The Art of Memory: Tracing the Colonial in Contemporary India

Abstract

Contemporary art, as a simple concept, is supposed to be an art of today, but a significant number of practicing global artists reference the past with their work. In India, contemporary artists, such as Nikhil Chopra, Pushpamala N., and Raqs Media Collective, produce art that revisits the representational legacies of India’s past. Their work explores the visual culture of nineteenth-century British colonial India and the critical importance placed during this period on the visual representation of colonial-subject identity. This chapter explores their work as examples of an “art of memory”—art that resurrects and reimagines archival imagery, offering critique, but also revealing how representations from the past, which get configured as memories, continue to condition the present as well as future. The work of Chopra and Raqs, this chapter also argues, reveals an ambivalence and incompleteness in regard to colonial legacies and modern identity that become apparent through artistic negotiation.