Book Reviews

Geeta Kapur, Speech Acts, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2025, 284 pages, Rs 995.

That art is not originary to Geeta Kapur’s most recent book can be seen in its title: Speech Acts.

Kapur remains the most formidable practitioner of a theory of the avant-garde in visual, performative and installation art across postcolonial openings in the continuous modernist–postmodernist twentieth century. It feels necessary to add ‘postcolonial openings in India’ in the previoussentence but more accurate would be to recognise that Kapur’s critical and public-curatorial practice, wherever it emerges at determinate points of national/ising and global/ising contexts, always decentres. This decentring therefore must also be thought of in her relation to ‘art’, a category under which her authorial name, before any reading of her written and publiccuratorial work, gets subsumed.