As part of MoMA’s C-MAP Asia group, I have had the distinct fortune of being able to make several trips to South Asia. Each time, I’ve visited new places and met new people, and each experience has bolstered my understanding of the history of modern art in the region, and has provided opportunities for engaging with its vibrant contemporary art community, as well. A few years ago, I visited the Faculty of Fine Arts at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, an important art school whose curriculum, drawing on aspects of the German Bauhaus principles unifying art, craft, and design, encouraged students to look to traditional idioms, indigenous materials, and historical genres in an effort to define a genuinely new and Indian art.

It was in this context that I came to know the work of Sheela Gowda, an artist best known for making large-scale abstract sculptural installations. Born in 1957 in the Karnataka region of southern India, where she currently lives and works in its capital city, Bangalore, Gowda received a MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1986, after studying in Baroda, and also at an equally historically important institution in Santiniketan. Though Gowda was trained as a painter, it was her interest in the specific medium of cow dung that prompted a shift in her work from two to three dimensions. Considered sacred in Hindu scripture, dung is formed into patties, often by village women laborers, and burned for fuel or applied to walls of Indian homes to protect their inhabitants. Ubiquitous in the Indian domestic landscape, the cow dung pats proved to be an ideal medium for Gowda to incorporate into her work: abstract, natural, available, and, most importantly, charged with reference—to culture, to place, to politics, and to personal history.

Gowda then began to seek other symbolically potent materials. She found them in the likes of empty tar drums (repurposed as road workers’ temporary housing), human hair, incense ash, red kumkum powder made from ground tumeric (all used in religious rituals), and, in the case of of all people—a work I saw at GALLERYSKE in Bangalore, my first stop on my trip—the remains of torn-down houses. Scavenged from the streets or purchased from scrapyard salesmen, these window frames, pillars, and doorjambs form the spine of of all people. Gowda painted the wooden fragments the bright yellows, pinks, and turquoises typical of Karnataka homes, and recombined them into structures that stand freely, lean, or stretch skyward; by doing so, she resuscitated them not to their original state but to their original integrity. Strewn on and among these reconstituted domestic fragments are thousands of small wood votive figurines that are typically distributed as gifts and kept in the homes of their recipients for good luck. Nearly abstract but for three small slits that signify a face, these figurines animate Gowda’s imagined architectural setting. With of all people, Gowda conjures a real place by stitching together elements from it, and also hints at a narrative with the figurative elements within it, all while maintaining a resolutely abstract visual language. In this way she constructs a complex environment that synthesizes the history, culture, and politics of her native India, western modes of twentieth-century abstraction, and her own biography.

Gowda has been the subject of several monographic presentations, most recently Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2017), and the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2013). She has an upcoming solo presentation at Hangar Bicocca, Milan in 2019. Her work has also been presented in international group exhibitions well over the past decade, including the Dhaka Art Summit (2017), biennials in Busan (2012), Sharjah (2009), and Venice (2009), and Documenta 12 (2007). She was a finalist for the Huge Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2014) and is represented by works in its and the Walker Art Museum’s collections. MoMA was fortunate enough to acquire of all people this spring, signaling an important investment on behalf of the Museum in tracing the significant developments in contemporary Indian art.

After viewing of all people in Bangalore, I was able to see another new installation by Gowda, this time at the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh. This was my second visit to the Summit, an international research and exhibition biennale for art and architecture founded by the Samdani Art Foundation in 2012 and organized by the Foundation’s curator, Diana Campbell Betancourt. The Summit provides a crucial platform for exploring the history and development of South Asia’s cultural communities, bringing together artists, curators, academics, and interested visitors from around the globe to participate in a series of cross-disciplinary discussions and exhibitions. One of these such presentations was A Beast, a god, and a line, organized by Cosmin Costinas, Director of the arts organization Para-Site in Hong Kong. According to the attendant didactic materials, the exhibition considered the South Asian region of “Bengal’s position at the core of different geographical networks, reflecting the circulation of people and ideas in different historical times… [T]he exhibition unfolds in several chapters, positioning the material histories of textiles as a central thread that carries the trace of these exchanges.”

