“The Constant Staring Eyes of Gods,” or, This Collage Which is Not One

This talk revisits the category of collage to think about how we understand the workings of vision, touch, and space, both in practices of collage and at the level of the habitus more generally – that is, the social arena in which the sensible, as the aesthetic ground of politics, has force. It does so through a close analysis of two related twentieth-century collage works from India: a religious souvenir from the pilgrimage centre of Nathdwara and an early work by modernist Bhupen Khakhar. Both engage a sensory infrastructure that at once conforms to, departs from, and interacts with certain presuppositions of modernism. Here that infrastructure is caste, associated with South Asia, but this analysis may open onto other sensory regimes like race. Particularly salient here are the ways in which materials, surfaces, and spatial relations—all constituent elements of form—are informed by hierarchical values of purity and pollution.

The 2026 Sydney Asian Art Series is convened by Yvonne Low and Natalie Seiz, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.