Prof. Iftikhar Dadi presents on “Abstraction and Modernism” at the Clark Art Institute
For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Research and Academic Program (RAP) at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., a four-day conference, Writing Art History, foregrounded how writing art history is changing rapidly.
Dadi presented at the panel on Thursday, June 26, 2025.
PANEL 1: 9 AM–12 PM
Resisting nativist cultural politics on the one hand and art history’s Eurocentrism in the matters of theory on the other, the panel takes off from an article titled "The Work of Theory: Thinking Across Traditions” by Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey in 2016 published in the Economic and Political Weekly, to propose that “we move from the position of being a critic of Western theory to that being a composer and assembler of a new theory from different sources and histories.” Theorists from the global south and the global north will gather to explore writing an art history that leaves open the possibility of abstract thinking and self-reflexivity in the non-European knowledge systems and aesthetic theories.
Speakers:
Parul Dave Mukherji, convener, professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Iftikhar Dadi, professor of History of Art, Cornell University, on “Abstraction and Modernism”
James Elkins, chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, on “Reconceptualizing Global Art History”
Prita Meier, associate professor of Art History, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, on “The Indian Ocean as Method: Beyond the ‘Cross-Cultural’ Paradigm in Art History”
Keith Moxey, professor emeritus of Art History, Barnard College, New York, on “Decolonization Now”
Sugata Ray, associate professor, History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, on “Eco Art History from the Global South: Genealogies, Methodologies, Practices”
https://www.clarkart.edu/event/detail/2854-92242
