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What
is a thek? Simply put, it’s a joint (though not the kind
you may have smoked in college!!), a place where like-minded
people informally get together for a common purpose. The purpose
can be a questionable one, such as drinking, drug use or
gambling; or it can be a benign form of socialization. Thek
has been a common term in the street parlance of Bengali
culture since around the 1970s, when my generation came of age.
While I’m not absolutely sure about the provenance of the word,
it’s possible that it came from the Hindi word “theka”, meaning
a place to halt or rest.
Needless to
say, it is the socialization aspect of thek that is at
the core of this site; and in this context, it is integral to
another word: adda. Unlike thek, adda is a
uniquely Bengali concept (why this is so is a matter of
a
complex anthropological inquiry, beyond the purview of this
introduction). Not precisely translatable, it loosely signifies
a kind of informal chit-chat. An adda has no
predetermined topics, no apparent logic of progression, purpose
or time limit; conversations change course arbitrarily,
seemingly unrelated topics come and go and time seems to halt in
a perpetual present. Often sporadic, adda can happen
virtually at any place; but if the same individuals frequent a
specific place with some regularity (everyday, every weekend,
once in a while) for adda, then that place qualifies as a
thek. In short, a thek is a recognized venue for
adda. It can be a bar, a clubhouse, a living-room, a
porch, even a street-corner; but most preferably, it’s a
tea-stall or a coffee-house, primarily because tea or coffee
(along with cigarettes, for some) is indispensable for most
addas. Especially prevalent among Bengali youth, the
practice of adda isn’t age-specific, though it is common
for the patrons of a thek to belong to a particular
age-group.
What does one
achieve from going to a thek for adda? Except that
it helps one to relax (which is an overused argument, anyway), I
don’t believe any Bengali knows a reasonable answer to this
question; yet most would instinctively accept an invitation to
an adda. Too much investment in adda is
often criticized as unproductive idling, which it indeed is. And
yet, historically, immensely productive adda isn’t an
oxymoron at all. The famous thek of the Calcutta Coffee
House on Kolkata’s College Street is a case in point. Writers,
artists, filmmakers, activists (especially of the leftist ilk)
and the like have gathered there for generations, and some of
the most notable contributions in those fields have germinated
in the vibrant exchanges, discussions and debates held there day
after day, for years. Therefore, no matter how bizarre it
sounds, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that adda
is a crucial component of Bengali cultural discourse.
In light of
this discursive role of adda, its gender dynamic at an
outdoor thek must be mentioned. Until the last decade or
two, with the exception of a handful of venues like the Calcutta
Coffee House and college cafeterias (called “canteens’ in
India), an outdoor thek had been frequented almost
exclusively by males. When my generation was young, for a young
female to sit in a roadside tea-stall and chat with her male
friends was to raise a whole lot of eyebrows. Those days are all
but hazy memories, at least in a big city like Kolkata, and
that’s good news indeed.
I have lived
abroad since the late 1980s, but have always resumed adda
at familiar as well as new theks on my repeated visits to
Kolkata. Therefore, soon after I considered having my own space
on the Internet, the concept of thek provided the primary
impetus to make my space both personal and public. So here it
is. Grounded in a bit of nostalgia, this site is a virtual
thek devoted to adda on visual culture. Yet it
differs from the conventional thek because it has a sense
of purpose: it aspires to promote critical understanding of
visual culture. I envisage it as a productive platform where
artists, art writers and the like anywhere on the planet can
make new contacts and share a diverse range of ideas.
One part of
the site has my personal stuff: my essays and other writings,
images, and blog; while the other part is open to friends,
acquaintances, even strangers. Artists are invited to offer
their images for display in the “Gallery”, along with their
vitae and contact information. They can also advertise their
exhibitions or other efforts in the “News” section. All this is
completely free of charge (though, if participation swells in
the future, the site’s maintenance may require a nominal
one-time uploading fee, just like people at an adda often
chip in for tea or snacks). Any party interested in someone’s
art should contact the artist directly, since I am not
interested in financially profiting from such transactions (this
policy will never change). Art writers are welcome to contribute
essays and reports, and anyone is free to propose topics to the
“Forum” for fruitful dialogs. And of course, all are expected to
provide feedback on my ongoing effort to upgrade and improve the
site. At the moment, it can be regarded as a social networking
site only in a severely limited sense, as there are obvious
constraints of its technology and specificity of its purpose.
Only time will tell how it evolves.
So, welcome
to globalthek!
Sunanda K
Sanyal
TOURING GLOBALTHEK
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ESSAYS |
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Scandalous
Art and the
“Global” Factor |
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An Unexplored
Discourse in Kolkata’s Visual Culture
In
its vibrancy, variety, and opulence, Durga Pujo
is indeed comparable to such grand spectacles as the
Carnival of Brazil. Yet unlike the Brazilian event,
which has been closely examined by chroniclers of visual
culture, ... [..more]
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From Object to Experience: Notes on
American Sculptur
To
put it rather bluntly, it is impossible to write an
exclusive history of modern sculpture... sculpture of
the last century has been more consistently engaged in
self-deconstruction, ... [..more] |
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Scandalous
Art and the “Global” Factor
One
often hears these days that Indian art has “gone global”. Indeed,
for those of us who were adults in
India
during the 1970s and 1980s, living with dead telephones,
state-run television and neighborhood mom-and-pop stores
is now..
