Abstract
Contemporary art, as a simple concept, is supposed to be an art of today, but a significant number of practicing global artists reference the past with their work. In India, contemporary artists, such as Nikhil Chopra, Pushpamala N., and Raqs Media Collective, produce art that revisits the representational legacies of India’s past. Their work explores the visual culture of nineteenth-century British colonial India and the critical importance placed during this period on the visual representation of colonial-subject identity. This chapter explores their work as examples of an “art of memory”—art that resurrects and reimagines archival imagery, offering critique, but also revealing how representations from the past, which get configured as memories, continue to condition the present as well as future. The work of Chopra and Raqs, this chapter also argues, reveals an ambivalence and incompleteness in regard to colonial legacies and modern identity that become apparent through artistic negotiation.
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Notes
- 1.
The word “durbar” derives from a Persian term meaning “court.”
- 2.
Sardar Singh, whose power in Jodhpur was restricted by British colonial officials, nevertheless played a significant role in extending the railway—another colonial technology—from Jodhpur to Hyderabad.
- 3.
For example, a loose representation of Chopra’s paternal grandfather, Yog Raj Chopra, an amateur landscape painter from Kashmir, frequently appears in the artist’s work.
- 4.
Many of Tipu Sultan’s material possessions were looted by soldiers in the immediate aftermath of his death, but one object—a semi-automaton tiger that mauls a European soldier—was sent to London and put on display commemorating the conquest of Tipu Sultan and the fall of a “despot.” During the nineteenth century, the tiger was one of the most popular exhibits in the East India Company’s museum. This object, known as Tipu’s Tiger, now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, continues to be a work of great curiosity.
- 5.
In 2017 Raqs produced film-like video-objects at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Tipu’s Tiger that set out to transform the eighteenth-century relic into a meditation on history and its potential.
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Waits, M.R. (2020). The Art of Memory: Tracing the Colonial in Contemporary India. In: Grenier, K., Mushal, A. (eds) Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_13
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