“India Since the 90s” is a collaborative bilingual project between Tulika Books, New Delhi and West Heavens, Shanghai, supported by Moonchu Foundation, Hong Kong.

How did we get here? As the twenty-first century unfolds, several seemingly unprecedented phenomena evoke ghosts of past histories that suggest we may have been here before. Forms and arguments gone acquire new relevance, as retrospective signposts for the contemporary. “India Since the 90s” assembles texts and images from diverse academic disciplines and cultural practices, to look again at the millennial turn that is shaping our present.

In an atmosphere of growing authoritarianism, how can we draw attention to performance as a transaction of sensorial agency – the right to be seen, heard, recognized – the right to be palpable? Improvised Futures attempts to frame performance as doing, as fraught negotiations of agency and identity. As it considers the performative effect of a range of ideas, actions and situations that have shaped society and defined cultural expression since the 1990s, it frames the body as a site of radical imagination. The volume comprises texts and artworks by artists, academics and activists, placing these works in conversation with each other in order to elicit new meanings and connections.

Ranjana Dave is an independent dance practitioner and writer. She is Programmes Director at Gati Dance Forum and has also taught at Ambedkar University, Delhi and Ashoka University.

Set up in 2010 by Chang Tsong-zung (Hanart TZ Gallery), Gao Shiming (China Academy of Art), West Heaven is an integrated cross-cultural exchange programme aiming to disentangle and compare the different paths of modernity taken by India and China. It promotes several layers of interaction across intellectual and art practices, and social thought, between the two countries. In its ten years of existence, the project has organized numerous forums, exhibitions, film screenings and workshops, and has published more than twenty books.