Art Histories Seminar
Di. 19 Nov. 2013 | 15:00–17:30

Colonial Shadows: Vision and Space in Modern Indian Art

Niharika Dinkar (Art Histories Fellow 2013/14)

Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Raja Ravi Varma, Man Reading a Newspaper, c. 1904. Oil on Canvas, Trivandrum: Sri Chitra Art Gallery.
Raja Ravi Varma, Man Reading a Newspaper, c. 1904. Oil on Canvas, Trivandrum: Sri Chitra Art Gallery.

Colonial Shadows: Vision and Space in Modern Indian Art addresses the legacy of colonial visuality in nineteenth century Indian painting and visual culture. It explores the role of light and darkness in the production of spaces, geographical, pictorial and architectural in the visual culture of Empire. The nineteenth century mapped the world in terms of ‘cities of light’ and ‘hearts of darkness’ and the rhetoric of the civilizing mission frequently employed devices of illumination like torches or the lifting of the veil to usher the native subject into a sphere of enlightened rationality. The project examines how such visual tropes figured in colonial art and culture, the notions of space they engendered and how Indian painting both adopted and resisted colonial visual ideologies. In particular, the talk will look at two paintings by Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) that employ chiaroscuro to examine how pictorial and architectural spaces were re-imagined to convey depth and interiority and the very idea of a private life.
 

Niharika Dinkar is Assistant Professor for art history at Boise State University and current fellow Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices (2013/14).

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