Conversation

Art, Architecture and Postcolonial Nation-Building in Sri Lanka

Thu, May 5, 2022

12:00 PM–2:00 PM

To view the recording of this event can be found here.

How are the ideological forces of nationalism and the nation-state, geopolitics, and identity, visualized and spatialized in art and architecture? What are the possibilities and limitations of re-imagining home, community, and nation in Sri Lanka?

Offering a trajectory from the mid-20th century to today, Dr. Tariq Jazeel(Professor, Department of Geography, University College London, and author of Sacred Modernity: nature, environment and the postcolonial geographies of Sri Lankan nationhood), and Sharmini Pereira (Chief Curator, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, and Founder, Raking Leaves Publishing), will share and discuss insights on their work and projects, inviting us to reconsider the aesthetics of national formations through tropical modernism, language, translation and counter-hegemonic histories. The discussion will be moderated by Jin Wang and Deborah Phillip.

A list of resources shared in this session can be found here.

Organized by the James Gallery Mellon Global Art Fellow Jin Wang, and Deborah Philip (Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center) in conjunction with The Racial Imaginary Institute James Gallery Seminar on Nationalism.