[..more]
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Look
in the
Mirror |
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Kolkata’s Contemporary Art : A Look
in the Mirror
A
couple of years ago, during one of my frequent visits to
Kolkata, a well-known artists’ group in the city invited
me to one of its weekly meetings. I was requested to
propose a topic for discussion, so I suggested a
conversation about the lack of experimental drive in
Kolkata’s contemporary art...
[..more]
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Installation in Perspective: Two
Outdoor Projects
During
conversations about installation, I have often heard Indian
artists insist that the West has, only in the recent
decades, merely intellectualized something that has been
part of the Indian heritage for centuries. As with all
nativistic gestures, such claim demonstrates an erroneous...
[..more]
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Critical Perspectives on
Photograph(y)
Back
in the 1980s, the photo historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau
concluded her insightful essay on art photography with a
poignant observation that left many photographers
uncomfortable, even irate. Art photography, she wrote, “has
systematically engineered its own irrelevance and
triviality...
[..more]
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Sex, Culture and Otherness Two
(W)edges in Kolkata’s Art
“Avant-garde”
is the name attributed to a progressive leadership in the history
of modern art. Taken from French military terminology, it was
understood for a century to signify the creative pursuits of
several generations of Western artists --typically from Manet and
Courbet in France to Pollock and Rothko in America-- that
broke with the Renaissance legacy..
[..more]
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A Majestic “Africa”: El Anatsui’s
Wall Hangings
Displacement
of objecthood has been one of the primary attributes of much of
modern art in the latter half of the twentieth century. From
the emergence of environments, installation and happenings
in the 1960s, to earth art, conceptual art, and performance
art of the subsequent decades, ..
[..more]
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Writing as Transgression: Two
Decades of Graffiti in New York City Subways
Of
all
the genres invented in the history of modern art, “protest art”
is one of the broadest and most open-ended, not least because it
encompasses a wide variety of forms, materials, processes and
aesthetics. If Picasso’s Guernica shares this rubric with
anti-apartheid posters from South Africa, then the
definitions of the..
[..more]
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Teaching
Art History |
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Teaching Art History at an Art
School: Making Sense from the Margin
What
made me decide to contribute to this volume of essays was a
feeling of exclusion, so to speak. While the literature on the
scholarship of pedagogy and the NECIT seminars indeed resonate
with many of my concerns as a person of foreign origin in
American academe, none of the speakers..
[..more] |
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● Medi(t)ations
of a Decentered Self The Art of Jayanta Roy
A
large canvas is wrapped in taped newspaper sheets; Barack Obama
and Paris Hilton peek out from speech bubbles; cartoon clips and
Sharukh Khan appear in broken eye-glasses; two pairs of conjoined,
attired legs engage in yoga positions; a headless zebra stands on
a wavy checkered floor; a shadow/silhouette..
[..more] |
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● Picturing
Maladies The Art of Subhadarshini Singh
Subhadarshini
Singh’s art is deeply involved with the subject of medicine, both
modern and ancient, Indian and Western. A legacy of her experience
as a medical journalist, it is unambiguously central to her
creative enterprise. What interests me, however, is not so much
the subject itself, nor the artist’s strong passion for it, but
the larger question – ..[..more]
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কিশোর সাহিত্য..
বিভূতিভূষণের
'চাঁদের পাহাড়' |
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Being
Modern |
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● Subir
Hati’s Painted Prisms
In
the 21st century, the question of any new contributions
from abstract art is a complicated matter, for the Modernist
baggage it carries can hardly be justified any more. And
because of the curious mix of utopia and reason that once
informed its rhetoric, the problem is more acute for..
[..more] |
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● কিশোর
সাহিত্য নিয়ে কিছু কথোপকথনের শুরুঃ বিভূতিভূষণের 'চাঁদের পাহাড়'
বাংলা সাহিত্য সমালোচনায় কিশোর
সাহিত্যের কোন জায়গা নেই বললেই চলে। যেহেতু বড়রাই ছোটদের জন্য
লেখেন, তাই তাঁদের প্রজন্মের কোন মূল্যবোধ পড়ুয়াদের মনে কতটা
ছাপ ফেলেছে সে প্রশ্ন স্বাভাবিকই শুধু নয়, উঠতি মনের ওপর
টেলিভিশন বা সিনেমার প্রভাবের মতই..
