The Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy (ACUA), Vadodara, was formed in February 2008 to revitalise and enrich universities as prime centres of higher education, prevent the erosion of university autonomy and constitutional provisions sustaining it, and advocate the idea that the university is a space to nurture the public imagination. ACUA has pursued the above objectives by organising workshops, public lectures, seminars and conferences in collaboration with individuals and educational institutions, thus working towards establishing a creative-critical interface between universities and the public.

Recognising the dire need for curatorial studies, ACUA will organise a travelling workshop series ‘Curating Indian Visual Culture: Theory and Practice’ that will seek to engage with new perspectives on curation. The material generated through these workshops will form the basis of a Curatorial Studies Course that will be designed at a colloquium held at the end of the three-year grant period.

One of the crucial reasons for the glaring absence of critical curating in India is the lack of supportive institutional systems that encourage and enable the various practitioners in the field to conceptualise and materialise their critical quests. Through a series of five workshops across the country and in-house discussion with academics, curators and artists from varying disciplines, the field will be mapped, problems identified, and the potential of curatorial practice in the context of Indian visual culture will be understood. The project will conclude with a colloquium to conceptualise an academic curriculum for curatorial studies.

Each workshop will have 15 participants including M.A. level students and interested arts professionals with eight seats reserved for local participants. There will be four to five resource persons (possibly one international resource person) for each workshop, which will be held for a span of six days. The workshop is structured as a research oriented project, which will include presentations by the resource people with discussions around each presentation. It will also include a thorough discussion of the key reading material as well as the curatorial projects conceived by the participants. After the completion of each workshop, its contents will be published on a dedicated website for the project to enable fiirther discussion around the subject, as the workshop series develop.

The venues for these workshops have been tentatively identified as Vadodara, Jammu, Kochi, Shillong, Goa/Hyderabad and Bangalore, The distribution of these workshops across the country aims at enabling the development of a curriculum that deals with particular regions and their local concerns and issues. Smaller towns and relatively ‘side-lined’ regions will be focus areas because metro-centric approaches to the cultural practices of India of the last many decades have not been able to engage with many pertinent questions around regional discourses. To begin addressing these questions of regional modemities or many modernisms, the workshops will initiate a discussion to understand/frame the cultural/political ethos of those regions. For instance, in the case of the Shillong, a specific chapter would be added which deals with me questions of ethnicity, the concept of nation»state and the ways in which regional/ethnic aspirations are represented in national cultural institutions. In the case of Vadodara, a special emphasis would be given to mainstream art institutional practices, addressing issues such as various genres, schools of thoughts and styles. However, none of these special emphases are exclusive to any one workshop; only the quantum of discussions around focal areas may vary according to the needs of the specific locations. The contents of each workshop would also vary substantially according to the interests of the participants.

Most art schools in India are moribund in terms of their approach to arts teaching—particularly in the areas of museology and art history—and there is little, if any, recognition of the discipline of curatorship. This initiative will be a first step towards re-conceptualising curatorial practices, especially in a context in which pedagogical recognition of curatorial theory and practice is absent. Considering the multi/inter disciplinary character of curatorial practices. This initiative will envisage a curriculum which addresses contemporary challenges in a much more holistic manner. This is one of the central reasons behind the idea of conceptualising the curriculum through a series of workshops in different parts of the country rather than following the usual approach of curriculum development, which only reorganises existing practices in a centralised way. Also a critical process has been envisaged at the outset itself, instead of merely implementing a set of pre-given ideas in the form of a course structure. This move certainly invokes a much more decentralised conceptual framework, and brings forth possibilities of addressing local, regional and community specific questions.

It is hoped that this unique curriculum devising process will eventually lead to the implementation of a curatorial studies course within a recognised institution in India, thus, signifying that the practice of curating has begun to be recognised as an important discipline in the arts.

 

This description is part of the institutional records created by IFA at the onset of the grant. The project may have changed in due course as reflected in the deliverables from the Grantee.