Join us for a talk by Iftikhar Dadi reflecting on Pop South Asia, an exhibition that spotlighted artworks engaging with popular culture in South Asia.
Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular was a major exhibition on South Asian art engaging with popular culture. Spanning works from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the exhibition showcased an intergenerational dialogue through more than 100 artworks by artists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and its diasporas. It spotlighted artists who intervene in the aesthetics of print, cinematic and digital media, alongside those engaging with devotional practices, crafts, and folk culture; it presented artists addressing modes of local capitalism, from large-scale industries to vernacular bazaars, in company with those commenting on identity, politics, and borders.
Pop South Asia framed the region as a vantage point into developments that are regional and global, as much as they are subnational and national. It consequently brought to light practices relevant to parallel regions across the world, equally shaped by forces of capitalism and media as they continue to modernise and urbanise.
Exhibiting from 2022–23 at the Sharjah Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) New Delhi, Pop South Asia was curated by Iftikhar Dadi, artist and John H. Burris Professor at Cornell University, and Roobina Karode, Director and Chief Curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.
Free and open to the public with registration.
Moderators: Noopur Desai and Rattanamol Singh Johal
Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor and Chair of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art. He authored Lahore Cinema Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), and edited The Lahore Biennale Reader 01 (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). He co-edited Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and Their European Diasporas (2023); Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). As artists, Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi make collaborative work that explores questions of identity and borders, and the capacities of the informal urban realm in the Global South. They work in diverse mediums, including large-scale installations, often incorporating neon lights, mass-produced objects, photography, and sculpture. Their work draws on the tropes of archaeology and media, and critically engages with the legacies of Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and site-specificity.
Rattanamol Singh Johal is Assistant Director of the International Program at Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he works on the global research initiative, C-MAP, the Primary Documents publication series, and Co-Chairs the Contemporary Collection Working Group.
Noopur Desai is Researcher at Asia Art Archive in India.
