Infrastructure and Form

In the 1990s and 2000s, contemporary art in India changed radically in form, as an art world once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance. State-run institutions decreased the support they had given a modernist avant-garde, and art was cultivated instead by a booming market as well as new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. The result was an unprecedented efflorescence of contemporary art in India.

Among the first studies of contemporary South Asian art, Infrastructure and Form engages deeply with sixteen of India’s leading contemporary artists and art collectives to examine what made this development possible. Karin Zitzewitz articulates the connections between formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. By untangling the complex interactions of infrastructure and form, the book offers a discussion of the barriers and conduits that continue to shape global contemporary art and its relationship to capital more broadly.