Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen is the current Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.
Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen
Contributions
The Art History to Come: Vivan Sundaram’s Marxism in the Expanded Field (Geeta’s Bookshelf), 1968–2000
In 2000, the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram made a portrait of the critic Geeta Kapur’s bookshelf titled Marxism in the Expanded Field (MEF, fig.1). Framed and sectioned by a beaten band of tape spelling a famous line from the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air,” and executed nearly a decade after India’s neo-liberal reforms of 1991, MEF documents a suddenly precarious twentieth-century landscape: the aesthetics and politics of international Marxism