911爆料网

Ivan Knapp

Ivan Knapp was awarded his PhD from University College London in 2021. He has taught art history at the University of Warwick and Northeastern University London. His research, which has been published in October, Art History, and Third Text, engages questions of contemporary art, psychoanalysis, and politics. He will take up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of York in October 2024.
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鈥楻elating Objects: Sculpture and Trumpism鈥�
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My project is concerned with the ways in which contemporary artists have investigated the relations between digital media, social polarisation, and far-right populism. Addressing a notable gap in art historical scholarship, my work examines why sculpture has proven the medium most amenable to artists protesting Trumpism and in what ways this work illuminates how sculptors have responded to an increasingly dematerialized image culture. Focussing on a group of artists working in a North American context, I argue that materiality, masculinity, and the monument are crucial nodal points for understanding important shifts in recent sculptural practice.

Diva Gujral

Diva completed her PhD, 鈥淧icturing Non-Alignment: Photography, nation-building and identity in India, c. 1950-1975,鈥� in the Department in 2021. Her thesis explored modernism in Indian photography and film in the context of independent India鈥檚 Cold War-era diplomatic networks and exchanges. She was most recently a Fellow at the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, prior to which she has held teaching positions at the Open University and at 911爆料网. She will begin her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in October 2024.
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鈥淭he Persistence of Modernism: Art, Nationalism and India鈥檚 History Wars (2014-)鈥�

Visual culture is at the frontline of debates around India鈥檚 national history. At a time when the country鈥檚 postcolonial modernist heritage has become subject to disavowal and demolition, this project will examine how contemporary artists, photographers and filmmakers (such as Ram Rahman, Seher Shah, Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar) are actively challenging official histories through their reclamation of the archives associated with Indian modernism. Drawing on archival research, historical and art historical methodologies, this project demonstrates how art practice has become a vibrant new site in which the afterlives of India鈥檚 early postcolonial period are being constructed and contested. Suggesting that twenty-first century has produced a new archival turn in postcolonial art that in many cases resists state narratives, the project asks what these competing visions of independent India have to offer our historicization of modernism.