The Workshop in the History of Material Texts will be welcoming Sonal Khullar for her talk entitled: "Wartime Gifts: Contemporary Artists' Books from Sri Lanka" on Monday, Oct 16th, at 5:15 PM Eastern Time. We will convene in the Class of 1978 Pavilion, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
You can also join the workshop online using this Zoom link:
https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98629925933?pwd=cDV3aThpNjlYbHRTMVp5U3JBZGVMQT09
Sonal Writes:
This presentation considers The One Year Drawing Project (2008) and The Incomplete Thombu (2011), artists’ books commissioned by the independent publisher Raking Leaves during and after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009). Citing historical practices of artmaking, bookmaking, and gifting in South Asia, these books oppose the logic of official narratives and grand monuments and create a place for art and memory “when gallery spaces do not exist,” as the curator Sharmini Pereira puts it. They illuminate a distinct aesthetics and politics of time, home, document, and archive in Sri Lanka and postcolonial and ‘postconflict’ societies more broadly. They also exemplify how artistic collaboration has emerged as a critical response to conflict between and within nation-states in South Asia since the 1990s. Such collaborations challenge hegemonies–of metropolitan artists and institutions, the art world centers of Delhi and Mumbai, and a regional and international system of exhibitions—through alternative modes of production, exhibition, circulation, and distribution for contemporary art.
Sonal Khullar is the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (University of California Press, 2015) and editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (University of Washington Press, 2023). She is completing a book manuscript, The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia, under advance contract with the University of California Press.