Iftikhar Dadi was awarded $220,000 from the Getty Foundation to lead the Climate Congress, a weeklong intensive series of seminars, workshops, lectures, panel discussions and field trips in Lahore, Pakistan in November 2024.
Dadi, the John H. Burris Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, co-convened the Climate Congress with John Tain of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. The Congress was made possible by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, which aims to strengthen art history globally by increasing opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange across nations and regions.
The conference featured more than thirty guest scholars, curators, artists, and other practitioners and twenty-seven emerging scholars who formed the core Climate Congress delegates. As the closing program of the third Lahore Biennale, a large-scale art exhibition held every two years to highlight the city’s heritage, the Climate Congress extended the research developed as part of the main exhibition by convening leading and emerging scholars, curators, and artists focusing on Asia.
“Art history as a discipline has tremendous relevance for Asia and Africa, places rich in modern and contemporary cultural production,” Dadi said. “By bringing emerging scholars and practitioners from these regions together with those from Europe and North America in an intensive forum, the Climate Congress forged intellectual relationships necessary for the global growth and relevance of the discipline.
“Addressing climate change through the environmental humanities and the arts is of urgent importance today as we face the climate emergency on a local and global scale,” added Dadi.
The Climate Congress offered a platform for South-South conversations around the role of the arts and humanities to contribute towards wider efforts to generate awareness and support for imagining sustainable futures, said Dadi. “As a transnational forum sensitive to local and indigenous perspectives, the Congress modeled the international and interdisciplinary collaboration critical to building just and sustainable societies in the face of the climate crisis.”
The event was hosted by the Lahore Biennale Foundation in collaboration with the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
This is the second Connecting Art Histories grant from the Getty Foundation received by Dadi, both in association with Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities. In 2019, he was the recipient of a $238,000 grant supporting “Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia,” a series of research seminars.
More News from A&S
