Akshaya Tankha

I am an art historian of modern and contemporary South Asia. My research is focussed on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and postcolonialism in India. In my current book project, tentatively titled “Nagaland and the Art of Indigenous Presence in Postcolonial South Asia,” I explore the slippage that craft objects, memorial monuments, and house museums perform across ritual and secular domains of practice, the tensions that characterize this border-crossing, and what that tells us about the contemporaneity of art and the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously-inhabited, predominantly Christian, and contested state of Nagaland in northeast India.

My research and teaching practice draw on my graduate studies in Art History and Anthropology, ethnographic research on museums, archival research on photography and modern and contemporary art in India, and teaching in universities and independent educational institutions in India, the University of Toronto, and Yale University. My work has appeared in Marg, Trans Asia Photography, Lalit Kala Contemporary, IIC Quarterly, and in the books, The Artful Pose: Early Studio Photography in Mumbai c.1855-1940 (Mapin Publishing, 2010) and No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: the museum in South Asia, edited by Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh (Routledge, 2015).

Fields of Study

• Modern and contemporary art
• South Asia

Areas of interest

• Indigenous art and visual culture
• Representations of Indigeneity
• Museums and public culture
• Photography
• The anthropology of art
• Art historiography and temporality