Tagore, pedagogy and contemporary visual cultures

The Tagore, pedagogy and contemporary visual cultures network aims to bring together a group of leading 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 (both senior and early career researchers), 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 idiosyncratic, unorthodox approaches in order to think outside of the established conventions of Tagore scholarship. This network not only offers new opportunities for cross-disciplinary research, but proposes an original and as yet uncharted approach to Tagore's work and its continuing relevance.

We will meet twice in London, once in the Netherlands, and once in Santinikatan, the community school set up by Tagore in India in 1901.

This network will formalise a group made up of artists, academics (both senior and early career researchers), curators and a political scientist, from Europe and Asia, who will 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.

The impact of the work of the network will work in the following ways:

1. Impact on Tagore, artistic and curatorial scholarship (academic, multidisciplinary): The network seeks to bring traditional scholarship and contemporary curatorial ideas together in ways that create new ways to understand and transfer knowledge on a key figure of Modernism;
2. Impact on arts practitioners (the multidisciplinary field of visual art): The network will introduce artists and curators to aspects of Tagore that are less recognised outside India, including aspects of his work that relate to ecology, social and communal development and pedagogy. This will impact on artistic and curatorial practice who will benefit from collaboration with a range of other artists and academics of various disciplines, which will help them develop their research skills and reflect on and improve their curatorial and pedagogical practice;
3. Impact on museums and galleries and their stakeholders (professional and public): this network has the potential to impact greatly on the way museums and galleries use the exhibition to produce new forms of knowledge production, as well as the way they address their pedagogical imperatives. Through a direct application of Tagore's ethos of openness and non-hierarchical participation in culture, it is hoped that the outputs from the project will change museum and gallery practice to enhance accessibility;
4. General public impact: Workshops and discussions held as a part of this research network will be open to the public, as will the production of an exhibition of research findings at a major London venue. This network aims to increase interest and understanding of Tagore's radical and truly contemporary significance for curating and education in the UK.
5. Impact developed through project partner, INIVA:
The network principal partner, the Institute of International Visual Arts, founded in 1994, produces exhibitions, publications, multimedia, education and research projects that engage with idea and debates in the contemporary visual arts which reflect the diversity of contemporary society and are dedicated to exploring questions around race, migration, internationalism and cultural difference. Iniva is open five days a week and is free to the public. Working in partnership with Iniva, the network will both increase the audience for its ideas and be supported by the institutions press and education team to develop new audiences for Tagore's ideas.
6. Impact developed through collaboration with DAI and Santiniketan:
Members of the network will also take part in meetings and knowledge exchange fora at the Dutch Art Institute, based in Arnheim, NL, and Santiniketan, the utopian community school set up by Tagore in West Bengal. DAI is a 'roaming academy' that sites pedagogical projects all over the world, is an educational institution that welcomes and houses visiting artists and scholars on a regular basis as part of its MFA programmes. DAI explicitly focuses attention on cross-dispiplinary learning and is thus a natural partner for the network. The impact of working with DAI will be in the introduction of the networks research findings to a broad international audience of curatorial and artistic experts in April 2014. Santiniketan, now a research site as well as a school linked to Visva Bharati University, will host network members and facilitate discussions with local practitioners, enabling local and international impact through knowledge exchange.