Art, Ritual and Pharmaceutical Futures
Tuesday 2 June 2026, 2pm - 4pm
Lecture Room, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
All welcome
A research network dedicated to divination, oracles, and omens cannot help but engage with methods of prediction used at different historical moments and in diverse cultural contexts. Against this background, the Dorsett/Gupta residency in Oxford has explored a divinatory process that is uniquely relevant to present-day artists. When it comes to the contemporaneity of new art, or even the educational cultivation of artistic promise in art schools, Rosalind Krauss’s ‘expanded field’ diagram has proved to be a key device for embracing creative uncertainty, pioneering unexpected developments, and circumventing the safety of historical narrative.
First published in 1979, Krauss’s diagram in ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ has helped decide what counts as contemporary art for decades, and this presentation examines the practice-based methods Dorsett and Gupta have used to research the continuing efficacy of this celebrated essay. Alongside their current studio experiments, their presentation applies expanded field ideas to both Dorsett’s archive of museum interventions in the 80s and 90s and Gupta’s documentation of Hindu worship in temples throughout India. As a result, a long engagement with Krauss’s ideas is drawn into a cross-cultural and intergenerational dialogue with the emergent sculptural language of a young Indian artist who makes artworks that combine sacred rituals with everyday pharmaceutical routines.
Chris Dorsett is an artist-curator with research affiliations to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
Poojan Gupta is an artist based in Jaipur and London. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and the Associate Artist scheme at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