It was in this context that Gowda was commissioned to make a site specific installation. Discreetly sited under a back staircase in the Shilpakala Academy, a state-sponsored cultural center and the Summit’s main venue, Of Becoming¸ her contribution to the Summit, comprises dozens of “gamchas”—brightly colored cotton cloths used across South Asia as towels or worn by laborers as loincloths or head wraps—which are tied together and suspended in the space. These ubiquitous, everyday materials become the formal building blocks of an abstract sculptural installation, but one that is imbued with a specific political and cultural meaning. 

The remainder of my trip brought me to a host of new places and experiences, including memorable visits to several renowned architectural sites, made all the more meaningful on account of my traveling companions, curators and research fellows in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design: the Faculty of Fine Arts in Dhaka, an art school designed by renowned Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam in 1948 which serves as an incubator for a new generation of contemporary artists; Auroville, an experimental utopian community in southern India founded in 1968 by the spiritual leader Mirra Alfassa and designed by visionary architect Roger Anger; and Le Corbusier’s masterful Court Complex in the northern city of Chandigarh, among other sites.

I ended my trip in Delhi, where I was lucky enough to make several studio visits, visit the India Art Fair with contemporary curator, scholar, and friend Gayatri Sinha, and see the marvelous career retrospective exhibition of artist Vivan Sundaram at the Kiran Nadar Museum. I have been aware of Sundaram’s multidisciplinary practice for some time now, but had not understood what a phenomenal painter he is! The exhibition teemed with remarkable, never-before-seen paintings from early in his career, such as Indeterminacy, 1967, which demonstrates the artist’s interest in Pop art, or, as his friend, artist Gulammohammed Sheikh described it, a “love of the mundane, the trivial and the trite, even kitsch.”

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Reports by trip participants

Tagore in Bangalore

By Sarah Suzuki

Sprawling and choked with traffic, though lushly verdant, Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) is likely best known as an international IT hub. So perhaps it is a bit surprising to discover that the city is also a rising artistic center. It is home to Suresh Jayaram’s No. 1 Shanthi Road, a multifunctional art space and residency program that just marked its tenth anniversary. Not far away, Sunitha Kumar Emmart oversees the eponymous Gallery SKE, one of India’s most innovative contemporary art galleries, which is housed in a fairy-tale cottage with gingerbread trim. And in 2000, Bengaluru was selected as the site for the third location of the National Gallery of Modern Art, joining branches in Delhi and Mumbai. In 2009 the former Manickyavelu Mansion, a colonial-style manor built in the 1930s and sited on several green acres, opened following a renovation of the existing building, and an addition to house supplementary gallery space and an art reference library. In the airy, domestic-scale spaces of the historical building, I found a surprisingly rich display of works by three members of the esteemed Tagore family: Rabindranath (1861–1941), and his nephews Gaganendranath (1867–1938) and Abanindranath (1971–1951). Each of these artists made a distinct and exceptional contribution to India’s modernist tradition, but it is quite rare to find examples of their work to study in person.

A brilliantly talented polymath who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the poet Rabindranath was credited with reviving Bengali literature and music, and charted a new pedagogical course for artists at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, where students were encouraged to loosen the tight reins of studio academicism in favor of observation and a life integrated with nature. His own work tended toward studies of vaguely mysterious figures. Abanindranath was a founder of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, and sought to incorporate traditional Eastern methods, materials, and ideals into contemporary practice. In creating what would come to be known as the Bengal School, Abanindranath sought to rediscover nationalist themes and subjects that predated the colonial period. His brother Gaganendranath was interested in a similar kind of synthesis, but he pushed his formal experiments toward a Cubist syntax, with fractured facets and partial planes, in a visual style that was uniquely his own. The Tagore name echoes throughout any study of India’s recent history of art, and in Bengaluru, one can discover the many moods and moments of its artists’ oeuvres.

North_West_South_East

By Rattanamol Singh Johal

In my new role as MoMA’s C-MAP fellow for Asia, which I assumed in January 2016, my first assignment was to plan the annual group trip to India and Bangladesh—with only a couple of weeks to organize travel for a group of seven people from six museum departments (Media and Performance Art, Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Painting and Sculpture, Library and Archives, International Program). The nearly two-week itinerary was to include visits to artist studios, museums, galleries, the India Art Fair, and the Dhaka Art Summit. Though I am tempted to offer a blow-by-blow account, I trust that the collective publication of the group’s individual reports on post will achieve that end. This, then, is a collection of short snippets—highlights, if you will—from each city.

