Proposals are invited for the fifth webinar in the series “Hidden Networks: The Trade of Asian Art,” a collaboration between the National Museum of Asian Art (Washington, DC) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), in cooperation with The British Library (London). The webinar, which will take place on October 6th and October 7th, 2022 (9:00 a.m.–12 p.m. EST), will explore the historical trading networks of South Asian art.
Deadline: 22 Jun 2022
From the seventeenth century, western visitors to the South Asian subcontinent were actively acquiring as well as commissioning works of art for private and public collections. A complex network of individuals and institutions encouraged collecting and facilitated the strategic movement of art out of South Asia. In our contemporary moment, histories of South Asian objects in museum collections are under increasing scrutiny, and questions about the art market and museum ethics are in the forefront of people’s minds. While this webinar engages with those important issues, it primarily focuses on documenting the provenance and circulation of South Asian art before 1970 as a way to better understand and reckon with the collections we’re confronted with today. Divided into two half-day sessions, this webinar will present scholarly talks and discussions that provide an overview of the field of South Asian provenance research and highlight important resources for the field.
We invite short papers of ten minutes in length, focusing on:
- Individual dealers or collectors of South Asian art
- Completed, ongoing, or in-process provenance research on a single object or small group of objects
- Analyses of historical trends in the movement of objects from South Asia to western and/or global collections
- Solicitations for feedback and suggested next steps from colleagues on active provenance research
- Research resources (including, but not limited to, specific archival repositories or collections, databases, collection inventories, etc.)
For submission, please email a proposal of no more than 200 words, your contact information, your affiliation, and your CV to AsiaScholarlyProgram@si.edu by June 22, 2022. We will be in touch after we have collected and reviewed all submissions.
If you have any questions, direct them to the same email address.
Najiba H. Choudhury, Assistant Collections Information Specialist and Provenance Researcher, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art
Joanna M. Gohmann, Provenance Researcher & Object Historian, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art
Christine Howald, Deputy Director Zentralarchiv & Provenance Researcher Asia Collections, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Malini Roy, Head of Visual Arts, The British Library
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