TAKE on Art

Established in 2009, TAKE on Art is the leading English-language periodical covering contemporary art and culture from and about South Asia. Published twice a year, it commissions essays, reviews, interviews, and photo essays by critics and key voices - both nationally and internationally. It has been invested in sustaining critical writing practices in India not just through its own capacity as a publication, but also by organizing initiatives that generate discourses and keep conversations alive. The publication emphasizes an outreach programme - to initiate and continue dialogue among contemporary art writers and critics. Part of doing that includes reviving the concept of publication on art by generating an interest in such content, nurturing a younger generation of critics, and contributing to the scant efforts made in building art histories in the region. Through this, TAKE on Art aims to engage a specialised community as well as a large readership.

Editor, 28th issue: TAKE on Art, Memory, TAKE on Art, 2022, © Editor

The latest issue of TAKE, Memory emerges from the context to identify the ground of inclusive perspective on lived experiences by extending critical inquiry on the constellation of photo-archives, monuments, memorials, visual culture and digital technology. In the same spirit, the world of representation, when navigating the spatial-temporal axis to trace the becoming of the self, could not escape the pressing concerns around political issues of identity and institutions.

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Editor, 27th issue TAKE on Art Books, TAKE on Art, 2022, © Editor

This issue of TAKE on Art focuses on the production and circulation of printed books, particularly those devoted to the arts of India. A short list of suitable books in any one genre is fraught with the danger of personal subjectivity. With that as a given, the central premise has been on identifying seminal books across a wide gamut of topics that shed new light on the various disciplines of India’s arts. Seminal means different things to different people. Our filter for books is purely integrity of purpose and the creation and articulation of new bodies of knowledge. Books featured across this issue include those on paintings, botanical drawings, photography, cinema, textiles, design, architecture, ecology, children’s publication, material culture, exhibition catalogues and more; all made public within this new era of the Anthropocene.

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Discussants, Panel Discussion: The Future of Memory in the Present: Possibilities of Archive-Making, TAKE on ART x Arthshila Santiniketan, 2023, © Discussants

The dual desire for the creation and exploration of archives is an engagement with a sense of enchantment to complicate not just trace the points of origins and relations of connections. With the onset of decolonization, the repository of the empirical knowledge systems was challenged to lay bare its absolutism - an extension to mobilise the kaleidoscopic view of memory. In the current times of hyper-populism, the necessity to identify the gaps in mainstream history and fascination, to document the marginalised narratives, has once again reactivated the role of an archivist. A gesture by artists, researchers and cultural activists to navigate the fluidity of memory in the present - the interventionist approach embraced by the speakers of the panel discussion is aimed to revitalise the many possibilities of archive and its making, to initiate the discussions around nuanced political struggle, cultural capitalization and identity-making exercises at large.

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