The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation is delighted to announce the opening of the new exhibition, Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular, presenting the works of around 50 artists from different parts of the world.
Organised by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Sharjah Art Foundation, Pop South Asia is curated by lftikhar Dadi, artist and John H. Burris Professor at Cornell University, and Roobina Karode, Director and Chief Curator of KNMA. Initiated and displayed first at the Sharjah Art Foundation, the exhibition is now presented at KNMA with additional works and parallel projects located in both the Saket and Noida spaces of the museum.
We spoke to Roobina in detail about the importance of art and culture in the ethnic minority community.
What makes South Asian art and artists relevant and important to the art and culture community?
Today, art and culture have become more ‘global’ than ever, where, paradoxically, western idioms and lifestyles still dominate contemporary mass culture. At the same time, as a reaction to the contradictions of our globalised world, we also find different appeals to regress to a jingoist and hyper-nationalistic identity, narrowing down the scope of truly collective life and the vastness of human imagination. It is in this context that the transnational and cosmopolitan notion of ‘South Asia’ provides an opportunity to look at the present moment beyond the two extreme options of the global and the national, as well as the trite opposition between the west and the east. Artists from South Asia, with their perceptive reading of and intervention into the cosmopolitan and syncretic traditions of the subcontinent and the region’s dynamic and complicated popular culture, encourage us to rethink the contours of our civilizational legacy and the shared future. For instance, in the context of the exhibition, we find surprising parallels between Indian painter-entrepreneur Raja Ravi Varma’s reinterpretation and popularisation of Hindu icons and Sri Lankan artist Maligawage Sarlis’s similar take on Buddhist themes at the very beginning of the twentieth century, inspiring the later generations of artists to delve deeper into the intersections between the sacred and the secular, the classical and the popular, while remaining sensitive to the intricacies of the subcontinental culture.
Do you think South Asians are getting the right opportunities and infrastructure to be able to nurture their artistic talent and also make decent monetary gains?
I would say, yes. My experience mainly relates to the Indian scene and speaking from that vantage point, I can say that here one of the turning points happened during the liberalisation phase in the 1990s wherein we adopted a more open approach to the global market. As a result, many new players, both national as well as international, commercial as well as non-profit, entered what was earlier a highly limited art domain restricted to primarily government-funded organisations like the Lalit Kala Akademi which dispensed with fellowships and awards as well as educational institutions like Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal. Government fellowships and awards did allow artists to explore western institutions and movements but these were few and far between.
In terms of any one institution which has helped to nurture and expand the artistic talents and language in South Asia, it was the entry of the international artist-led initiative the Triangle Art Network (formerly, Triangle Art Trust, UK) in the region. Khoj International Artists’ Association was one of the first South Asian organisations to be founded in India in 1997 through the support of the Triangle Art Network. It was established with the principal objective of promoting contemporary art and addressing the lack of dialogue with other subcontinental neighbours as well as building connections with specifically non-western cultural discourses in Africa, Latin America, China, the Asia Pacific, Australia etc. Eventually other such artist-led initiatives were set-up in Pakistan (Vasl), Bangladesh (Britto Art Trust), Sri Lanka (Theertha) and Nepal (Sutra Workshops). These formations as well as the profusion of private institutions, museums, residencies and workshops have led to an expansion of the art scene and have facilitated transnational as well as transcultural networks to develop in South Asia which I believe are doing their part in imparting visibility to our artists on the global stage.
Tell us a bit about the idea behind this exhibition. What goes into putting it together?
The exhibition, which evolved from my conversations with Dadi, had its first iteration at the Sharjah Art Foundation the last year. Over the months before the Sharjah exhibition as well as its Delhi edition at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, we painstakingly developed a list of around fifty South Asian and diasporic artists and their works, developed a research database on their practice and philosophy, and co-ordinated over logistical means with numerous art collectors, museums and galleries spread all over the world. A massive exhibition such as this had to be divided into subsections and categories. So display-wise, we created separate galleries within the exhibition, thematically devoted to the visual culture of the bazaar, popular prints, cinema, urbanisation, the questions of identity etc.
How can the UK and India cross-promote artists so that their work is recognised and travels across the globe?
I believe there is a well-developed ecology in place wherein cross-cultural exchanges between UK and Indian artists are shaped and promoted. In fact, for Indian artists, the UK presents the maximum number of scholarships and fellowships in the form of the Commonwealth Grant, Charles Wallace Fellowship, or the Chevening Scholarship along with residences offered by London-based non-profit independent outfits like the Delfina Foundation and Gasworks. British artists travel to India and work with various art organisations across the country, whether in the form of workshops or residences. If we look back at what was happening in India post-independence, a lot of prominent artists from the Fine Arts Faculty at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, was travelling to the Royal College of Art, London on scholarships in the 1950s and 1960s. While artists like Gulammohammed Sheikh and Vivan Sundaram went to Britain, there were art practitioners like the figurative painter Timothy Hyman and painter-printmaker Howard Hodgkin who came to Baroda and travelled across India in the 1970s and 1980s. Recently, there have been major showings of Indian contemporary artists in galleries across the UK. Jitish Kallat was invited by the John Hansard Gallery, part of the University of Southampton, to develop an exhibition out of objects from their archives which culminated in the show, Tangled Hierarchy in 2022. The show has now travelled to India and is presently being exhibited at Kochi-Muziris Biennale. One of the artists who is now being shown along with the India iteration of the Pop South Asia exhibition, Nalini Malani, has her works on view at the National Gallery, London as the first recipient of the National Gallery contemporary fellow award. So, I would say that at the present moment we have generated and developed a good network of artist cooperation and experimentation. However, I also look forward to the future to see how these networks are maintained and if they become stronger or are eroded in the long run.
