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Multiple Indias: a traveling show of contemporary Indian art, now at Rutgers, addresses political, social and personal issues on the subcontinent
Art in America, April, 2008 by Susan Snodgrass
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The social and cultural complexities of India are exposed in "New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India," an ambitious traveling exhibition that maps personal, political and historical narratives from the perspective of 21 artists and some 60 works. It debuted at the Chicago Cultural Center last summer and opens this month at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs with the aid of independent curator Betty Seid, it is one of several large-scale surveys devoted to contemporary Indian art currently touring Europe and the U.S. (an exhibition organized by the Kunstmuseum Bern is devoted to a similar theme). (1) These exhibitions reflect the West's rising interest in contemporary Indian art as well as the country's flourishing art economy (as recently reported in the New York Times (2)).
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More important, India, the world's largest democracy and third largest military force, emblematizes our globalized, Dost-9/11 world. There one finds a confluence of religions (Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism) and a hybrid economy that merges the post-Independence Marxist policies instituted in 1947 by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with economic reforms initiated in 1991 to open India's markets to foreign investment. The latter, known as "liberalization," has made India a key player in the fields of technology, communications and mass media, and supported a boom in the mega film industry known as Bollywood.
The impact of globalization is not, of course, without cost. In 2000, over 28 percent of India's approximately one billion people lived below the country's poverty line, (3) and there is a huge gap in income and consumption between the wealthy and the poor. In his travelogue Temptations of the West, Pankaj Mishra traces the effects of Western-style modernization upon the cultures of Southeast Asia, noting "India, with its severe disparities of income, caste, and religion is split into ... many separate worlds." (4)
"New Narratives" similarly conceives India as a series of more or less discrete worlds, with each artist exploring different aspects of Indian society and the contemporary Indian psyche. The rubric of narrative provides a connective thread within the diversity of current art practice (all works in the show except one have been created since 2000). Seid lends a literary framework to the theme of narrative and storytelling, as reflected in her catalogue essay. Critic Johan Pijnappel's insightful text on video art describes digital media, particularly multichannel, interactive works, as the "new narrative matrix." Pijnappel served as consulting curator for video and new media works, which prove to be some of the strongest in the show.
Perhaps to avoid the pitfalls of imposing any semblance of Western authority, the organizers have taken a fairly apolitical stance, despite the political content of many of the works. The wall texts and the catalogue would both have benefited from more information on India itself in order to situate contemporary art practice there within a broader cultural context. Instead, the exhibition's social content emanates solely from the works themselves, which are organized into three subthemes: Looking Inward: Narratives of the Self; Looking Outward: Contemporary Observations; Looking Backward: Interpreting Texts. Several artists who work across various mediums are represented in more than one section.
The show includes several artists with international reputations. Nalini Malani was included in the main exhibition of the 2007 Venice Biennale, while Subodh Gupta's monumental skull cobbled from stainless-steel cooking vessels commanded the entrance to the Palazzo Grassi. A suite of large-scale watercolors by Atul Dodiya was on view at Documenta 12 (as was a video installation by Amar Kanwar, an artist conspicuously absent from the Cultural Center show). The majority of the artists in this intergenerational sampling hail from either Mumbai or New Delhi. That nearly two-thirds of them are female is important to note. It is a reflection, according to the curator, of the growing number of women artists gaining visibility in the Indian art world.
Private Lives
Gulammohammed Sheikh and Arpita Singh (both born in 1937) are the exhibition's elder artists. Together, they provide some historical grounding to the show's first section, Looking Inward: Narratives of the Self, where autobiography and personal symbols cohere into private tales that often intersect with narratives from India's cultural history.
Sheikh is a central figure in contemporary Indian art as well as an important teacher. His ongoing project Book of Journeys, begun in 1996, was represented by a digital facsimile of the 36-page, accordion-style original, which he declined to loan for exhibition. The book records key moments in the artist's life; the gouache and acrylic images range from densely worked and saturated pages to delicate figural drawings. Sheikh is both a storyteller and a documentarian. Scenes from his childhood home in Gujarat, for example, and allusions to revered artists and poets unfold alongside responses to historic events, such as the nuclear tests India carried out in 1998 that brought worldwide condemnation.
