Vicisitudes de la contemporaneidad ante la dualidad urbana/rural de las artes de India: en torno al caso de Jagdish Swaminathan y el Bhārat Bhavan de Bhopal

Sergio Román Aliste

doi:10.5565/rev/indialogs.77

Vicissitudes of contemporaneity faced with urban/rural duality of arts in India: around Jagdish Swaminathan and the Bhārat Bhavan of Bhopal

Authors

Sergio Román Aliste Universidad Complutense de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1225-0122

PDF (ES)

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of the difficult inclusion in the contemporaneity of those arts emerging from the edges of modernity, given the contemporaneity as a supposedly enveloping field. The coexistence in time does not seem to be enough to consider certain arts, as handicrafts or tribal arts, as indissoluble part of the space of “contemporary art”. The Indian artist Jagdish Swaminathan carried out, from the criticism to that approach, a work, both in the theory as in the practice, applied to the Bhārat Bhavan in Bhopal, which is critically examined here through the concept of contemporaneity. The proposal of this paper defends the idea of Bhārat Bhavan as an innovative project in the international context of the 80’s, but with a limited projection due to the historical vicissitudes it suffered.

Keywords

Contemporaneity, Jagdish Swaminathan, Bhārat Bhavan, handicrafts, tribal art, ādivāsīs, primitivism

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Author Biography

Sergio Román Aliste, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Doctor en Historia del Arte (UCM, 2015) con una tesis sobre arte y pedagogía en torno al proyecto de Rabindranath Tagore en Santiniketan (Bengala Occidental). Coordinador del Título de Especialista UCM en Arte de India (desde 2015). Ha sido investigador invitado en SOAS (University of London), Visva-Bharati University (Santiniketan, India) y American Institute of Indian Studies (Delhi).