author | curator | art critic
Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is also a leading Indian poet. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin, 2018; in the UK by Arc as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020), and Hunchprose (Penguin, 2021). His translation of a celebrated 14th-century woman mystic has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011).
Hoskote was the curator of India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). Among his curatorial projects are three transhistorical exhibitions developed for the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa: Terra Cognita? (2016), Anti-Memoirs (2017), and The Sacred Everyday (2018). With Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, Hoskote co-curated the exhibition-conference platform, The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, 2016). He has also curated a retrospective-scale exhibition of M.F. Husain, Horses of the Sun (Mathaf Museum, Doha, 2019) and F.N. Souza: The Power and the Glory (currently on view at CSMVS, Bombay, 2021-22).