New Delhi, India’s capital, is also arguably the country’s busiest hub of art-world activity. The city’s network of institutions range from the imposing state-run museums and academies to prominent galleries dealing in modern and contemporary art, small nonprofit spaces, and a range of cultural activities supported by foreign embassies and foundations. In the midst of this, there is also a private museum founded by Kiran Nadar, which is housed in a largely unoccupied (in terms of commercial establishments) shopping mall. It is here that Dayanita Singh had set up her Museum Bhavan, or “Bureau of Museums” (bhavan loosely translates as ‘building,’ but often connotes an institutional site for the activities of state bureaucracy). The artist’s intervention took place through a series of specially designed wooden structures—boxes, columns, screens—that housed selections of black-and-white images from her vast photographic archive. These “mini-museums,” which she constantly arranged and rearranged as she conversed with invited interlocutors, appeared thematically organized along a logic largely governed by subject-matter associations—for example, the “museum of little ladies,” the “museum of chairs,” etc. Over the course of the afternoon we were there, the “museum of erotics” slowly emerged as the result of a dialogue between Singh and Shanay Jhaveri, observed by a small group composed primarily of art-world insiders.

Our next destination was Goa, known for its extensive coastline dotted with beautiful beaches and its lush hinterland scattered with sleepy villages. The current state of India’s metropolitan areas, riddled with issues of uncontainable population growth, pollution, astronomical living costs, and insufficient infrastructure, has pushed many artists, across different generations, to relocate either full-time or for part of the year to Goa. Indeed, one wonders how long Goa can sustain this inflow, given its already bustling tourist economy, but for now it offers a lifestyle that is scarcely available elsewhere in India. Nikhil Chopra, whose career I have been following for nearly a decade, chose to relocate here from Bombay with his family. This shift has transformed his practice significantly, adding to it something of the roles of a mentor, pedagogue, catalyst, and institution builder (though he would probably never label himself as such!). Chopra, along with Madhavi Gore and Romain Loustau, transformed a Portuguese-era hotel into the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a residency-cum-exhibition space for young and emerging artists working in performance. This is an important initiative for a number of reasons, not least of which are the region’s sparse landscape for performance-art pedagogy and residencies as well as the unusual event (at least in India) of an established, mid-career contemporary artist’s devoting substantial time, attention, and resources to nurturing a younger generation.

Bangalore, a city that has grown exponentially over the past two decades owing to a booming information technology industry, is also home to an alternative art scene with strong leanings toward experimental film, media, sound, and photography. Our relatively brief visit here introduced us to number of unfolding trajectories, beyond the practices of well-established artists such as Sheela Gowda and Pushpamala N., emphasizing the need to return when we have more time on our hands. I found it particularly useful to understand the sustaining influence of Srishti—a private institute of art, design, and technology—which was set up in 1996. A number of artists experimenting across media, including Ayisha Abraham, Shai Heredia, and Abhishek Hazra, currently teach at this relatively young institution. Here, again, it seems that a platform for interaction among different generations of practitioners has been incredibly generative.

The final stop on our trip had us flying east to Bangladesh whose capital city was once again playing host to the biannual Dhaka Art Summit. This platform promised to bring together art and artists from across the subcontinent and farther afield, presenting a very ambitious series of exhibitions (six at my last count), panel discussions, a writing workshop, and a film program on the premises of the Shilpakala Academy (the state academy of fine art). The consolidation of all the summit’s activities across one venue allowed visitors to easily engage with most of the programming offered. One exhibition that stands out in my mind, titled Rewind, was curated jointly by Sabih Ahmad (Asia Art Archive), Amara Antilla (Guggenheim Museum), and Beth Citron (Rubin Museum) with Diana Campbell Betancourt (the Summit’s artistic director). The small show presented a gathering of little-known late-modernist works from across the region, revealing diverse engagements and interests in textiles and tapestries (Rashid Choudhury, Monika Correa), painting (Zahoor ul Akhlaq), printmaking (Krishna Reddy, Safiuddin Ahmed, Anwar Jalal Shemza), photography (Lionel Wendt), and projected image (Nalini Malani, Akbar Padamsee). A research publication or catalogue would have greatly enhanced the understanding and reception of the exhibition’s historical implications (and, undoubtedly, also bolstered the marketability of the works/artists included). As a broader observation, it seems that almost every exhibition at the Summit contained the kernel of an extended presentation in a museum-like setting accompanied by a publication and programming. In its current format, with a limited three-day run (we are told the next one will go ten days) and the need to move works and people across tense international borders, this is understandably both logistically and financially difficult. That said, the research outcomes, speculations, and possibilities for further exploration laid out by each of the exhibitions are rich and compelling.

