Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition

221 Pages·2020·8.029 MB·English

by  Cathrine Bublatzky

“ In the past two decades, Europe has seen more than a dozen exhibitions of Indian contemporary
art, but none as dazzling and complex as Indian Highway , which was originated by celebrated
curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and traveled between 2008 and 2012 . . . Bublatzky’s richly detailed
analysis sheds new light on a key analytic of studies of globalization: mobility.”
Karin Zitzewitz , Interim Chair, Department of Art, Art History, and Design
and Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture,
Michigan State University, Kresge Art Center, USA
“ This book is a fresh and pioneering ethnographic work about the dynamics of art exhibitions in
a transcultural context. Not only is the case study of Indian Highway’ s journey through Europe and
to China fascinating and unique, Bublatzky’s clear and creative approach to reading the mate-
rial makes this book a must-read for students and scholars interested in contemporary cultural
production.”
Christiane Brosius , Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Center for
Transcultural Studies, Germany
“ Cathrine Bublatzky has made an important contribution to exhibition history and the emerging
understanding of the global milieu of contemporary art production and viewing with this book. It
situates its reader squarely where the action is.”
Raqs Media Collective , Delhi, India

Along the Indian Highway
This book is an ethnographic study of the travelling art exhibition I ndian Highway that presented
Indian contemporary art in Europe and China between 2008 and 2012, a signifi cant period
for the art world that saw the rise and fall of the national exhibition format. It analyses art
exhibition as a mobile “object” and promotes the idea of art as a transcultural product by using
participant observation, in-depth interviews, and multi-media studies as research method. This
work encompasses voices of curators, artists, audiences, and art critics spread over different cities,
sites, and art institutions to bridge the distance between Europe and India based on vignettes
along the Indian Highway. The discussion in the book focuses on power relations, the contested
politics of representation, and dissonances and processes of negotiation in the fi eld of global art.
It also argues for rethinking analytical categories in anthropology to identify the social role of
contemporary art practices in different cultural contexts and also examines urban art and the
way national or cultural values are reinterpreted in response to ideas of difference and pluralism.
Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars, students and researchers of modern
and contemporary art, Indian art, art and visual culture, anthropology, art history, mobility, and
transcultural studies.
Cathrine Bublatzky is a visual and media anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the
Department of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies,
Germany. As a trained photographer, she received her Magister in Anthropology with a focus
on South Asian History and Visual Anthropology in 2008. In her research and teaching, she
investigates contemporary visual practices in the fi eld of art and photography, with a main
interest in migration and diasporic studies, citizenship, and urban contexts in South Asia, the
Middle East, and Europe.
Visual and Media Histories
Series Editor: Monica Juneja, Heidelberg University
This Series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing
meanings, maintaining aesthetic values and relations of power. Through individual studies, it
hopes to chart the trajectories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important
premise here is the conviction that the making, theorising and historicising of images do not exist
in exclusive distinction of one another.
Opening up the fi eld of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously
anchors vision to other media such as audio, spatial and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls
for closer attention to inter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing
layers of readings and responses are brought alive.
Through its regional focus on South Asia the Series locates itself within a prolifi c fi eld of writing
on non-Western cultures which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies, and to perceive
temporalities as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe
debates and conceptual categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating
the historical dimensions of visual practice implies close attention to specifi c local contexts
which intersect and negotiate with the global, and can re-constitute it. Examining the ways in
which different media are to be read onto and through one another would extend the thematic
range of the subjects to be addressed by the Series to include those which cross the boundaries
that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship – sculpture, painting and
monumental architecture – from other media: studies of fi lm, photography and prints on the one
hand, advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings, and cityscapes on the other.
Women Architects and Modernism in India
Madhavi Desai
No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia
Edited by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh
Barefoot Across the Nation : Maqbool Fida Hussain and the Idea of India
Edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy
Water Histories of South Asia : The Materiality of Liquescence
Edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati
Along the Indian Highway : An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition
Cathrine Bublatzky
For more information about this series, please visit:
www.routledge.com/Visual-and-Media-Histories/book-series/VMH
Along the Indian Highway
An Ethnography of an International
Travelling Exhibition
Cathrine Bublatzky
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Cathrine Bublatzky
The right of Cathrine Bublatzky to be identifi ed as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bublatzky, Cathrine, author.
Title: Along the Indian Highway : an ethnography of an international
travelling exhibition / Cathrine Bublatzky.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2019020442 (print) | LCCN 2019021637 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Indian Highway (Exhibition) | Art, Indic—21st century—
Exhibitions—Social aspects. | Nationalism and art—History—21st century. |
Art and society—History—21st century.
Classifi cation: LCC N7305 (ebook) | LCC N7305 .B83 2020 (print) |
DDC 709.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020442
ISBN: 978-0-8153-8210-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-31616-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Goudy
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Leonel

Contents
List of Figures x
List of Plates xi
Acknowledgements xii
Preface xiv
1 Along the I ndian Highway: an introduction 1
2 “Cancel that fl ight to Delhi . . .”: Serpentine Gallery, London 2008 36
3 “Indianness and the urgency of transmission . . .”: Astrup Fearnley Museum,
Oslo 2009 62
4 “There might be an Indian background, but the theme is global”: HEART
Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning 2010 90
5 Transcultural dissonances in the contemporary art world: Museo Nazionale
Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, Rome 2012 115
6 Indian Highway VI fi nally on its way to China: Ullens Centre for Contemporary
Art, Beijing 2012 142
7 Shared exoticisms or the limits of the national exhibition: some fi nal
observations 166
Index 192