Nancy Adajania (private)
Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator. She has curated a number of major research-based exhibitions including the Nelly Sethna retrospective, ‘The Unpaved, Crusty, Earthy Road’ (Chatterjee & Lal with Cymroza Art Gallery, Bombay, 2021); 'Zigzag Afterlives: Film Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s in India' (Camden Art Centre, London, 2020); the Mehlli Gobhai retrospective, ‘Don’t Ask Me About Colour’ (National Gallery of Modern Art/ NGMA, Bombay with Chemould Prescott Road, 2020); the Sudhir Patwardhan retrospective, 'Walking Through Soul City' (NGMA, Bombay with The Guild Art Gallery, 2019) and 'Counter-Canon, Counter-Culture: Alternative Histories of Indian Art' (Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019).
Adajania has proposed several new theoretical models through her extensive writings on subaltern art, media art, public art, collaborative art, transcultural art and the biennale culture in the Global South. She recently conceptualised and led an online curatorial workshop, ‘Once Upon a Cultural Famine: A Curatorial Thought Experiment’, for the Kochi Biennale Foundation (2021).
Adajania was the juror for the Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017). During 2013/2014, she taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. In 2012, she was joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale