Learning by Doing: Alternative Strategies for Art History Pedagogy
Talk by Sarada Natarajan

Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art presents

Learning by Doing: Alternative Strategies for Art History PedagogyTalk by Sarada Natarajan

Friday 28th November 2014 | 6 pm
FICA Reading Room, D-42 Defence Colony, New Delhi

In this talk, Sarada Natarajan will present a series of pedagogical experiments that evolved over a decade of teaching art history to practicing art students at the University of Hyderabad. Initially devised as pragmatic strategies to overcome the huge linguistic and cultural challenges that most of the students faced, these experiments were gradually fine-tuned towards making art history more accessible and relevant to their art practice. The emphasis is on making, doing, performing (often in groups) as a vital supplement to conventional classroom learning. The theoretical threads running through this diverse series of experiments originate in Natarajan's long-term engagement with the materiality of art and with fracture.

About the speaker:
Sarada Natarajan is Visiting Faculty at the Department of Art, Design and Performing Arts for the Shiv Nadar University, Noida. She has also lectured and taught at various universities in Hyderabad, Chennai and Colombia. In particular she has been Guest Faculty S N School, University of Hyderabad for a decade from 2004 – 2014 teaching Art History as well as being part of the Theatre Department (2008 – 2014), Natarajan completed her M.A. in Art History from the M.S. University of Baroda in 1993 and in 2013 submitted her Ph.D. thesis on ‘Pre-Modern Indian Art’: Art and History to the same institution