Keynote Lecture
5:30 pm
"In the Cock-Pit: Zoffany and the Performance of Empire in India"
Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art

This one-day graduate student symposium is informed by the recent proliferation of projects on India’s visual and material culture, including two exhibitions that opened at the Center in the fall of 2011: Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, which includes a substantial section devoted to the works the artist produced during his residence in India, between 1783 and 1789; and Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830, which concentrates on the complex networks of British and Indian artists, patrons, and scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Art, Agency, Empire: India in Global Contexts explores how, in a postcolonial period, it has become increasingly pressing to reevaluate India as a site of multifarious cultural (indeed intercultural) production, which has provoked global responses across media. The symposium is free and open to the public. Online registration is available from January 16 to February 9, 2012. Onsite registration is available on February 11 from 8:30 am.

The program will include breakout sessions in the Center’s exhibitions and collections and the following talks by graduate students.

Zirwat Chowdhury, Northwestern University
"Spolia Indica: George Dance the Younger’s ‘Hindoo-Gothic’ Guildhall Façade"

Laurel Peterson, Yale University
"Private Ambition, Public Display: Benjamin West’s Lord Clive Receiving the Grant of the Diwani"

Dipti Khera, Columbia University
"Picturing Architecture between Praise and Decline: Interpreting the Artistic Practice and Travels of Ghasi, 1800-35"

Shailka Mishra, Jawaharlal Nehru University
"Conceptualizing Space, Manifesting Power: Artists, Patrons and Mapmaking in 18th century Amber-Jaipur"

Radhika Natarajan, University of California, Berkeley
"The Place of India in ‘Our Family of Nations’: The Commonwealth Arts Festival, 1965"

Pankhuree Dube, Emory University
"The Politics of Authenticity: Gond Art and the Indian Modern, 1936-1964"

Varunika Saraf, Jawaharlal Nehru University
"Between a Museum and a Society: Revival of Paintings That Placed ‘Himachal Pradesh on the art map of the world’"