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Unpacking Family Collections: Personal Archives and Public Art Histories - with Ranjit Hoskote & Indira Chowdhury, moderated by Tapati Guha-Thakurta

The collaborative online exhibition, “The Art of the Painted Postcard: Nandalal Bose and his Contemporaries”, has largely grown out of the rediscovery and a gift of a family collection of painted postcards by Nandalal Bose to the visual archives of the Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre (JBMRC), a unit of the CSSSC. Like family photographs, postcards written by artists and writers to friends and family have always belonged to the private domain, from which it is now flowing into public collections. Marking this transition, this exhibition underscores the importance of archiving and documentation side by side with art collecting and museum making.

This closing panel discussion around the exhibition intends to explore the new primacy of family collections to think about (i) how personal and professional worlds coalesce in the ambit of postcard writing, making this field of sketching and correspondence a crucial archive for new directions in art history, and (ii) the space of the home, with its multi-generational memories and preserved memorabilia, can lend themselves to the writing of public histories. We hope to develop the conversation around this intertwining of the private and the public, and the coming together of oral, visual and written testimonies, as family archives become public historical and artistic resources.

Speakers in the Panel:
Ranjit Hoskote,
Poet, critic and cultural theorist

Indira Chowdhury,
Historian and archivist

Moderator:
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Art-historian and curator of the exhibition

Jan 7, 2021 07:00 PM in India