This unpublished document is a blurb produced by curator Geeta Kapur for the book, 'body.city: siting contemporary culture in India.' The book was published on the occasion of the exhibition titled 'subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold,' held at the House of World Cultures, Berlin.

Regarding the exhibition, the curator writes:

'My focus is on art practice in the social, political and psychic 'subterrain' of third world 'global cities.' Here too the contemporary is an inevitable part of the deconstructed history of modernity that valorised the ambiguously masked artist and set up an elaborate masquerade around the theme of what Freud called 'civilisation and its discontents.' This civilisational discourse was furthered by the revolutionary working-class history of the twentieth century and, subsequently, by the history of decolonisation that added new contours to the very idea of civilisation by revealing the vast limitations of a Europe-centred universe. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of differently situated modern artists all across the third world whose acknowledged presence shaped a hermeneutic retake on the (political) unconscious of the contemporary. It necessitated the relatively privileged interlocutor – the artist – to assume the position of a conspicuously underprivileged subject of an unequal social order, and this led to reasonably located (in regional, national and third world terms) interventions in and through art.'

On 8 November 2003, Geeta Kapur delivered a lecture with the same title as the exhibition in the symposium, 'Migrating Images - Reading and Translating Images Transculturally,' organised by the House of World Cultures, Berlin, 7-8 November 2003.