One-day symposium on discourse on indigenous communities, art and craft, and nomenclatures, with panels and two keynote speakers. One from the Australian side.

Brief:

The program emerges from the urgent call to re-centre Indigenous knowledge systems, not as historical relics but as active epistemologies of the present. The Songlines exhibition reflects how oral traditions not only resist erasures but actively produce new relations to land, memory, and cultural expressions. Storytelling here is not nostalgic but active: it reframes the past in the present and disrupts the hierarchy that privileges the written word over lived experience.

 Taking inspiration from the exhibition, this one-day symposium focuses on the material culture of the indigenous communities, cultural expressions of the historically marginalised, and conditions of artistic production. The symposium will also interrogate the dominant narratives surrounding the representation of the indigenous worlds in exhibition histories and art history, official surveys, the various nomenclatures that are developed to categorise them.

Each panel will have only two speakers and a moderator giving ample time to present, discuss, and workout hands on examples and demonstrations. 

Panel 1: 11.00am – 12.30pm

Craft and the Artisanal Question:

Moderated by Premjish Achari

Sandeep Hota, Odisha Craft Odyssey and Beads Studio

Priya Krishnamoorthy, Founder, 200 Million Artisans

Lunch: 12.30pm – 1.30pm

Panel 2: 1.30pm – 3.00pm

Researching Indigeneity:

Moderated by Premjish Achari

Sreyansi Singh, Curator

Shiva Gor, Artist