Talks
From the Depth of the Mould: The making of the artist Meera Mukherjee
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
One of the most prolific sculptors of late 20th century India, Meera Mukherjee chose a mode of metal sculpting and a life-style that set her apart from most other artists of her time. The momentous turn in her career came with her first journey to Bastar in 1960, followed by a three-year country-wide study of traditional metal crafting communities and techniques. This in turn propelled the radical shift in her choice of sculpting methods and subjects, and more broadly in her notion of art as labour and collective practice.
Join Tapati Guha-Thakurta for a talk on her just-published edited volume, From the Depth of the Mould: Meera Mukherjee (1923-1998), A Centenary Tribute. It uses the metaphor of Meera Mukherjee’s elaborate mould-making and metal casting process to look closely at the themes of material and technique, individual and community work, struggle and resilience in her life story.
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Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Tapati Guha-Thakurta is a senior art and cultural historian who has written widely on modern Indian art, art institutions, and public visual culture. She is a retired professor of History and the former director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). Her work is located across the fields of art history, social and cultural history, and visual studies. While based in Kolkata for her entire professional career, she has given several lectures and keynote addresses in India and abroad, and held distinguished visiting fellowships in the USA. Her three main monographs are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992, reprint, 2008), Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015). The latest of her co-edited anthologies of essays is How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (co-editor Vazira Zamindar, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2023). She has also authored exhibition monographs and artist’s biographies – among them, In Her Own Right: Remembering Karuna Shaha (Calcutta; Seagull Books, 2000), Dharmanarayan Dasgupta: Representing the Bengali Modern (Calcutta: Galerie 88, 2000), Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal (Kolkata: Seagull, 2002), The Aesthetics of the Popular Print (Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, 2006) and The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (Calcutta: CSSSC, 2011).
