Indian art is having a global moment. Three months ago, eyebrows shot up when Bhupen Khakhar’s De-Luxe Tailors fetched £1.1 million at the Sotheby’s auction in London. In mid 2016, The Met Breuer launched its modern and contemporary art programme with a retrospective of modernist artist Nasreen Mohamedi, while across the Atlantic, Tate Modern in London honoured Khakhar. Closer home, calendar events like the upcoming India Art Fair and the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale are helping instil confidence in the contemporary art scene and increasing international presence. While many ascribe this to a growing Indian diaspora bringing in support, others feel more curators putting up exhibitions abroad are fuelling the interest. “The Indian art scene has never been more exciting; it is reaching a certain vintage and maturity, and being sought after by major museums,” says Gaurav Bhatia, MD of Sotheby’s India. While Christie’s backing out of the country may have dampened spirits, Bhatia insists the market is strong. “Our focus has been working with Indian collectors around the world and, over the last five years, clients have purchased works totalling over $250 million,” he says. We speak with five key curators on how art is being consumed differently today.
Natasha Ginwala
Curated Contour Biennale 8, 2017 and a 56th Venice Biennale collateral
Ginwala was last in India in 2016, to research an upcoming project, Hello World - Revising a Collection , for Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart. Emerging as an important name internationally, she is living the dream of a young diaspora curator with many interesting projects, like last year’s documenta 14. Her curatorial selection for the contemporary art exhibition — which examined the post-modern and late neo-liberal phenomenon of ‘crisis’ becoming the new normal — had her boldly mixing modern artists and contemporaries. So one saw work by KG Subramanyan, Amrita Sher-Gil and Chittaprosad alongside new-media artists Amar Kanwar, Gauri Gill and Nikhil Chopra. Another project that stands out is her politically-charged curatorial venture, My East is Your West . Featured as a collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale, it talked of cross-border politics through the works of Mumbai-based artist, Shilpa Gupta, and Rashid Rana from Lahore.
“Indian artists are being actively collected within international museum collections, and exhibited in challenging modes within the biennial circuit. Moreover, there are more examples of collaborative projects between arts organisations here and international cultural institutions, so there is a more sustained exchange,” says the 32-year-old. Like her ongoing project, Riots and Slow Cancellation of the Future — launched last month at IFA Galerie Berlin — which looks at the phenomenology of crowds and riots, and the spectres that lurk in the aftermath. It features artists like John Akomfrah, Chto Delat, Jitish Kallat and Natasha Sadr Haghighian.
Ginwala feels that in a global scenario, it is no longer just modern paintings and sculpture that are grabbing attention — there is a growing commitment to interdisciplinary and research-led approaches in contemporary art across South Asia.
Shanay Jhaveri
Curated Companionable Silences, Palais de Tokyo, 2013
Jhaveri, known for his sharp dressing and keen eye for the arts, is the assistant curator of South Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As diaspora, he holds a unique position. “It (the post created specifically for him in 2015) offered me the possibility to engage in a more embodied manner with some discursive concerns. The question I had was, ‘How do you begin to introduce modern and contemporary art from South Asia into the fairly well-established chronology of the museum in which it has been a persistent blind spot?’”
This year, the MET’s Modern and Contemporary Department will unveil two projects by South Asian artists. “Our first exhibition will be a large installation work by Ranjani Shettar, followed by our annual roof commission by a female artist, for which I am the curator,” says the 32-year-old, whose primary responsibilities are to build the museum’s holdings of South Asian art and contribute to its exhibition programme. “Then we have a retrospective of another female Indian artist, planned to open in the summer of 2019 at the Met Breuer. A goal of mine is to ensure that South Asia remains well represented on an annual basis,” he says.
Where does Indian modern and contemporary art stand globally? “I believe there is growing awareness, and this is aided by major international museums organising retrospectives of Indian artists as well as acquiring works by them for their permanent collections,” says the New York-based curator. He feels the inclusion of a number of Indian artists in documenta 14 and other paradigm-shifting exhibitions indicate that more concerted efforts are being made to rethink received art historical narratives, which have traditionally been oriented towards the West.
Myna Mukherjee
Curated Contrabanned: Provocations of Our Times, Art Konsult, 2017
“In the past, Indian contemporary artists spoke a language primarily borrowed from the West. And if they spoke a language particular to South Asia, they tended to be ghettoised,” begins Mukherjee, a curator and cultural producer. “However, with the impact of globalisation, India and the Global South are turning inwards. They are evolving a language that is returning to skill and craft, the miniatures and our rich heritage of tribal art. This is leading to a unique Indian voice.”
