Speech Acts - by Geeta Kapur (Hardcover)

About the Book

Speech Acts contains select interviews that annotate Geeta Kapur's contributions to modern Indian art criticism and trace her interrogations of the contemporary through various historical conjunctures

Book Synopsis

Geeta Kapur's writings engage with modernity, emphasizing alongside the need to identify the contradictions that undergird it. She has traversed a situated discourse across categories such as the Third World, the postcolonial and the global South. In Speech Acts, she problematizes her own discourse by marking historical disjunctures, by tracking cultural anomalies in the contemporary. The essays, lectures and interviews that constitute this book range from manifesto-like assertions to the more reflective, wherein the relationship between subjectivity, aesthetics, and practice above all, is endorsed.

About the Author

Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Speech Acts (2025), Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2025). She was a founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, advisory board member of Third Text and Marg. Her curatorial projects include: 'Dispossession', Johannesburg Biennale (1995); 'Bombay/Mumbai' (co-curator, Ashish Rajadhyaksha), Century City, Tate Modern, London (2001); 'subTerrain', House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); 'Aesthetic Bind', Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (five exhibitions, 2013-14). She is a Trustee of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), Delhi, and general editor of the Art Documents series published by SSAF-Tulika Books.