Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008

In the 1990s and 2000s, contemporary art in India changed radically in form, as an art world once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance. In response to the liberalization of India’s economy, art was cultivated by a booming market as well as by new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. The result was an unprecedented efflorescence of contemporary art and growth of a network of institutions radiating out from India. Speaking from her new book, Infrastructure and Form, Karin Zitzewitz articulated the connections among formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. By untangling the complex interactions of infrastructure and form, Zitzewitz offered a discussion of the barriers and conduits that continue to shape global contemporary art and its relationship to capital more broadly.    

Speaker Bio

Karin Zitzewitz is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. An art historian, anthropologist, and curator, her latest research is collected in Infrastructure and Form: Globalization, Contemporary Art, India (University of California Press, 2022). Her earlier books are The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (Hurst/Oxford, 2014) and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (Chemould, 2003). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Fulbright program.  At Michigan State, Zitzewitz is core faculty in the Global Studies in Arts and Humanities Program and Muslim Studies Program, and is affiliated faculty with the Asian Studies Center and the Center for Interdisciplinarity (c4i).