Diksha Dhar

Diksha has just submitted her PhD thesis at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and her interest lies in the visual methods of studying history; the possible emergence of a ‘viewing public’; and their significance within the larger sphere of the city. For this fellowship, Diksha will attempt to put together an exhibition that will explore the visual corpus of the city at work. She will study the different tropes of the city that are recognised as distinct ‘Kolkata experiences’ through various spatio-temporal worlds and registers. For this contrastive study she will draw on the curative techniques of Dr Barnes and his display at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, USA, where he showcased different artworks alongside each other, irrespective of their place of origin, painter, genre or medium, to highlight intertextual aesthetic practices that are at work despite their spatio-temporal and medial divergences. Some of the strands that Diksha plans to pursue are: infrastructure of the city, geographical sites, streets of North Kolkata, festivals, food etc. She will narrow down her choice once she begins working in the archive.

Diksha will also organise a series of public events around the select themes in order to bring in a variety of audiences to the exhibition. As ‘the viewing public’ and their responses, are an integral part of her proposal, Diksha will try and observe audience reaction over a period of time. The Fellow’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be process images, audio recordings, images from the exhibition, texts and publication, if any.

This fellowship is made possible with support from Tata Trusts.