Akshaya Tankha is a historian of modern and contemporary art in South Asia. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonizing approaches and ethnographic methods in his research, he tracks how religious, ritual, and secular understandings of the image, space, and time animate works of art, photography, museums, and monuments in India. Tankha’s research has been published, among other places, in 21: Inquiries Into Art, History, and the Visual, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and the art magazine, Marg. In his current book project, tentatively titled “Nagaland and the Art of Indigenous Presence in Postcolonial South Asia,” Tankha explores what critical resources such as ideas regarding the sentience of material and space in the work of artists, cultural practitioners, and curators in the Indian state of Nagaland tell us about the contemporaneity of art outside metropolitan contexts of practice and the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously inhabited and politically contested borderlands of South Asia.

Tankha received his PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Over 2024-25, he was the Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Art in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Previously, he was the 2022-24 Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow in Art at the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan and the 2020-2022 Dr. Malathy Singh Postdoctoral Associate & Lecturer at the South Asian Studies Council in Yale University. 

Fields of Study

• Modern and contemporary art
• South Asia

Areas of Interest

• Indigenous art and visual culture
• Representations of Indigeneity
• Museums and public culture
• Photography
• The anthropology of art
• Art historiography and temporality