Speech Acts

Geeta Kapur’s writings engage with modernity, emphasizing alongside the need to identify the contradictions that undergird it. She has traversed a situated discourse across categories such as the Third World, the postcolonial and the global South. In Speech Acts, she problematizes her own discourse by marking historical disjunctures, by tracking cultural anomalies in the contemporary. The essays, lectures and interviews that constitute this book range from manifesto-like assertions to the more reflective, wherein the relationship between subjectivity, aesthetics, and practice above all, is endorsed.

Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are widely anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism (2000) and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2023), besides Speech Acts (2023). She was a founder-editor of Journal of Arts and Ideas, and advisory board member of Third Text and Marg. Curatorial projects include: ’Dispossession’, Johannesburg Biennale (1995); ’Bombay/Mumbai’, Century City, Tate Modern (co-curation, 2001); ’subTerrain’, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); ’Aesthetic Bind’, Chemould, Mumbai (five exhibitions, 2013-14).