Devika Singh specialises in modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on art in South Asia and the transnational history of modernism.
Before joining the Courtauld in 2022 she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern where she was in charge of museum displays and acquisitions of South Asian art for the Tate collection. She was also part of the core team of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational where she led and convened a number of conferences and research events. Singh has previously been Smuts Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art (Max Weber Foundation) in Paris. Singh is an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies of the University of Cambridge and a member of the ‘Observatoire: Globalisation, Art et Prospective’ at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA, Paris).
She completed an hypo-khâgne and a khâgne at Lycée Condorcet in Paris and holds a BA in the history of art from the University of Cambridge (King’s College) and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). Singh worked at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris before pursuing her PhD in the history of art (Cambridge, 2013) supported by the AHRC and a Knox studentship from Trinity College. She has held an AHRC fellowship at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC, a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) fellowship at the Freie Universität, Berlin, an André Chastel fellowship of the INHA at the French Academy at Rome (Villa Medici) and was a resident of the Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo (OCA)’s International Studio Programme.
Singh has curated in a diversity of contexts and continues to curate internationally. She co-curated ‘Gedney in India’ (Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, CSMVS, Mumbai, 2017; Duke University, 2018) and has curated exhibitions including ‘Planetary Planning’ (Dhaka Art Summit, 2018), ‘Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan’ (Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 2019-20) as well as a number of displays at Tate Modern including Lee Mingwei’s Our Labyrinth (Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2022).
Her writing has appeared widely in exhibition catalogues of international museums, art magazines such as frieze, Art Press and MARG and journals including Third Text, Modern Asian Studies, the Journal of Art Historiography and Art History. Her book International Departures: Art in India after Independence, for which she received a research grant from the British Academy and a publication grant from the Paul Mellon Centre, is forthcoming in 2023 with Reaktion Books. She is a member of several professional bodies, including CIMAM, and she is on the editorial board of the Oxford Art Journal.
