THE PLURAL TEMPORALITY OF THE NOTION OF THE PRIMITIVE

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lecture performance

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Starting with Santhal Family – the first modernist sculpture in India – and its specific relationship to primitivism within the Contextual Modernism at Santiniketan, where the work emerged, the lecture explores what the notion of "the Primitive" might mean in the context of a globalized landscape. While the term is outdated and entangled in colonial imaginaries, it reminds us of the unevenness that is only superficially erased in a globalizing world. The lecture further raises the question whether the Other of a global self might refer to epistemological alterity (different ways of knowing), rather than to actual people(s) – as the notion of “the Primitive” once implied. 

 

The lecture was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation that began in a formal manner, summarizing the text, then gradually drifted away from the content, eventually evolving into image-based metaphors that disrupted the lecture in a poetic way.

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The Plural Temporality of the Notion of the Primitive was presented at the Fine Art Department of Goldsmiths University of London, and at a Conference on Comparative Political Thought at SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 2016. The work was developed in collaboration with Katie Pickerell, who created the visuals.