Bio

Atreyee Gupta’s area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global as materially, intellectually, and politically constellated around decolonization.

Gupta is presently completing Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960, a book on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. Her coedited books include Postwar – A Global Art History, 1945–1965 (with Okwui Enwezor).

In the past, Gupta has published essays on postcolonial art, the Cold War, and the Non-Aligned Movement in journals such as Art Journal, Yishu, Third Text, and the MMCA Studies of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. Other publications have focused on the methodologies for a global art history (James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? 2006); the myriad histories of the “global” (Artl@s Bulletin, 2017); and the question of translation that emerges therein (28 Magazine, Gaza 2018). She has spoken internationally on the Non-Aligned Movement and the visual arts and delivered keynotes at conferences, museums, and nonprofit organizations.

Affiliated with the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender, Gupta teaches courses on modern and contemporary Asian and Asian American art and architecture, along with thematic seminars on South and Southeast art, art and decolonization, curatorial practice, and global modernisms more broadly. She also co-founded and co-leads the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies with colleagues from Art Practice (Allan deSouza; Asma Kazmi) and Art History (Sugata Ray).

Before coming to Berkeley in 2017, Gupta was the Jane Emison Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her curatorial projects at University of California, Berkeley include When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020), which she co-curated with BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder and undergraduate and graduate students in the seminar The Folk and/in the Modern: Critical Concepts + Curatorial Practicum in Twentieth-Century South Asian Art.

Books

Select publications

“Delhi Silpi Chakra: Art and Politics after the Radcliffe Line,” in Twentieth-Century Indian Art, edited by Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram, 146–57. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2020.

“Not Aligned: Fragments from a Global History,” MMCA Studies, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020): 52–65. [Published in Korean and English]

“Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism’s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy,” in Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, 185–208. New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2020.

“Can words (re)make worlds?” 28 Magazine 12 (2018): 118–125. [Published in Arabic]. Republished in English as part of the New Alphabet School project Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin on 21/10/2019.  https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/can-words-remake-worlds/

“Dwelling in Abstraction: Post-Partition Segues into Postwar Art,” To Draw the Line: Partitions, Dissonance, Art – A Case for South Asia, Third Text 31, no. 2-3 (2017): 433–57.

“Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): 20–25.

“After Bandung: Transacting the Nation in a Postcolonial World,” Postwar – Art between the Pacific and Atlantic 1945 – 1965, Exh. Cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016, 632–37. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2016.

“The Global, The Local, The Contemporary, The Collaborative,” in Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present, edited by Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown, 78–93. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

“Belatedness and Simultaneity: A Short History of Photography from India,” Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, Exh. Cat., San Jose Museum of Art, 2015, 24–35. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

“Ghar Pe/At Home in the Margins of Contemporary Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2 (March/April 2014): 53–61.

“Kitchen Conversations,” Prajakta Potnis: Store in a Cool and Dry Place, Exh. Cat., Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2014, 52–57. Bönen: Verlag Kettler, 2014.

“In a Post-colonial Diction: Postwar Abstraction as Aesthetics of Modernization,” Art Journal 72, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 30–47.

“On Territoriality, Temporality, and the Politics of Place,” The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on The Contemporary, Field Notes, Asia Art Archive Journal 001 (2012): 73–80. (Published in Chinese and English)

“Is Art History Global? Responding from the Margins,” in Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins, 348–57. New York: Routledge, 2007. (Coauthored with Sugata Ray)

Recent Published Interviews and Broadcast:

• “5 Questions with Atreyee Gupta,” post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 17, 2017.
• “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): 20–25.
• “It is Difficult to Change the DNA of a Museum,” Conversation with Ming Tiampo, TRAFO – Beitäge zur transregionalen Forschung, Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, December 18, 2015.
• “Who is written into the history of India, of Europe, or of the world?” 5in10, TRAFO – Beitäge zur transregionalen Forschung, Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, April 13, 2015.