LOOKING AFTER LIBERALISATION: ETHNOGRAPHY, CONCEPTUAL DRIFT, AND THE PROBLEM OF VISUAL MAKING IN INDIAN CONTEMPORARY ART
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29121/shodhkosh.v7.i8s.2026.7369Keywords:
Indian Contemporary Art, Liberalisation, Ethnography, Visuality, Pedagogy, Conceptual ArtAbstract [English]
Since the economic upheaval of 1991, modern Indian art has been moving more and more toward research-based and ethnographic methodologies. What started as a plan to fix social division, political violence, and the effects of forgetting history has slowly become part of the institution. This study investigates the nuanced shift in the equilibrium between cognition and perception resulting from that consolidation.
I use Henri Bergson's ideas about duration, Jacques Rancière's ideas about the distribution of the sensible, Fredric Jameson's ideas about late capitalism, and Ann Cvetkovich's ideas about emotional archives to show a conceptual shift in post-liberalisation art. The artwork is progressively susceptible to transforming into a medium for argumentation—explicit, research-backed, and discursively fortified—rather than a domain of perceptual uncertainty or visual involvement. The study analyses the reconfiguration of form, audience engagement, and pedagogy within the framework of liberalization, focusing on the methodologies of Shilpa Gupta, Riyas Komu, Gigi Scaria, Raqs Media Collective, and CAMP. I support a renewed emphasis on emotion, duration, and visual thinking, rather than rejecting ethnographic or conceptual approaches. This is not a retreat from politics, but a necessary complication of it in modern art and its pedagogy.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Jaynat K. Gupta, Dr. Raj Kumar Singh, Anoop Daniel Ponnachan, Anupriya Rajawat, Dr. Megha Attray Purohit
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