Art-Driven Adaptive Reuse in Several Indian Cities

By Jennifer Tobias

During recent C-MAP visits to Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Bangalore, and Kochi, I noticed how artists and gallerists are adapting neglected and abandoned structures for use as studio, exhibition, and performance spaces. This caused me to wonder about preservation policies in India, and artists’ unofficial role in relationship to them.

I learned that various public and private institutions address preservation, but also that there’s no national mandate for buildings less than one hundred years old. At the city level, initiatives vary. As a result, preservation and adaptive reuse are often the results of enlightened self-interest as much as organized planning. And that’s where the art community comes in. Several examples encountered during 2015 and 2016 C-MAP visits to India are discussed below.

Along Mumbai’s Marine Drive I noticed beautiful Art Deco buildings in various states of repair (Mumbai is said to be second only to Miami, Florida, in its number of Art Deco buildings).¹ Regarding their preservation, it seems that in Mumbai, as in many cities, public initiatives and private developments form what is a patchy safety net. At the international level, the district was proposed for UNESCO World Heritage site status in 2013 (Delhi’s Old City was chosen instead),²while on the local level, artist groups are starting to incorporate Deco preservation into their missions.³

New Delhi has its own architectural identity, and adaptive reuse patterns reflect it. Yet like Mumbai, economic growth and a swelling urban population are driving much of the demolition and rebuilding, often destroying significant modern architecture in the process. A case in point is the planned demolition of the Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion by Raj Rewal and Mahendra Raj at Pragati Maidan (1972). Recent efforts to save these endangered icons of Indian modernism demonstrate complex social and legal forces at work.⁴ As a representative from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) put it: “More than the fact that there is difficulty in wrapping one’s head around the idea of modern architectural heritage, it is the bureaucratic apathy that is causing trouble.”⁵

The C-MAP group also visited Bangalore, a thriving, tech-driven city. One writer claims that the city has more alternative spaces than traditional galleries, positing that “in the absence of government infrastructure or commercial enterprise, artists and art students have taken on the responsibility of leading Bangalore’s art scene.”⁶The group visited an exuberant example: 1Shanthiroad, a collective founded by artist and historian Suresh Jayaram and designed by architect Meeta Jain.

In Goa, the group visited the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a one-hundred-year-old Portuguese-style villa turned hotel turned artist residency space founded by artists Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore, and Nikhil Chopra. Artists from all over the world come here to share seven studios, several bedrooms—and a cat. Pleasant shared spaces have been adapted to facilitate interaction among residents but also with the community beyond, which is invited to visit during the program’s regular open studio days.

Of all the sites visited, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, an ongoing project to integrate architecture of the past into the city’s present and future, is the most expansive example of artist-driven adaptive reuse. Kochi is a historical port town on India’s tropical southwest coast. Long a center for international trade (especially of spices), the built environment strongly reflects the city’s heritage, especially in its Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial architecture. The biennale is sited within historic venues in or near the Fort Kochi heritage area, from the maritime warehouses known as “godowns” to public parks to former military barracks to empty houses. To visit is to feel thoroughly oriented in place and time, and to experience art in ways that strongly resonate with it.

Aspinwall House, built in the 1860s as a waterfront warehouse and now serving as the biennale’s anchor space, makes this immediately apparent. In this context, Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz’s installation Stopover (2012) is especially resonant. The pair collected and installed more than one hundred wet-grinding stones in a central, symmetrical room that opens onto a small pier. Such stones were once used domestically to grind spices and other ingredients for cooking. Usually embedded in the floor, they were standard fixtures in Indian homes built well into the early twentieth century, but are now being abandoned.

As an installation the stones represent once unmovable objects set in motion by irresistible global forces. One is left to guess at the next site for the stones, the fate of the building, and the future of the biennale as a global force. In this way Stopover and Aspinwall House vividly manifest the spirit of art-driven adaptive reuse that is bringing new life to historic but marginalized structures in Indian cities.

