TRANScuratorial Academy Mumbai

Law transacts, even if invisibly so, with affective figures such as the insider, the outsider, the guest and the stranger. How does the law produce, visibilize or invisibilize these relational figures, and what would it mean to legally foreground these figures and the conceptual universes they inhabit at a time when there could not be a greater demand for legal hospitality even as we are witness to the greatest forms of legal inhospitality? The Muslim ban promulgated by the Trump administration is just one instance of the challenge we face. If the law has been inherently spatial and territorial, where then to turn to if we are to articulate a radical politics of belonging: is the Kantian ideal of a cosmopolitan right to hospitality a solution or only a bigger problem in her liberal times? In this talk, which is by way of a set of exploratory wanderings, I shall set up a few problems of thinking of the overlap between law, hostility and hospitality.

Lawrence Liang is a professor of law at the School of Law, Governance and Citizenship at Ambedkar University Delhi. A founder of Alternative Law Forum, a collective of public interest, Lawrence’s work and interests lie at the intersection of law and culture. He has also collaborated with groups such as Sarai Delhi and Camp in Mumbai on research and archival initiatives.


The TRANScuratorial Academy (TCA) is an initiative of the foundation KfW Stiftung with the aim of advancing international knowledge transfer, networking and the development of the transcultural and transdisciplinary curatorial discourse. Conceived and directed by Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, the TCA brings together emerging curators and internationally renowned experts in a mobile format, focusing on key issues which gained urgency within contemporary curatorial practice under the conditions of globalization. By inviting Lawrence Liang as the keynote speaker for the TCA Mumbai, the project follows its aim to introduce vital terms from neighboring disciplines to the curatorial discourse. Encounters and discussions with protagonists of the local curatorial scene are a further important part of the TCA. The academy is structured in three chapters, each of which extends over five days and is centered on a keyword: Mumbai is the location of the second chapter which will discuss the question of “hospitality” in relation to the curatorial, the first one took place in Berlin in May 2017 and reflected on “entangled histories,” the third one will be Phnom Penh in 2018, focussing on “untranslatability.”

A project by KfW Stiftung in collaboration with Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai.

About us:
KfW Stiftung is an independent non-profit foundation set up by Germany’s state-owned development bank KfW in 2012. Its mission in the arts is to stimulate intercultural dialogue in today’s globalized world. It aims to advance exchange between those working in culture in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia by supporting local and international projects, such as residency programs in Berlin for artists and curators, writers’ workshops for authors in the Middle East or artistic encounters in music and performance.
Program manager arts and culture: Nicola Müllerschön, nicola.muellerschoen@kfw-sftiftung.de.