Most of us are still cooped up inside homes as a precautionary measure to avoid catching COVID-19. If boredom is setting in, there are ways to get rid of it and expand your knowledge of art. Goethe Zentrum, Hyderabad brings Kunstforum — a series of online art talks, beginning June 13.
‘Learning to Look’ is the first in a series of seven Kunstforum lectures that attempts to explore what art historians do study in the context of the discipline’s evolution in India. The first lecture ‘Learning to Look: Indian Art History and the German Legacy’ will be delivered by art historian Sarada Natarajan on June 13, 6pm. This is a series of lectures by her for six weeks every Thursday.
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Sarada shares an Indian parable to explain the approach needed to understand different works of art. “Six blind men try to piece together what the elephant is really like by feeling different parts of its substantial body. Whenever we confront as complex an entity as a work of art (and for me the medieval monument is the quintessence of complexity) we are all in the position of those blind men, groping in the dark and talking about disconnected bits and pieces of a dynamic phenomenon beyond our comprehension.”
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She adds, “The lecture lays out the problem of the complex object of art history and gestures at the multiplicity of approaches required to comprehend it. Inspiring partial solutions for the problem can be found in theoretical formulations of six pioneering German critical historians of art; five of them active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
The subsequent Kunstforum lectures will experiment with using diverse insights of six scholars, ‘to help art lovers navigate past a motley herd of wild elephants — a heterogeneous selection of artworks from across the Indian subcontinent.’
(To register for the session, email jyothi.bezawada@goethe-hyderabad.org)