Performing Transnationalisms in the Works of Rasheed Araeen, Prafulla Mohanti and Sutapa Biswas

While performance art has often been linked to politics of representation, this talk explores performance through the lens of personal positionings vis-a-vis 'transnationalism'. It defines performance art as action or inter-action in the context of the visual arts, and examines the ways it was mobilised in Rasheed Araeen's Canal Events (1968–72) staged in London, Paris and Karachi; Prafulla Mohanti's Painting-Performances (1960s–90s) developed in Leeds, London and Orissa; and Sutapa Biswas's Kali (1984) enacted during her undergraduate degree at Leeds University.

Taking up the frameworks of ‘itinerancy’ (Adadol-Ingawanij, 2018) and ‘disobedience’ (Mignolo, 2009), this talk discusses the central role of uncomfortable or risky encounters and mobility in these works, and their emphasis on independent thought and personal subjectivity which went beyond national narratives and over-arching discourses on postcolonialism or ‘black art’. In doing so, it proposes that Araeen, Mohanti and Biswas’s performances can be situated alongside works by artists such as David Medalla and Mona Hatoum, in whose practices performance presented expanded possibilities for negotiating ‘transnationalism’ as both perspective and artistic method in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s.