[..আরও]
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“Being
Modern”: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the
1960s
Ulrich Middeldorf was a
historian of Renaissance art. A student of the legendary
Heinrich Wölfflin, he headed the Art Department of the
University of Chicago. On 16 May 1950, he wrote a letter to his
contact at Uganda’s Makerere.. [..more]
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Critiquing the
Critique |
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‘Global’: A
View from.. |
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Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui
and the Politics of Inclusion
Wifredo
Lam (1902-1982) was a Cuban artist of mixed race. In the 1980s,
his painting Jungle (1943) hung near the coatroom in the
first floor lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, prompting
the poet and critic John Yau to sharply criticize the museum’s
influential curator William Rubin (Yau 1990). As a custodian of
modernism, .. [..more] |
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‘Global’: A View from the Margin
There is no question
that for contemporary artists of non-Western origin, the
doors to international art scenes, barely ajar in the late
1980s, have opened wider, with increasing access to an
inter-continental art market and blockbuster exhibitions.
What is more, in the absence of any dominant paradigm in the
contemporary discourse of art, critics like Terry Smith,
.. [..more]
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Amrit: A Poetic Meta-Exhibition
(New)
Four white horses stand
atop
tall columns, surveilled by a series of watchful painted
eyes; two bowl-like objects rest on a padded bench; a two-part
slab with its own ocular sits on a tall wooden stool; seven
white horses, standing in a row on a horizontal metal beam,
confront a dark painted surface; dense, ..
[..more] |
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Essay/Interview |
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In
Conversation with Kanishka Raja
Originally
from Kolkata, Kanishka Raja now lives and works in
New York.
For more than a decade, his large, hybrid painting installations
--employing such diverse pictorial devices as Indian textile,
linguistic and miniature motifs; drastic perspectives; pop imagery
and surrealistic juxtapositions-- have received a fair amount of
critical acclaim. I sat down with this ambitious artist in his
Brooklyn
studio to talk about his art training, life in New York, and his views of contemporary art. [..more] |
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Talking to Annu P. Matthew
Annu
Palakunnathu Matthew’s work is firmly grounded in cross-cultural
experience. Professor of Photography at the University of Rhode
Island, she appropriates images from diverse sources and juxtaposes them to
make incisive comments about displacement, family, social
inequities, and cultural memory. I chatted with her at her
Providence
home about her background, artistic strategies, and her life
between/across cultures.
[..more] |
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● In
Conversation with Sarina Khan Reddy
Born
of an Indian father and a white American mother, Sarina Khan Reddy
is a new face of the South Asian immigrant culture in the United
States. Her new media work intensely scrutinizes, among other
things, the hegemonic underpinnings of American world view. I met
with Sarina at a café in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to talk about
her life and the sharp political edge that defines her art.
[..more] |
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Essays & Reports |
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Essays & Reports |
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Film |
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Criticality
in painting developed in such a way as to determine the
intentionality of the artist, the formal handling of
medium in relation to the work, and the intrinsic
individuality that resulted from a fusion of the two.
Representational Painting After
Richter : Critical Issues By Robert Sullivan
[..more] |
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When
you are all but convinced that art these days does
little more than serve self-promotion and the market,
someone comes along to show that all is not lost, that
art can still make a difference.
It happens rarely, but when it does, you have to salute
that artist.
Rituparno Ghosh, the first openly gay and transsexual
Bengali filmmaker and actor, ...
Rituparno Ghosh by The
Critical Tourist
[..more] |
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The
documentary examines specific aspects of the visual
culture of Durga Pujo, a grand religio-cultural
festival held in Bengal, India. Locally, it is seen as
the occasion of the Hindu Goddess Durga’s annual
visit to her parental home. Central to the rituals is a
sculptural image of the Goddess killing
Mahisasura, or the buffalo-demon. This mythic event
is considered a symbol of the eternal battle between
Good and Evil, and of female empowerment.
“A Homecoming Spectacle” (58 mins.
& 28 mins.)
[..more]
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Artists in the Gallery |
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My work is made up of a
personal vocabulary of marks, which are loosely based on the constantly evolving
urban landscape. For years, I looked to nature for inspiration-- trees, clouds,
and leaves, and edited out the rest..
Mary Crenshaw
[..more] |
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One
frequently hears that it is futile to search for meaning in art. Since
the end of my art training, I have been exploring various avenues to
test the validity of this view. I have discovered that my creative
endeavor is..
Sanjoy Chatterjee
[..more] |
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My art mostly
reflects social issues that matter to me. I also love nature and its colors.
With vibrant colors, my work frequently celebrates nature and its beauty. Many of them also have
geometric patterns or mathematical..
Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar
[..more] |
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Intrigued
by the formal boundaries of painting as they relate to objects and
architecture, I use materials, space, color and geometry to study the
limits of these boundaries. Through the Modernist tradition, painting
has been preoccupied with pictorial illusionistic space..
Liselott Johnsson
[..more] |
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Secondhand images filtered through the media now exert a
powerful influence on our perception of reality, making reality itself
artificial. The distinctions between model and copy, mediated experience and
tangible reality are all but blurred..
Jayanta Roy
[..more] |
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Appropriating a variety of familiar motif and themes from both Indian and
Western pictorial tradition, I re-contextualize them in the light of
contemporary issues. I deliberately combine icons of “High” art and those of
mass culture with wit and irony to redefine their role..
Meenakshi Sengupta
[..more] |
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