Gitanjali Pyndiah is a doctoral researcher in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She worked for six years in Mauritius as a lecturer in History of Art and Media Theory at the School of Fine Arts/University of Mauritius and as a multimedia developer at the Folk Museum of Indian Immigration. She has an MA in Arts Management from USQ Australia and a Bfa Applied Arts from the Delhi College of Art, India. Her research interest covers the relationship between culture (visual arts, language and literature in particular), memory and national history with focus on the Indian Ocean. She will be working on the concept of transcommunitarianism with Astrid Erll during her research stay at the Goethe University.
Project: Memoriography: The history that objects hold
This research in Cultural Studies develops the concept of Memoriography as the remembering and the retelling of a historical event, a moment, a feeling in the present in art and literature. Two axes are dealt with: Historical writings in memory scholarship and the way art objects, particular writings, musics, performance function as forms of the inscription and transmission of affectively-charged memory. This thesis reads the works of Mauritian contemporary visual artist Nirmal Hurry in particular and other post colonial artists as affective memoriographic things which produces a different temporality from linear chronological historicities of historical writings. The possibility of different temporalities and affective intensities act as a framework for the discussion of forms of expression in art, theatre and music on the main island of Mauritius.