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Abstract

How important is the nation and national identity in the contemporary moment? This case study takes up the work of Chitra Ganesh (b.1974 New York), Tejal Shah (b.1979 Bhilai, India) and Nikhil Chopra (b.1976 Calcutta, India), to understand the changing relationship of the gendered body with national identity in contemporary art practice. Ideas of national belonging are challenged precisely through a concerted focus on identities marginalized by the nation, - women, queer, transgender.

This study proposes the ‘post-national’ as an empowering term and a critical framework to understand the dynamics of contemporary art practice. The first part of the analysis demonstrates that the artists’ critique of national, normative heterosexual identities hinges on the nature of a ‘national’ identity that itself as a construct. Adopting a post-structural approach towards the constructed-ness of gender, this study analyses some of their work with the performative body, positioning it within the larger national discourses on gender, sexuality and post-colonial histories. The second part of the study moves onto another set of works and to the artists’ body itself to argue that it is within conditions of de-territorialisation stemming from the artists’ residencies and participation in global networks that a post-national context emerges. Public dialogues on contemporary artworks in the virtual social sphere comprising of queer sexuality, unequal human rights and endangered ecologies are articulated via the queer body within a transcultural framework. This study argues that in order to reflect on the multiplicity of issues and questions which affect and bind people together, irrespective of where they are born or reside, cosmopolitanism offers a possible way forward.