Sona Ki Chiaiya, the Golden Sparrow, is the name long applied to India in reference to its rich heritage of art, religion, and culture, dating back to 3500 BC.
Today’s Indian art reflects influences from multiple periods and sources: ancient rock paintings and temple arts; the spiritual practices of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam; various regional schools and styles of such Madhubani painting and Mughal miniatures; and Western artistic imports during the colonial era. Contemporary artists from India avail themselves of this treasure trove, melding traditional forms with contemporary concepts.
Globalization and modern technology helped spread Western art to India, whose artists decoded and modified it, then rechanneled in through places like Dubai back to the Western world. In 2006 Galerie Enrico Navarra published the now legendary book Made by Indians, in which curator-critic Fabrice Bousteau and an expert team survey the new Indian art scene. Their selection of artists, still very relevant today (as attested by biennales, international galleries, and important exhibitions), includes Krishnaraj Chonat, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, Sunil Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Amar Kanwar, Barthi Kher, Sonia Khurana, Ryas Komu, Nalini Malani, Pushpamala N., Ravinder Reddy, Tejal Shah, Sudarshan Shetty, Dayanita Singh, Thukral & Tagra, and Raqs Media Collective, and others.
Made by Indians revealed the complexity of 21st-century Indian life and culture. Contemporary Indian art is a reflection of the country: it throws up paradoxes. “Young people might dance to electro,” Bousteau observes, “but if they are Hindus, they continue to worship Ganesh with as much joy and piety as ever.” Highly visual but less Pop than Chinese art, the new wave work is often punchy, like that of of the Young British Artists of the 1980s and ’90s. Contemporary Indian artists express critical views on consumer society, the way democracy functions, power structures, and cultural and religious taboos.
Below are some female Indian artists who deal with the cast system, society’s hypocritical attitude to sex, forced marriages, illiteracy and poverty, and disappearances under the cover of “domestic accidents.” Through their work these artists attempt to raise women from a second-class status.
Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London) is a perfect examplar of the fusion of East and West, India and Europe, traditional and cutting-edge. The painter and sculptor is known for her use of the bindi, the “third eye” mark applied to the forehead. In The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006), for instance, a life-size prostrate female elephant made of fiberglass is adorned with a large number of bindi dots. Another focus of Kher’s work is the female body, as seen in the 18-foot-tall figure Ancestor, currently on view (through August 27, 2023) at the southeastern entrance to Central Park in New York. Combining fragments of devotional clay figurines—a technique the artist has used in several previous works—Ancestor is an Indian goddess, found in Hindu popular iconography, with 23 extra heads protruding from the upper body. Hindu goddesses are often depicted with several heads and/or multiple arms, each holding an object symbolizing spiritual powers or offerings. Overlooking the center of Manhattan, Ancestor brings a sense of serenity and divinity to a loud and bustling metropolis.
Sonia Khurana (b. Delhi, 1968), is one of India’s most discussed performance artists, exploring gender issues with poetic intuition. In her video Bird (2000), the artist ascends like a roundish bird that has lost its power but not its will to fly. The performance speaks of a desire to overcome difficulties and an insatiable longing for freedom. Khurana often pushes the boundaries of art by inducing the public to participate in her work. At “Lying Down on the Ground,” a 2011 workshop at KNMA (Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket, New Delhi), Khurana encouraged the participants to lie down among the art works exhibited and describe their experience. In the kinetic work Zoetrope (1999), Khurana installed 13 images of herself, looking like a dramatically gesturing opera singer in theatrical costume and large wig, inside a drum-like object. The viewer, by rotating the drum, creates a moving image and can thus control the pace of the figure’s poses and gestures. Variations of the work have included a larger and smaller drum on a trolley at KNMA, a large sculptural drum on the beach in St. Tropez, and a life-size version at the Busan Biennale 2014, among others. The viewer is invited to decide about the rhythm, repetition, cycle, duration, and stillness of the moving sculpture. The photographs become a performance inside the cylinder, as the “singer” floats between presence and absence.
Audience participation equally plays a crucial role in the work of Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976), who lives and works in her native Mumbai. Very concerned with politics, the artist has addressed freedom of speech issues in her country, as well as others, with the immersive installation In Your Tongue I Cannot Hide (2018). Hidden speakers amplified the voices (speaking in English and a babel of other tongues) of poets incarcerated for their beliefs. Beneath each speaker was a printout of some of their poems, skewered by a metal spike. The work was exhibited at the Kochi Biennale in 2018 and the Venice Biennale in 2019. Untitled (2006) comprises photographs of the artist covering her eyes, ears, and mouth with her hands, while pointing with additional arms and hands (like a Hindu deity), suggesting a gun aimed at an imaginary target. In the performance Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak (2009), Gupta elaborated on this pictorial tenet—the three monkeys—as a metaphor for her conviction that power, politics, and rapid globalization lead to social rupture and inequality. Gupta furthers her engagement with power structures, language, and systems of control in the figurative sculpture Untitled (2020-21), shown with Neugeriemschneider, Berlin, at Paris+ par Art Basel 2022. Three stark white androgynous busts atop wooden poles present a new version of the untitled work from 2006. Gupta is moving away from her roots without losing them.
The most important art festival in Asia in 2022 is the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, an international exhibition of contemporary art, held in the city of Kochi, Kerala, India. The Biennale matches Kochi’s multi-layered history of settlement by Arab, Chinese, Jewish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English peoples as well as various migrant groups from India. The fifth installment, “In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire,” runs from December 12, 2022 to April 10, 2023. According to the event’s curator, Shubigi Rao, “This edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale embodies the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim.” The artists will reflect the political and social condition of our world today, hopefully with much poetry and spirituality, as artists in this part of the world have done for centuries.
Courtesy The Sublime India Issue by Vissionaire
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