How Not to be a Footnote to Western Art History

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In this keynote address, Adajania provided a glimpse into the research process and methodologies in her book The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf. Trained in political science, cinema, and art history, Adajania scrutinizes all inherited knowledge to urgently address that which has been marginalized, forgotten or misremembered. She has re-calibrated histories of Marxism, feminism and collaborative art by melding the abstractions of conventional art history with a situated politics of culture approach. In the broader context of contemporary Indian art, her critical investigations of lost, misremembered, or neglected histories also focus on producing regionally inflected vocabularies and histories that do not appear as mere footnotes to western art history.