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1. On the Second Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations

By Cara Manes

Kochi was our first stop on what was, for everyone on this leg of the trip, our first visit to India. We arrived in the major port city of Kochi, in the southwestern region of Kerala, in the middle of the night, and then shuffled into our hotel beds for a few precious hours of rest before venturing into the southern Indian sun toward the main site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Whorled Explorations, the biennial’s second edition, was organized by Jitish Kallat, an internationally esteemed contemporary artist based in Mumbai. Appointed by the biennial’s Artistic Advisory Committee, Kallat was tasked with envisioning a show that “responds to the environment that hosts it,” according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Indeed, since its founding in 2012, the biennial’s mission has been to “draw from the rich tradition and public action and public engagement in Kerala . . . and build a new aesthetic that interrogates both the past and the present.”

Past and present certainly converge in the city of Kochi, where sixteenth-century Portuguese churches are intermingled with spice markets and restaurants on streets filled with auto-rickshaws and goats vying for the right of way. The biennial integrated seamlessly into this dialectical space. Kallat built a conceptual framework for the exhibition around an investigation of oppositional forces, as he explained when we met with him in Dubai a few days before our visit. In his curatorial essay for the catalogue, he cites two historic currents from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that informed his thinking—the maritime explorations of the Age of Discovery and the astronomical propositions made by the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. By examining the location’s history, he aimed to “reflect back or forth in time to understand the present” and to “interlace the bygone with the imminent, the terrestrial with the celestial.” Toward that end, he selected a wide range of works by ninety-five artists from thirty countries that speaks broadly to these themes. He organized the works into installations in eight venues across the city, each one a heterogeneous presentation. Free of any chronological, geographical, or medium-specific constraints, Kallat employed a seemingly more intuitive curatorial logic to create a host of unique, generative juxtapositions. Throughout the exhibition, however, a general leitmotif was discernable: Kallat seemed to gravitate toward work involving globes, compasses, maps, telescopes, and star charts—tools for plotting a course through space and time.

Encapsulating Kallat’s point of view and setting a tone for experiencing the biennial through this lens, Powers of Ten, a well-known 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames, is the exhibition’s opening work. In it, a camera zooms out at a rate of one power of ten every ten seconds, and then back in at the same rate, so that the pictured image first expands incrementally from human to cosmic scale and then contracts in the same manner. The work is installed at the biennial’s main site, Aspinwall House, the sea-facing compound of offices, residences, and warehouses built for a nineteenth-century British trading company. The physical space itself unfolds as a series of successive rooms in loosely adjoining buildings surrounding a central courtyard, each roughly devoted to one artist or project. Other highlights from this venue include Francesco Clemente’s Pepper Tent, a giant tent painted with scenes inspired by the artist’s travels around the world, and the crowd-pleasing Descension by the well-known Indian artist Anish Kapoor, an abyss-like whirlpool cut into the existing floor, which serves as a literal illustration of the thematic “whorl” of the exhibition’s title.

Interspersed among large site-specific installations by internationally renowned artists such as these were many smaller-scale works by younger artists. Installed in an interstitial space at Aspinwall House, American artist Tara Kelton’s video work depicts a laptop screen placed against the open door at the end of a commuter train in Bangalore that is live streaming video feed from a camera placed at the front of the train, suggesting the sensation of simultaneous time travel. One of the greatest discoveries for me was the work of Kerala-born artist Unnikrishnan C. At twenty-three, he was the youngest artist to participate in the biennial. For his project, installed in the show’s Pepper House venue, he spent two months in Kochi (a few hours from his hometown) recording his observations of daily life in the city by painting figures, objects, symbols, and simple scenes onto individual bricks and arranging them into a site-specific “brick wall diary,” as he has described his project. Unnikrishnan seems to be developing a unique visual language that blends the personal and universal; I look forward to seeing more from him!

2. Notes on CAMP at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum

By Jennifer Tobias

Representing the MoMA Library during the March 2015 C-MAP trip to Dubai, Sharjah, Mumbai, and Delhi, I was most taken by the fascinating institution known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (DBDL), its revival by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (Managing Trustee, Honorary Director, and MoMA International Council member), and the current installation by CAMP, a self-described studio organized in 2007 by Shaina Anand (filmmaker), Sanjay Bhangar (software programmer), and Ashok Sukumaran (architect). Visiting with Mehta and two CAMPers on site helped me to grasp a particular segment of the installation—The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition—as a compelling historiographic palimpsest.

