The conversation with Abhishek Poddar reflects on his innovative and pioneering spirit for our times. An industrialist of renown and a passionate collector of Indian art, Abhishek has over the last few years moved from personal enjoyment to a brilliantly conceived project to share his vast collection –the setting up of a new museum from the ground up in the dynamic city of Bengaluru, India. This soon to open museum, MAP –the Museum of Art and Photography will house the fruits of his tireless and decades-long collecting.

The focus of the Conversation will be on Abhishek and his collecting journey, and on his vision for a 21st  century Museum, MAP, which is now close to realization in 2022. This will be an illustrated Conversation with works from the MAP collection.

Please join us in this Intimate Portrayal of the Artist in an In Person Illustrated Presentation : Zarina and the Folding House

Zarina’s art practice offers a perspective radically different from the mainstream narrative of modernism, which has historically been shaped by a Euro-American and male-centric art world. The talk will highlight how the trauma of Partition and the pain of not belonging take on complex existential dimensions, through her mystically elevated minimalism and a sparse, bare abstraction that explores aspects of home, migration, distance and geographical separation.

SACHI, Society for Art & Cultural Heritage of India is Honored to Present Internationally Distinguished Author Dr. Amitav Ghosh. Dr. Ghosh will discuss his most recent and groundbreaking publication, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. 

In Conversation with Amitav Ghosh will be UC Santa Barbara, Associate Vice Chancellor and Distinguished Professor Dr. Kum Kum Bhavnani and Dr. Sugata Ray, University of California, Berkeley.

Image credit – Ivo van der Bent

Please Join an insightful discussion on how the ‘double-ikat’ tradition of the Patola has bound the cultures of India and Indonesia together for over 500 years!

Learn about the ‘power’ of intricate Patola-inspired Balinese textiles, journeying from fabrication to ritual use in native context, and further to curation/display in the West.

Image caption:

Patola-inspired ‘Cepuk’ cloth used as protection in a tooth-filing ceremony in Ubud, Bali;  Photo by Dr. Urmila Mohan.

Biomedical researcher Annamma Spudich shares her research into the “Hortus Indicus Malabaricus” (“The Garden of Malabar”). Get a unique view into the contributions of Indian scholarship to early modern science in this illustrated presentation focusing on a 17th-century Dutch treatise on Indian botanical medicines.

Image Credit: Frontispiece, Jardin de Lorixa (1690)
Volume 1 (of 14), Paper and pigments. Artist unknown
Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Indo-Persian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Her practice explores gender roles, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. This talk will present her powerful oeuvre, creative process, and multidisciplinary work, illuminating her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art practice. Sikander’s early works from 1988-2003 are currently exhibited at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Free and Open to the Public

Image Credit: Epistrophe, ink on paper, 10 x 15 feet. Morgan Library Museum,  2021.