Wednesday
25
March 2026
2:30 - 4:00 PM IST
Location
Room 300, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Abanindranath’s Arabian Nights: Reclaiming the Indian Narrative Voice
Arts and Sciences Research Seminar Series
R Sivakumar
Art Historian
Curator
Speaker
Colonialism led, among other things, to the loss of the ability to narrate our stories as we saw them. Reclaiming that power was Abanindranath’s main project. Besides representing the high point of his artistic achievement, the Arabian Nights series marks the culmination of this effort. It brings together his engagement with India’s past and present, with the bane of colonialism and the possibilities of modernity, and a pictorial meditation on the power of narration.
Speaker
R Sivakumar
R. Siva Kumar is an art historian and curator based in Santiniketan. He has researched and written extensively on the artists associated with Santiniketan, including Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, K. G. Subramanyan and A. Ramachandran. He has curated several exhibitions, including “Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism” a retrospective of K.G. Subramanyan, and “The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath” which was exhibited at nine major museums worldwide. He also co-curated the centenary exhibition of Benodebehari with Gulam Mohammed Sheikh. He retired as professor of Art History at Visva Bharati in 2022.
