Zehra Jumabhoy

Recent calls to ‘decolonise’ university curricula, museums, and public spaces have inspired a reckoning with the complicity of art and art history in the practice and legacy of empire. Responding to these debates, this year the Aberystwyth Art History Research Seminar Series provides a forum for those working in and alongside art history to reflect upon ways in which we might transform and broaden our practices. Zehra’s talk, Heights & Hubris? will focus on mountain scenery in Indian and Welsh paintings, which are often identified with the search for the Sublime as well as the rise of nationalist sentiment. The paper will include a discussion of Abanindranath Tagore’s alpine paintings and touch on Welsh nationalism’s fascination with mountains (for instance, the craggy peaks of painter John Kyffin Williams).

Join the debate here.

Course description

Encompassing ‘virtual visits’ to studios and museums, this Course will re-dress definitions of femininity, masculinity and the in-between in contemporary South Asian art. It will show how conventional notions of gender have been re-vamped by artists in South Asia and its diasporas. The idea of the ‘demure’ South Asian woman haunts the popular imagination; both in the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. Alternatively covered up (behind the veil) or exposed as a sexy fetish for an Orientalizing male gaze, she is de-nuded of agency. In fact, stereotypes notwithstanding, the Indian and Pakistani artworlds are dominated by women artists, collectors, gallerists and theorists.

Starting from the British Raj’s de-masculinisation of the South Asian male body, lectures will go on to discuss how Indian and Pakistani artists riff on (and traverse) gender roles. We will encounter artworks as diverse as the miniature-inspired offerings of Pakistani New Yorker Shahzia Sikander, the cartographic ruminations of the late ‘diasporic’ print-maker Zarina Hashmi and Indian Nalini Malani’s video-shadow plays, governed by powerful female protagonists. Fashion-centred, feminist fun will ensue!

Course information here.