Art and Emergency

Book at Lunchtime, Art and Emergency During states of emergency,
normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail.
In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for
violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. Art
and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India asks: what
happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the
uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history,
Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and
postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the
history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged
from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal,
fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo
Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of
Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how
Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of
massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current
debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers
our understanding of the history of modernism.