Akshaya Tankha (Yale University), “An Aesthetics of Endurance and Emergence: art, visual culture, and Indigenous presence in Nagaland, India” (South Asian Studies Council)

In this talk, Akshaya Tankha will discuss the tensions that animate the reconstitution of Indigenous cultural forms as sculpture, monument, and museum demonstrate that the contemporaneity of Indigenous art is tied to—rather than distant from—the ever-changing corporeality of Indigenous lifeworlds in contemporary South Asia. Rather than the popular and scholarly relegation of Indigenous art to an archaic past and/or a ruptured present, Tankha argues that art and visual culture in Nagaland’s post-ceasefire political field shows us the importance of Indigenous art in terms of the political significance of the aesthetic.