History of Art Research Seminar Series 2024

What do the Indian Tiger and the Welsh Dragon share in common vis-à-vis the Lion of Britannia? If India was the Jewel in the Imperial Crown, could we argue that Wales was England’s first colony? How should Britain deal with its colonial past, internal and external? As Wales struggles for its identity within ‘British-ness’, how should it acknowledge the way it contributed to, benefited from and, even, suffered for Britain’s Imperial ambitions? This talk will consider these questions, in the context of a major exhibition, Tigers and Dragons: India and Wales in Britain, which will take place at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea from 23rd May to October in 2025. The curators argue that the Welsh involvement in Empire was often different to the larger British experience. Taking no sides politically, it seeks to join the dots between India and Wales, to explore Imperial connections as well as probe national equivalences between the ‘Welsh’ Dragon and ‘Indian’ Tiger. As an exhibition Tigers & Dragons has both a contemporary and historic element; spotlighting Wales-based practitioners alongside art from South Asia and its diasporas, serving as a platform for debates about ‘British’ heritage, decolonialisation and competing nationalisms. This talk will address some of the complexities of the conceptual issues that the show seeks to explore visually. It asks: Do the beleaguered red dragon of Wales and the subjugated ‘Indian’ Tiger continue to share common ground? Or have the ‘(post)colonial’ tables have turned – in India’s favour?

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Zehra Jumabhoy is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. She is an art historian, curator and writer specialising in modern and contemporary South Asian art and its diasporas. She was the Steven and Elena Heinz Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she completed her doctorate and lectured on undergraduate and postgraduate art history courses (2016-2020). In 2018, she co-curated the landmark exhibition, The Progressive Revolution: A Modern Art for a New India, at New York’s Asia Society Museum. In 2020, she curated a site-specific immersive installation by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, titled Justice for All, at the Old Parliament House in Singapore. She is Guest Curator for the US travelling show, Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West, which travels to four major institutions between 2023-2025, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in LA. She is currently the Curatorial Research Fellow at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, a position funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, to facilitate programming related to the museum’s decolonizing agenda. The exhibition Tigers & Dragons: India and Wales in Britain, which Zehra will co-curate with Katy Freer, Head of Exhibitions at the Glynn Vivian, is part of this project. See: https://www.zehrajumabhoy.com/curating/