Associate Professor Chaitanya Sambrani

Chaitanya is an art historian and curator interested in modern and contemporary art in Asia, especially in relation to tradition, marginality and politics. He teaches courses on modernism and contemporary art in India, Indonesia, China and Japan, and on art, design and urbanity. In 2018, he initiated and taught the inaugural in-country course on Indonesian art at ANU, and started work on the ongoing project The “Wonders” that Basham Saw: analysing the visual archives of Professor AL Basham, now a collaboration with colleagues at ANU, the National Gallery of Australia, National University of Singapore and the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Chaitanya is the primary author and editor of At Home in the World: the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh (2019).

In 2020, Chaitanya was nominated to membership of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and appointed a Curatorial Adviser to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He co-founded the Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa.org), and serves as a member of the Network’s inaugural Coordinating Group (2020-2023). In 2021, he was nominated to the Committee of Management of The Asian Art Society of Australia (TAASA), and appointed Curatorial Advisor to the La Trobe Art Institute for its Geoff Raby Collection of Chinese Art.

His major curatorial projects include Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India (touring seven museum venues in Australia, USA, Mexico and India over 2004-07); Place.Time.Play: Contemporary Art from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom (the first ever contemporary art exchange between artists from China and India, Shanghai, 2010); To Let the World In: narrative and beyond in contemporary Indian art (Art Chennai Festival of Art, 2012) and All that Arises, a mid-career survey of the work of Lao-Australian artist Savanhdary Vongpoothorn (Canberra, 2019).