SynTalk

What’s posterity ever done for you? What survives in the long run? How did (public) museums come to be from private collections? Who owns the past? Do we transact with the invisible sacral world via these accumulations? How is the integrity of (say) sounds preserved and meanings imbued in them? What makes chants memorable? Can objects be looked at as mere postulations? Are ‘art’ objects pointers to a certain moment in time in the artist’s life? How stable are museums – do objects sometimes end up in a bonfire there? Can art survive only by including the possibility of its own change (& even death)? Does making something also allow one to move forward? What is not heritage? Do narratives precede collection? What do we look past? How does a proverb work? Why do non-Brahmins chant? How are histories localized? What happens outside museums and galleries, & how is that taken ‘in’? Are devotion and detachment different? Does the present need the past; & is the past always ‘here’? Are we worried about forgetting? Will we keep traveling from the particular to the universal? How can you postpone somebody else’s death? What is the future of the past? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from folklore studies (Dr. M. D. Muthukumaraswamy, National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai), art (Sudarshan Shetty, Mumbai), & art history (Prof. Kavita Singh, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in...