A management strategy consultant by training, she left a career on Wall Street to produce and curate contemporary South Asian art and cinema. The founder/director of EnGendered — a New York/New Delhi-based Transnational Arts and Human rights organisation — says, “I am interested in art curation as a feminist practice, as a means towards subversion of a hegemonic culture.”
Mukherjee, who was recently asked to speak at the Smithsonian Museum in DC on transnational art practices, has curated at the Lincoln Center, Tribeca Film Center and Queens Museum, among others. This year, she is taking an Indian contemporary exhibition to New York, which “looks at indigenous techniques of painting and expression, but re-invents it to address it in a more global, universal manner”. Another highlight: her Wall of Solidarity , which is also heading to New York. It is a collection of over 100 canvases that was part of RESIST — a curated exhibition that responded to the Nirbhaya rape case with multi-media works and live installations by artists like Anjolie Ela Menon, Mithu Sen, Arpana Caur and graphic artist Daku.
Roobina Karode
Curated the Nasreen Mohamedi retrospective, Met Breuer, 2016
Last October, Karode, director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, collaborated with the Pompidou Centre and the Musée de Guimet des Arts Asiatiques Guimet in Paris for two important exhibitions. The first featured Nalini Malani and the second had artist Jayashree Chakravarty’s Earth as Haven: Under the Canopy of Love . “It was wonderful to be in Paris at the time. Not only was I involved with Nalini and Jayashree’s exhibitions, but Samit Das and Pablo Bartholomew were showing, too. It is like India is being looked at very seriously as a country producing important modern and contemporary artists,” she says. While earlier South Asia meant mostly China and Japan, India is now a global contender.
Malani’s exhibition, titled The Rebellion of the Dead Retrospective 1969-2018 , offers 50 years of her creativity, in two parts: in Paris (2017) and later this year in Rivoli, in the city of Turin, Italy. “I think it is especially significant showing Nalini’s work because she draws from issues that effect all of us across the globe, while remaining extremely local in her approach,” says Karode, adding, “It was wonderful to see David Hockney and Nalini right next to each other. It made me feel proud of our journey as a country, to finally get the international representation we deserve.”
For Chakravarty’s project, Karode was involved in advising the artist who created a site-specific installation. “The Musée de Guimet had this beautiful semi-circle gallery with windows facing the street. We decided to seal off the windows and make it a more meditative space,” she recalls. For the Canopy of Love , the artist created scrolls with Nepali paper, fronds and other natural materials, to create a space to heal from environmental degradation. “People reacted well to both, and were excited to see contemporary artists from India. Some had not heard of either artist and it was a revelation for them,” she says, sharing, “I feel that Indian artists, curators and critics are finally having a global dialogue and discourse that is not Western centric.”
Shaheen Merali
Curated Berlin Heist, 4th Mediations Biennale, Poland, 2014
London-based Merali, who is in his 50s, belongs to a generation senior to Ginwala and Jhaveri; his practice earmarks an earlier era of Indian art internationally. “Curating, alongside exhibition-making and placing art in public spaces, is a means for an exchange of ideas,” says the former curator at Haus Der Kunst, Munich, who was instrumental in brining a presence for Indian art in Berlin, Singapore, New York and Mumbai, as the Artistic Director of Bodhi Galleries.
He believes that much of the fame and popularity that Indian contemporary art exhibitions abroad are receiving are related to the market. But for sustained interest, it needs to be anchored in scholastic or academic understanding. Merali points out that earlier, auction catalogues were the only form of publication on Indian art. But with time, the number of scholastic publications are increasing. And while it needs to accelerate, he believes this deeper understanding has led to a better global audience.
Another detriment? The curatorial courses in Europe and North America that many from India attend. Without government financial aid, the high fees are crippling, leading younger curators to either rely on family money — which leads to only the well-endowed getting plum projects — or take up ‘commercial’ projects, thus compromising on quality. “There was a curatorial and personal practise earlier — where the impulse was for making art (rather than selling art) rising from a deeper study of its methodologies (not its market viabilities) — which I believe is gradually being replaced,” he says.
Published - February 02, 2018 03:44 pm IST
