Art critic and curator Geeta Kapur’s oeuvre engages with modernity, emphasizing alongside the need to identify and polemicize the contradictions that undergird it. She traverses a situated discourse across categories such as the Third World, the postcolonial and the global South. Speech Acts contains select interviews that annotate Kapur’s contributions to modern Indian art criticism and trace her interrogations of the contemporary through various historical conjunctures. It also includes texts by her that enrich as well as complicate the relationship between art, subjectivity and the historical context. These writings and exchanges range from manifesto-like to the contemplative, offering an overview of a critic’s praxis through art-thinking.
Geeta Kapur
Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologized; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Speech Acts (2025), Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2025). She was a founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, advisory board member of Third Text and Marg. Her curatorial projects include: ‘Dispossession’, Johannesburg Biennale (1995); ‘Bombay/Mumbai’ (co-curator, Ashish Rajadhyaksha), Century City, Tate Modern, London (2001); ‘subTerrain’, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); ‘Aesthetic Bind’, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (five exhibitions, 2013–14). She is a Trustee of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), Delhi, and general editor of the Art Documents series published by SSAF–Tulika Books.
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).
Geeta Kapur
Tulika Books