
2025 | ‘a stake in the contemporary’ | ‘Speech Acts’ by Geeta Kapur
a stake in the contemporary
Panel discussion to mark the publication of
Speech Acts by Geeta Kapur
9 February 2025, 6.30 pm
Seminar Halls 1, 2 & 3, Kamaladevi Complex, India International Centre, New Delhi

Saloni Mathur | Ranjit Hoskote | Udaya Kumar | Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Art critic and curator Geeta Kapur’s writings engage with modernity, emphasizing alongside the need to identify the contradictions that undergird it. She has traversed a situated discourse across categories such as the Third World, the postcolonial and the global South. In Speech Acts, she problematizes her own discourse by marking historical disjunctures, by tracking cultural anomalies in the contemporary. The essays, lectures and interviews that constitute this book range from manifesto-like assertions to the more reflexive, wherein the relationship between subjectivity, aesthetics and practice, above all, is endorsed.
Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Speech Acts (2025), Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2025). She was a founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, advisory board member of Third Text and Marg. Her curatorial projects include: ‘Dispossession’, Johannesburg Biennale (1995); ‘Bombay/Mumbai’ (co-curator, Ashish Rajadhyaksha), Century City, Tate Modern, London (2001); ‘subTerrain’, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); ‘Aesthetic Bind’, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (five exhibitions, 2013–14). She is a Trustee of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), Delhi, and general editor of the Art Documents series published by SSAF–Tulika Books.
Saloni Mathur is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 2024/25. Her areas of interest include modern and contemporary South Asian art; migration, diaspora, and postcolonial criticism; decolonization and aesthetics; and museum studies in a global frame. Her most recent book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, was published by Duke University Press in 2019 and is available on-line as part of an Open-Access initiative at the following link: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22291
Udaya Kumar is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His publications include Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016) and The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and papers on literary and cultural theory, as well as modern literature from India, especially Kerala. His recent research has focused on death and contemporary culture, forms of life writing, cultural histories of the body, and idioms of vernacular social thought.
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, translator, cultural theorist and curator. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Jonahwhale (2018), Hunchprose (2021) and Icelight (2023), and more than thirty books, including the translation of a 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic’s compositions, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (2011) and a translation of the 18th-century Urdu poet, Mir Taqi Mir, The Homeland’s an Ocean (2024). In 2011, Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Hoskote has curated numerous exhibitions in India and globally. In 2022, he co-convened, with Ravi Agarwal, the interdisciplinary platform State of Nature.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and an occasional art curator. He is the author of Ritwik Ghatak: A Return the Epic (1982), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009), The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011) and John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers’ Hackers (2023). He co-curated the Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001 section (with Geeta Kapur) of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern (2002), the You Don’t Belong festival of film and video in four cities in China (2011) and Memories of Cinema at the IVth Guangzhou Triennial, 2011, and the exhibition Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface: Mani Kaul & Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video at the Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur (Jan–Mar 2017).