A Distant Contemporary: Indian Twentieth-Century Art in the Festival of India.

In 1985–86, the Festival of India staged over seventy exhibitions in the United States in forty-two different states, emphasizing India's historical and vernacular traditions. Only three exhibitions presented “contemporary” Indian art, and while the term claimed a contemporaneity with the art of the northern Atlantic, these three shows simultaneously reified a geographic, temporal, and conceptual distance by pursuing a consistently introductory approach and by anchoring the work in the North American imaginary of India. The logic of the distant contemporary operates in the gallery contexts, curatorial choices, catalogs, and erasures of this exhibitionary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]