Shireen and Afzal Ahmad Professor of South Asian Arts; Assistant Professor of History of Art
About
Rattanamol Singh Johal is an art historian and curator, specializing in the art of South Asia and its diasporas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His research seeks to develop a history and genealogy of experimental, lens and time-based art emerging in India in the final decades of the twentieth century. His current book project, Forms of Despair, studies transformations in practice as metropolitan artists of a certain social class and generation were confronted with the limitations and failings of their postcolonial, cosmopolitan imaginaries. The period in question – from the mid-80s to the early 2000s – is marked by state-sanctioned economic liberalization, an eruption of identity and religion-based politics, a grave escalation of violence against minorities, and conflicts over indigenous rights, labor, property, and the environment. Johal’s study shifts the narrative away from an unquestioning celebration of the proliferation of so-called new media art across the Global South, providing a situated understanding of shared aesthetic and political stakes, conditions of possibility, and circumstances of production. More broadly, his research focuses on questions of periodization and artistic generation in postcolonial contexts.
A second project, currently in development, takes a transnational approach that focuses on transformations in documentary image making within the sphere of contemporary art, specifically among practitioners who have trained and work outside Europe and the United States. Moving beyond studies and exhibitions of recent decades that underscore “the documentary turn,” this research considers the animating impulses, enabling nature, and ethical urgencies of this mode of engagement and address.
Between 2016 and 2024, Johal occupied various positions at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, most recently serving as Assistant Director of the International Program. At MoMA, he worked on the global research initiative, C-MAP, the online research platform, post, and the Primary Documents publication series. He was also part of the curatorial team of the major exhibition, Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023) and co-chaired the Museum’s Contemporary Working Group (2023-24), members of which organize displays of collection works from the 1980s to the present. He was previously a fellow at the Tate Research Centre: Asia (2018), curator at Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi (2011-2013), and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2016-17).
