The Power Institute is proud to be hosting Dipti Khera as our 2025 Sydney Asian Art Series Scholar in Residence.
In August our guest will be Dipti Khera, who is Associate Professor of Art History at New York University.
Professor Khera is here as Scholar in Residence for the Sydney Asian Art Series, a program that The Power Institute coordinates in collaboration with VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW. While here she will meet staff and students, and deliver a public lecture at the Art Gallery of NSW on the visual world of Indian vijnaptipatra, scrolls of painted letters that carry important histories of early modern and colonial India.
This lecture will draw on Professor Khera's broader research and expertise on early modern South Asian art. While Professor Khera specialises in painted artifacts and architecture in Western India’s regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat, her work has always told much larger stories about Eurasia, the Indian Ocean.
In 2020, Professor Khera published The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). The book, which won the 2019 American Institute of Indian Studies' Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize, concerned the painting traditions of 18th-century Udaipur, a city in northwestern India, and their relationship to the politics and poetry of the period. The book's analysis ranged from monumental court paintings to royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings. In 2023 Professor Khera gathered together some of the key works from this same period in the exhibition A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, India (co-curated with Debra Diamond) at the National Museum for Asian Art (Washington D.C.) in partnership with the City Palace Museum, Udaipur.
Professor Khera is the third Scholar to visit Sydney as part of the Sydney Asian Art Series, preceded by Melody Rod-ari in 2023 (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles) and Thanavi Chotpradit (Silpakorn University, Bangkok) in 2024. We are delighted to have Professor Khera with us.
Series convened by Olivier Krischer and Peyvand Firouzeh, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.
More information and registration for Professor Khera's public lecture
