In this talk, Akshaya Tankha explores wood-carved objects made by artists in contemporary Nagaland, an Indigenous and predominantly Christian state in India, showing how they enact the plural and layered temporality of art and the Indigenous present, which challenges their relegation to a static past or ruptured present.

Akshaya Tankha (Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow, History of Art, University of Michigan) is an art historian of modern and contemporary South Asia. His research is focused on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and postcolonialism in India. Tankha's current book project, tentatively titled “Nagaland and the Art of Indigenous Presence in Postcolonial South Asia” is on art, visual culture, and the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously-inhabited and contested borderlands of northeast India.

This lecture is organized by Dismantling the Canon, the UW Graduate Students of Art History (GSAH) reading group, and is generously supported by the UW South Asia Center and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Please contact gsah@uw.edu for Zoom link