Universal Allegories /

Tagore’s Post Office

Tagore’s Post Office departs from the work and the ideas of poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore (Kolkata, 1861–1941) who was one of India’s leading figures of the early twentieth century. Tagore was the first Asian Nobel Laureate for literature and is considered to be the most influential Indian poet of the modern period, he was a pioneer in art and education, and played an important role in the country‘s freedom struggle. A popular figure in Europe and in particular in Germany during the 1920s, today Tagore is less known outside of his home country. Tagore’s Post Office looks again at Tagore’s legacy. His approach to art and culture as well as subjects including ecology, education and cosmopolitanism, his critique of nationalism and his concept of the universal. Bringing together artistic works and research, the exhibition features responses to Tagore’s ideas often from unexpected and heterodox positions.

The Tagore, Pedagogy
and Contemporary Visual Cultures Network

The Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures Network, is a research collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, and Iniva, that brings together a group of international academics and visual arts practitioners to discuss and explore the legacy and continuing relevance of Indian poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) for contemporary art practice and visual culture. The group made up of artists, academics, curators and a political scientist, from Europe and India, have come together because they share an interest in exploring Tagore’s legacy and influence from different disciplinary backgrounds, often taking unorthodox approaches in order to think outside of the established conventions of Tagore scholarship. This network offers new opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and proposes an original approach to Tagore scholarship. Tagore was an educational reformist and it is this aspect of his work, particularly in the context of his development of art and pedagogy at the community and educational establishment at Santiniketan, that the network will seek to explore. It is precisely the experimental approach to the process of pedagogy, the openness to ideas of international modernism in the form of art, music and dance in relation to local and national traditions of craft and the natural environment that we seek to connect to contemporary visual culture in new ways, bringing disciplines together and connecting academic scholarship and artistic practice on Tagore to a new academic and non-academic public.

Exhibition images, nGbK, 2104