“A Government for Artists: Making Modern Art/Institution under Monarchy” by Dipti Sherchan at Institute for the Humanities
Institute for the Humanities Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar Series
April 2, 2024
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
BSB 153
Calendar
Download iCal FileThe Contested Academy and Proliferating Modernities: The Art of Nation Building in Nepal
This chapter introduces the making of a modern art/institution under an authoritarian monarchical regime popularly known as the Panchayat rule in Nepal during mid-twentieth century. I trace the historical genealogy of the National Association of Fine Arts (NAFA)within the context of the political patronage and cultural politics of institutionalizing a distinctly “modern” art ecosystem under the helm of the monarch Mahendra and crown-prince Birendra. I engage with theories of statecraft and multiple modernities to ask why and how institutions such as NAFA become a durable part of state assemblage. Methodologically, I draw from ethnographic encounters within/beyond the institutional and archival contexts of institution-making, art/artist-making, and exhibition-making both in the present and past. The aim of the chapter is to contextualize the emergence of a“modern” art institution within a broader political and cultural history of the making of a new nation in the global South.
In “The Contested Academy and Proliferating Modernities: The Art of Nation Building in Nepal,” Dipti Sherchan examines contestations between artist-subjects and the nation-state over competing imaginaries of what it means to be modern that proliferate over time. These proliferations are emergent in the shifting cultural projects of nation building as the Nepali state undergoes socio-political transitions from aristocracy to monarchy to a newly federal republic. This anthropological work engages with an interdisciplinary analytical framework that investigates complex artistic and institutional articulations from the Global South. This research is based on long-term ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2018-2022 in Kathmandu.
Date posted
Mar 27, 2024
Date updated
Mar 27, 2024