In her relatively brief career, the Indian artist Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) straddled painting, drawing, performance, video, and installation. She turned to the latter three modes in the mid-nineties, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the ensuing anti-Muslim violence in her adopted city of Bombay. This talk will analyze Hussain’s shifting approach to her artistic practice during this period, as her postmodernist allegories in paint gave way to feminist interrogations of identity, representation and signification using objects, language and the body.

Rattanamol Singh Johal is the Shireen and Afzal Ahmad Assistant Professor in history of art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current book project, Forms of Despair, offers an account of experimental, lens and time-based art emerging in India in the final decades of the twentieth century as metropolitan artists were confronted with the limitations and failings of their postcolonial, cosmopolitan imaginaries.

Image caption: Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins, 1995. Performance at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai. Estate of Rummana Hussain. Image courtesy Talwar Gallery New York | New Delhi.

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