Anish Kapoor’s Installation Art: Epistemology and Unsettling spectacle[s] of Nostalgia

Abstract

This essay produces a nuanced understanding of nostalgia through the study of
Anish Kapoor’s installation art. It challenges a clichéd understanding of nostalgia
and argues the latter as a synthetic, performative emotion which can be invoked
voluntarily through the use of “iterative[s]” and how it acts as a stylistic, aesthetic
and constructive discourse in the choreography and cartography of spaces which
are not inert but offer a complex understanding of history. The essay discusses
the relevance and validity of nostalgia in new and unknown spaces to generate
their epistemology and render them comprehendible. It further argues how
nostalgia emerges as an ambivalent condition of modernity by critiquing and
making it legible simultaneously.