. These developments have clearly been enabled by a shift in frameworks of viewing art in the academy and in the public domain as well. It has led to the relocation of what was hitherto positioned quite unproblematically as “high” art into the domain of activism. This paper will track the relationship between activism and art, partly through a reading of the SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust), an institution that has consistently straddled the domain of art and activism since the late 1980s. ​Deeptha Achar is ​Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, MS University, Vadodara.​ She studied English Language and Literature at Bangalore University, Karnataka, and Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. Her recent publications include Discourse, Democracy and Difference: Perspectives on Community, Politics and Culture (2010) and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012). Her research interests include visual culture and childhood studies.