(Un)Seeing Goa’s Bom Jesus in Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s This is Not the Basilica!

R. Benedito Ferrão

doi:10.17742/IMAGE29666

Authors

R. Benedito Ferrão William & Mary

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29666

Abstract

This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan identity.

Author Biography

R. Benedito Ferrão, William & Mary

R. Benedito Ferrão has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Mellon, Endeavour, and Rotary programs, as well as the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. Curator of the 2017-18 exhibition Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, he edited a book of the same title (Fundação Oriente 2017) to accompany this retrospective of the artist’s work. His scholarly writing appears in various international journals and edited books, including Research in African Literatures, Society and Culture in South Asia, Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective (Routledge 2021), and Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism (HKU Press 2017). His fiction and creative non-fiction can be read in Riksha, The Good Men Project, Mizna, and The João Roque Literary Journal, while his op-eds have appeared in Scroll and The Wire.

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