From: Karin Zitzewitz
Date: Feb 15, 2026
Subject: CFP: Future of Practice: Artists and Art in 21st Century (New
Delhi, 19-20 Aug 26)
India International Centre, New Delhi, Aug 19–20, 2026
Deadline: Mar 15, 2026
Globally, artistic practice is shaped by art education, art world
institutions, and digital media, all of which are driven by logics of
value production. This conference, a collaboration between the project
ANTHROFUTURE (anthrofuture.com), which is hosted by the University of
Vienna’s Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Shiv Nadar
Institution of Eminence’s Department of Art, Media and Performance,
invites discussion of how the future is articulated through artistic
practice in India in a time of complex and interrelated social,
political and ecological crises.
Since the 1990s, the region has witnessed a tidal change in practice in
tandem with the transformation of art’s infrastructure, made visible
through dramatic changes in mediums, artistic form, and artists’ careers
(Zitzewitz 2022). Yet, these transformations have occurred unevenly
because ‘practising creativity’ is anchored to a country’s vision of its
cultural economy (Chumley 2016). Simultaneous developments in digital
media have generated unique affordances for and representations of the
art world that are as much a product of national as of global
conventions, languages and governance.
Against this backdrop, the conference asks whether and how an emerging
generation of artists can leverage the existing physical-digital
infrastructure to address the multiple crises of the present, and
whether their practices require new conceptual frameworks. The
conference places artistic creation and contemporary understandings of
creativity at the center of its inquiry.
We invite individual papers and multimodal submissions from artists and
scholars concerning key projects, sites, and methods by which artistic
practice addresses the future. Our conference combines discussions of
contemporary art practice with the social life of art, and so we invite
all contributors to reflect upon issues of hierarchy and power as they
constrain or inform the practices they discuss.
Of particular interest are engagements with the following questions:
1) Anthrofuture focuses on the dynamics of the digital and physical
(art) worlds. What sorts of limitations and productivities can we find
in (art) infrastructures? How might these digital and physical realms
interact? What is their relative significance, durability, or longevity?
2) Technology, in particular digital media, appears to be increasingly
vital to the social life of creativity. What roles do digital media play
in art making, display and circulation? Is analogue practice possible?
3) In India, the artistic landscape is increasingly enlivened by the
work of art collectives. How can we evaluate the contemporary
significance of collectives vis-à-vis individual art practice? What are
the ethical and artistic productivities or limitations of individual,
collective and collaborative art practices?
4) Anthrofuture aims to understand how artistic practice reveals or
addresses what is new about the crises of the present moment. In what
ways are artists shaping art infrastructure through their participation
in or withdrawal from the market, other forms of art infrastructure, or
the digital world?
5) Time and temporality are essential concepts to Anthrofuture. How are
these ideas explored in artistic practice in the present? Drawing on
these reflections, how are imaginations of the future manifest in art
practice through and beyond utopian or dystopian impulses?
In order to participate in the conference, please submit a 250 word
abstract and a short CV via Google Form by 15 March 2026 (see website
https://www.anthrofuture.com/news for link). You will receive a
notification regarding your participation just after 15 April. The call
is open to academics and practitioners at all seniority levels and we
particularly encourage younger applicants to contribute to this event.
The project has limited need-based funding for selected participants
from within India.
We envisage a publication including a selection of conference
presentations. By submitting your abstract and CV, you also agree to be
part of this publication. All submissions must be previously unpublished.
About the project
ANTHROFUTURE is the short name of ‘The anthropology of the future: an
art world perspective’, a European Research Council (ERC) sponsored
project hosted by the University of Vienna Department of Social and
Cultural Anthropology that uses multimodal methods to examine how
understandings of the future are generated through art in South Asia and
the Gulf. The project has emerged from a set of intertwined concerns,
namely anthropology’s fundamental difficulty of applying the
ethnographic method toward studies of the future; scholarship suggesting
that the global south’s current dystopic political and social conditions
increasingly shape—and therefore predict—the future norms of the global
north; scholars’ calls to look past the preoccupations of a global north
and towards decolonised futures; a significant absence of engagement
with the future in South Asia; and the combination of art’s thematic
engagement with imagining the future and the art world’s structural
commitment to the production of future value.
Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Future of Practice: Artists and Art in 21st Century (New Delhi,
19-20 Aug 26). In: ArtHist.net, Feb 15, 2026.
<https://arthist.net/archive/51762>.
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