Our Time for a Future Caring: Gandhi, transcultural curation and mnemonic care
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Querol, Nuria and Chidgey, Red. 2024. 'Our Time for a Future Caring: Gandhi, transcultural curation and mnemonic care'. In: "Memories in Transit", 8th Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, Peru 18 - 20 July 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]
No full text availableAbstract or Description
The figure of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) – the 'Great Soul' – has achieved global memory status. A lawyer, social activist and leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British imperial rule, Gandhi is well-remembered and commemorated for his doctrine of nonviolent protest as a tool for political resistance and social change. Gandhi's memory has travelled transnationally, transculturally, and transmedially across generations, forming aspects of India's 'soft power' and nation brand building (Wagner 2010), and consolidating into a malleable memory commons referenced by multiple social movements (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002). In recent years, this settled memory of Gandhi as inspiration, hope and apex of transformative social change activism has become contested, with new memory sites and claims coming into view. Statues of Gandhi have been vandalised in Johannesburg and London following reports of Gandhi's anti-Black racism when living in South Africa (BBC 2015, 2021), and a statue of Gandhi was removed from the University of Ghana campus following student and faculty protests (BBC, 2018).
With these tensions in mind – both the travelling nature of Gandhi's memory and its 'fixed' and 'undone' uses and contestations – in this presentation we examine the curation of Gandhi's legacy through the exhibition Our Time for a Future Caring (2019), curated by Roobina Karode for the India Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale. Taking place at one of the artworld's most prestigious platforms, as a collaboration between the Ministry of Culture and the Confederation of Indian Industry, the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Our Time for a Future Caring took as its curatorial prompt the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. The exhibition drew together eight inter-generational Indian artists showcasing works that respond to the memory and philosophies of Gandhi, his "acts of resistance and recuperation" (Karode 2019), across the mediums of sculpture, painting, video installation, mixed-media and performance.
In conversation with works such as Covering Letter (2012) by Jitish Kallat, which remediates a historical correspondence from Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler in 1939, before the start of World War II, and Ashim Purkayastha's works on postage and revenue stamps that alters Gandhi's memory images, this presentation will consider the creative practices of memory curation, and the links between art, memory and imaginaries for change.
Methodologically, the presentation combines an analysis of the exhibition discourses, curatorial strategies, artworks, press materials, interviews and art reviews, to consider how transcultural modes of curating social justice memories take place, within and across borders, and across temporalities (to speak to the future). We unpack the provocation Our Time for a Future Caring and its relation to memory practices and ideas, to argue for a closer consideration of how activist memories are mobilised – and made to move – within the constraints of institutional frameworks (an international biennale, with governmental and private funding) and the possibilities of artistic and curatorial practices (calling upon the imagination).
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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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| Event Location: |
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, Peru |
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| Date range: |
18 - 20 July 2024 |
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| Item ID: |
39110 |
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| Date Deposited: |
10 Jul 2025 11:01 |
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| Last Modified: |
10 Jul 2025 11:01 |
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