New Scholarship on Contemporary Art, September 08, 2021
ACSAA invites members to the virtual dissertation workshop of Kaitlin Emmanuel & Sayantan Mukhopadhyay on Wednesday, September 8, 12:00 to 1:30pm EST. This is an ACSAA Members only event. Please click here for the event link.
Kaitlin Emmanuel
Title: M.I.A. Afterlives: Strategies of Reproduction in Maya Arulpragasam’s Arular
Bio: Kaitlin Emmanuel is a PhD Candidate in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. Her dissertation project examines the mobilization of visual production in the face of state persecution and violence in Sri Lanka from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary period.
Abstract: The London-based visual and recording artist Maya Arulpragasam, known by her public persona M.I.A., broke onto the music scene in the early 2000s with the widely-acclaimed album Arular. While the album jumpstarted her success, it also marked the beginning of numerous controversies. The album’s art work, music videos, and lyrics invoke images closely associated with Tamil nationalism and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), thus drawing attention to M.I.A.’s proximity to Tamil militancy by way of her father and her own identity as a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka. On one extreme of the controversy, critics claim her album’s pop-inspired aesthetic both commodifies and takes an explicit political stance condoning violence. Another extreme
questions whether a figure like M.I.A. can even be political given her over reliance on aesthetics in place of a consistent and substantive political ideology. Both extremes mischaracterize the aesthetic and political as traits, as something that passively results from an artist’s intent or stylistic choices. I depart from this binary by calling attention to the numerous social processes and histories
inscribed onto the production of Arular that enable its political potential. I examine the album’s
release against the backdrop of the Global War on Terror, which shifted the trajectory of the war
in Sri Lanka and drastically increased surveillance of the Tamil diaspora and other diasporic
communities from the Global South. I also consider the role of satellite and internet technology in
expanding the production of multimedia in the Tamil diaspora, and their relationship to the images
and videos collected by M.I.A. to write, produce, and conceive of Arular.
Sayantan Mukhopadhyay
Title: Friends & Family: Queer Collaborations in Myself Mona Ahmed (2001)
Bio: Sayantan Mukhopadhyay is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his research focuses on contemporary art from India. Prior to his time in Los Angeles, Sayantan worked in Shanghai, New Delhi, and New York in various roles in the arts, publishing, and education. He holds a BA in Art History and Comparative Literature from Williams College.
Abstract: Dayanita Singh’s photo project Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) follows the story of Mona, a hijra from New Delhi, across the span of a decade. In a publication that blurs distinctions between book, art object, and epistolary archive, Singh documents Mona’s turbulent life through a seemingly endless stream of black-and-white photographs. Refusing the role of silent muse, Mona writes long messages to the Swiss publisher that accompany these semi-biographical images. In her letters, she speaks at length about the injustices she faces as a member of the hijra community living in an India experiencing seismic changes in its sociopolitical and economic landscapes.
Using friendship, intimacy, and queer kinship as models to interrogate the relationship between the book’s two key contributors, I contend that Myself Mona Ahmed is less a taxonomic biography of Mona than a story of radical solidarity between Mona and Singh that cuts across lines of class, caste, religion, and gender identity. Amidst the complex social hierarchies that exist in India, opportunities for an upwardly mobile cis-woman from South Delhi to form a meaningful entanglement with a Muslim hijra from the city’s outskirts are otherwise incredibly rare. I argue, therefore, that Myself Mona Ahmed exposes the transformative power of queer friendships to reorganize and reorder possibilities in both community-building and in artistic authorship. In doing so, I challenge dominant art historical models that seek to ascribe authorial mastery to singular artists in a hagiographic fashion, violently erasing untold stories of collaboration and mutual care.