Past Futures of Old Media I Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad I Travelling Shrine I Home, talk by Karin Zitzewitz

Past Futures of Old Media:  Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home

 a lecture by

Karin Zitzewitz

Art Historian, Michigan State University, USA

Over the past decade, Gulammohammed Sheikh has extended his career-long exploration of narrative, autobiography, and place-making by experimenting simultaneously with new media and old forms of visual storytelling.  Sheikh’s monumental project, Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home, extends his longstanding inquiry into the relationship between painting and modernity, which appears here as a secular critique of art’s secularization.  This paper focuses on two aspects of Sheikh’s work—its critique of secularization and its use of digital media—in order to argue that Kaavad provides a crucial opening from which to observe how the artist’s longstanding engagement with the history of representation is based upon a sophisticated critique of historical time.  Sheikh’s Kaavad, in both its representation of his own past work and in its careful assembly of an historical archive of images and figures, offers to viewers an open-ended visual and narrative experience that is at once grounded in a pre-modern past and surprisingly future-oriented.  Overall, it constructs a counterfactual world history in which the secular is absent, and then asks us to re-imagine temporality.  Though sheltered in known artistic forms and authoritative historical precedents, it imagines alternative futures for the past and, therefore, provides a utopian alternative to the present.

Karin Zitzewitz is Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Michigan State University.  Her book, The Art of Secularism:  The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India, is forthcoming from Hurst & Co Publishers (UK) and Oxford University Press (US).  She occasionally curates, including Naiza Khan:  Karachi Elegies (2013) and an untitled exhibition of the work of Mithu Sen (2014), both at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.

Where Moth & Rust Decay I A Jewellery Exhibition by Katheryn Leopoldseder

Bleeding Images: Culture in a Time of Multiple Screens and Cameras, talk by Lawrence Liang, Sunday November 24 2013

Bleeding Images: Culture in a Time of Multiple Screens and Cameras

Photography and film’s emergence as ‘new media’ at the turn of the 19th century unsettled the ontological stability of visual arts. A century later we see a similar destabilizing of film with the emergence of a wide range of visual practices enabled by digital technology. The emergence of you tube and the rise of amateurism, the proliferation of new screens from tablets to smart phones which also double up as cameras – all of these developments raise the question of what it means to make sense of cultural production in the era of the digital. But is the move from analog to digital as seamless as it appears? In this talk I am interested in examining a set of ordinary digital objects such as surveillance videos, leaked images – all of which share an immediate proximity and distance from the cinematic image and pose the question of how we think of the internal contradiction even within the digital moment. I will examine a set of questions about the ethical stakes of what seems to be involved in the transition from digital to analog and link them to the question of the emerging regime of images in the era of the digital leak.

Lawrence Liang is a cultural scholar, theorist, legal researcher and lawyer based in Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co-founder of the Alternate Law Forum and has emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of intellectual property. Liang's key areas of interest are law, popular culture and piracy. He has been working closely with Sarai, New Delhi, on a joint research project on Intellectual Property and Knowledge / Culture Commons. Liang is a keen follower of the open source movement in software and has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. Liang is author of " Sex, Laws and Videotape: The Public is Watching" and "Guide to Open Content Licences" published by the Piet Zwart Institute in 2004. He is currently working on a book on Law, Justice and Cinema. He is one of the few scholars in India working on the influence of technology and new media on visual culture. He writes and lectures widely internationally.

Japanese tea ceremony is a tool for self-awareness and profound communication.

In East Asia, tea drinking culture has a long history; it has started more than 3,000 years ago. It is widely recognized that the tea plant is originated in Yunnan province in China.

It is a daily ritual to maintain physical and spiritual wellbeing of the people.

Sharing a tea time or tea ceremony together with someone helps to deepen the relationship because of the calming property of the tea plant-Camellia Synensis.

The origin of Japanese tea ceremony is found in Song dynasty(10th ~ 13th century) China. It was brought to Japan via Korean Peninsula as part of Zen practice.

After that Japanese people transformed the tea ceremony through the years in order to conduct a spiritual practice in daily life.

Tea ceremony became one of the main pillars of Japanese beauty.

In this introductory experience in 1.Shantiroad by a Japanese tea ceremony practitioner/visual artist Jyoti Naoki Eri will lead the journey to the profound world of tea ceremony.

He wishes to convey the metaphysic and underlying spiritual science of Japanese tea ceremony.

He says “It’s just an act of simply drinking tea, yet simple acts in daily life can be very profound. In its essence we are able to carry it on with a sustainable joy”.

Artist Talk and Film Screening I Thursday 14 November 2013 I 6:30pm onwards