We are delighted to invite you to join in this seminar series, 'Six Readings on Time', conceptualised and designed by Kaiwan Mehta, PhD, in conjunction with our third online exhibition, Inherited Memory. This seminar series is supported by and developed under the aegis of TARQ Gallery, Mumbai.
About Six Readings- On Time:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
— T S Eliot in The Waste Land
Events, situations, and occasions are scattered within the Milky Way of TIME; but TIME also exists within the details of dust, ornament, walking feet, resistance, closed doors, a blooming flower or rotting fruit, ruins, stories, waste, and even arrogance. As we jump to new toys such as post-pandemic and ‘new normal’ what we forget is how TIME exists across pre- and post- as well as new and old... TIME bridges across epochs and events as well as creates multiple ecologies of existence. In these times we discuss space, materiality, and aesthetics to build a better understanding of TIME.
A seminar of readings, a continuing-education programme to help students and professionals engage with texts - words and visuals, within the fields of city studies, architecture, arts and culture, and the visual studies.
About Dr. Kaiwan Mehta
This is seminar series is conceptualized and designed by Kaiwan Mehta, PhD
All lectures will be conducted by Kaiwan Mehta, a theorist and critic in the fields of architecture, city studies, and visual culture, he is the author of two books, and has co-curated two national exhibitions on Architecture and Housing in India amongst other independently curated exhibitions. An academic and researcher he teaches and works within the university as well as various para-academic platforms. He is currently the managing editor of DOMUS India as well as professor and programme chair of the Doctoral Programme at Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University.
Reading 01: 9th June, 2020
Six Readings on Time: TIME and the nature of our CITIES
This session will discuss how the nature of speed or kinetics builds our cities as ecologies of work, migration, scales of architecture, along with memories, close-ness and crowd; reading Georg Simmel, Rahul Mehrotra, Eyal Weizmann and Alice in Bhuleshwar, bringing in references from A City Adrift, 100 Years—100 Voices, and Bombay: Cities Within.
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Reading 02: 12th June 2020
Six Readings on Time: TIME and the nature of PUBLIC
This session will focus on the nature of how we come and live together as people over time — how crossing time people come together and build relationships while navigating places, through memory, narrations, and nostalgia or rituals of public-ness; reading Richard Sennett, Jane Jacobs, along with Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Kajri Jain and Annapurna Garimella.
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Reading 03: 16th June 2020
Six Readings on Time: TIME and MATERIAL Histories for INDIA
This session focuses on moments in history that shape the idea and notions of Indian-ness, a changing ‘imagined constant’ and how material objects physically defined in time, articulate or change their meanings and relationships negotiating history — we read from A K Coomaraswamy to Tapati Guha-Thakurta, to Romi Khosla and Ranjit Hoskote.
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Reading 04: 19th June 2020
Six Readings on Time: TIME and the sense of REPOSITORY / ARCHIVES
This session will look at notions of collecting and preserving as a sense of recovering or writing notions of time, memory, loss and recuperation; or writing and rewriting cultures and their histories of restoration and reimagination; we read here Walter Benjamin and Kavita Singh, along with Jyotindra Jain.
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Reading 05: 23rd June 2020
Six Readings on Time: TIME and the ARTIST as CHRONICLER
This session will engage with the works of artists and how the poetics, narrativity and language of their work allow us readings of time, space, imagination and decay, love and longing; we read in to the works of artists such as Sudhir Patwardhan, Jitish Kallat, and Sahaj Rahal (involving writings on their work from Ranjit Hoskote, Girish Shahane, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and others) as well as the writer and poet Ruth Padel.
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Reading 06: 26th June 2020
Six Readings on Time: TIME and the notions of CRAFT / MAKING
This session will discuss how notions of craft and making involve a sense of building up over a duration along with notions of preservation, and accumulating skill and knowledge with time, over generations, and yet often processes of making or craft symbolise a sense of time-past and time-future; beginning with references to Adolf Loos, Hal Foster, and Richard Sennet, we read in detail the research of Annapurna Garimella and Nancy Adajania.