Shrine Empire presents 'Caressing History: A Draft for Body-based Historiography', an international group exhibition, curated by Adwait Singh.
This exhibition aggregates carefully selected works of a diverse set of artistic practitioners from around the world, encountered during the course of a yearlong research undertaken by Adwait Singh, the recipient of the Art Scribes Award in 2016, following a curatorial residency at Château de La Napoule (France) facilitated by the Prameya Art Foundation. Since 2012, the Art Scribes Award has been an initiative to discover young, emerging art writers, and support an international curatorial residency to encourage them to rethink their critical narratives within a curatorial framework, through research-based exhibitions.
‘Caressing History’ investigates the possibility of a sensuously queer-historiography that espouses a synesthetic and tactile relationship with the past as an alternate to the disciplinary, even “scientific” approach to documenting history, based on Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of ‘erotohistoriography’ as one fully encompassed by ‘bodies and their pleasures’ Reviving a Burkean affective historicism that advocates an empathetic link to the bygone as the proper mode of apprehending it, the exhibition attempts to reinstate the body and its phenomenology into historicism as a way of illuminating certain episodes and ephemera from the past that get side-lined by mainstream historiographical methods configured to maintaining the dominant temporal rhythms and status quo.
Venue: Shrine Empire, D 395 (basement), Defence Colony, New Delhi – 110024
On view: 13 April— 15 May, 2018