Swagato Chakravorty

Swagato Chakravorty (he/his) is an Indian American critic, scholar, and curator whose interests range across modern and contemporary art and visual culture. He is currently the Daniel W. Dietrich II Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is also a PhD candidate at Yale University in History of Art and Film and Media Studies. His dissertation is a cross-cultural study of displacement and materiality in art since 1989, focusing on work by South Asian, Latin American, and African diasporic artists in dialogue with American and European modernisms. 

 

Related interests include: immersive media and spectatorship, media, architecture, and the built environment; performance art and the image, non-Western histories of expanded cinema and intermedia, Third Cinema and its international afterlives, British cultural studies, postcolonialism and its legacies; diaspora, migration and mobility; the artist collective, and critical curation. 

 

His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the US Department of Education. He has held research and curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Jewish Museum, New York, and has worked on exhibitions including Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done; Bruce Conner: It’s All True; Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel; Nari Ward: We the People; and Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running. 

 

“Unwatchable: Alfredo Jaar, Lament of the Images (2002), and the Ends of Representation,” Art Journal 80:3 (2021)

 

“Out of the Waiting Room of History: Ritwik Ghatak’s Cinema of Partition,” LA Review of Books, February 2020

 

“Remediating the Body: Performance, Photography, and the Dance Archives at the Museum of Modern Art,” Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949, eds. Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2020)

 

“Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works and the Afterlives of Spectatorship,” Simultaneous Soloists, eds. David Grubbs and Anthony McCall (New York: Pioneer Works, 2019)

 

Reviews in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and Performa Magazine