Nancy Adajania

Born 1971 in Bombay/India.

Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay/India. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf, which combines an art historical perspective with a politics of culture approach, was published by The Guild in 2016. Her monographic essay, »Obey the little laws and break the great ones: A life in feminism« has been recently published in Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (Tulika Books and Volte Gallery, 2016). She has written extensively on the works of four generations of Indian women artists over the last two decades. She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju/South Korea, in 2012, and has curated a number of exhibitions, including No Parsi is an Island (National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi/India, 2016), which retrieves artistic positions that have been marginalized from canonical accounts of Indian art history, as well as a cycle of video art for Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video (Jewish Museum, New York, NY/USA, in 2016). In 2014 she curated the hybrid exhibition-publication project Sacred/Scared (Latitude 28 and TAKE on Art magazine, New Delhi/India), interweaving the expressive with the discursive by linking the exhibition to a transdisciplinary anthology.

Nancy Adajania has proposed several new theoretical models and has written extensively on the relationship of art to the public sphere, the pre-history of new media art, public art, the biennial culture, and transcultural art practices. She has lectured on these subjects at numerous venues, including the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, NY/USA; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin/Germany; the 3rd FORMER WEST Research Congress, Part One: Beyond What Was Contemporary Art, Secession, Vienna/Austria; ZKM |Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe/Germany; transmediale, Berlin; and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon/Portugal. In 2013 and 2014, Nancy Adajania taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Salzburg/Austria. She is the editor of the monograph Shilpa Gupta (Prestel, 2010) and co-author of The Dialogues Series (Popular Prakashan/foundation b&g, 2011). She was research scholar-in-residence at BAK/basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht/Netherlands, in 2010 and 2013.