As a self-aware de- and reconstruction of a colonial museum, the DBDL is a fertile setting for a meta-exhibition. A striking Victorian structure in the heart of Mumbai, constructed in response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the DBDL opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. By the late 1990s the museum was neglected, but Mehta organized an innovative public-private partnership to restore and revitalize the institution, which reopened in 2008. In addition to the structure itself, two salient Raj-era aspects of the institution that survive today are the collection of “Indian manufactures” and model-filled displays presenting a history of Mumbai.

Mehta conceived of artist involvement as a key element of the revived mission. Noting that the collection was originally built with little interest in individual makers, her approach today is to “bring artists back to the center” through enlightened management of the legacy collection, building a contemporary collection, and—most relevant here—a stimulating series of interventions. In this framework, artists (especially alumnae of the related Sir J. J. School of Art) conceive installations that engage the space and the collections, often addressing local culture in light of both the colonial legacy and contemporary social issues.

CAMP’s series of installations, titled As If – III Country of the Sea, brings together segments of the group’s multi-year project examining maritime culture proximal to the western Indian Ocean. The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” segment revisits an installation first realized in 2011 at Lalit Kala Academi in Delhi.That project deconstructed an eponymous 2010 exhibition and symposium (and later a book) organized in the Gujarat port town of Mandvi. The exhibit, initiated by a local historical society, was composed largely of digital reproductions of artifacts held by UK archives as well as private collections, with the reproductions licensed for the duration of the show. Scholars from around the world participated in the symposium, and the show traveled to other sites in Gujarat.

The installation at DBDL constitutes primarily photos of photos of photos. For example, a photograph of a photograph of the annotated checklist (left, top) shows a cryptic and apparently damning list of the show’s organizers. In another example (left, middle), a photo of a photo of primary-source documents, which are held by what is presumably a Gujarati hand, is annotated with the oblique, “Not just Word of Mouth but Slide of Hand On a replica Gujerati navigation log dated 1644.” In a clearer example (left, bottom), a photo of a colonial map of Gujarat is updated with present-day claims by British Gas. Although it’s difficult to do a close reading at this remove, CAMP’s argument is clear: they object to the use of colonial spoils licensed back to its subjects, and they charge that limiting local informants to a caste of Hindu seafarers failed to account for the diversity of the colonial period and the present.

As an art-making strategy, Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” is an excellent foil for CAMP’s more critical (if less edited) larger project about contemporary maritime culture in the region. Where the original show featured aura-deprived reproductions of colonial spoils, CAMP’s larger project counters with a barrage of ostensibly collaborative contemporary media (radio, cell phone data, video, shipping records) and extended (if coy) interpretive texts. If the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” show can be criticized as unreflective colonial nostalgia, CAMP’s work errs in the other direction: it is anthropological in its thoroughness and reluctance to draw explicit conclusions.

I conclude that this is precisely the point of the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” : to engender critical thinking about the historiographic endeavor. Experiencing this in person, in the DBDL context, and from the C-MAP perspective, was a wonderful object lesson.

3. Studio Visits in Mumbai and Delhi

By Sarah Lookofsky

In Mumbai we met the artist Shilpa Gupta in her studio. She gave us an overview of her diverse practice, particularly her most recent works. I was especially struck by the site specificity of her practice, since I had previously understood her work, which I had encountered in European museum contexts, as abstract and conceptual. Upon speaking with her about her most recent pieces, it was clear that most of her practice is deeply invested in the Indian context, particular the deep scars of partition that persist in the present. For instance, she spoke of a recent untitled body of work (2013–14) that addresses the Chitmahals, the Bangladeshi minority enclaves in India and vice versa—sites where 51,000 people effectively live within a hostile nation. Gupta’s presentation made me ponder two important phenomena that impact the global circuits of contemporary art: on the one hand, it is often the more metaphorical and conceptual works that circulate internationally and, on the other, works that have a local specificity take on a more metaphorical meaning once they leave local audiences and their frameworks of reference behind.

In Amar Kanwar’s New Delhi studio, among other topics, the documentary filmmaker discussed his forays into what could be described as narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting to the widest possible audience): screening his films directly to the people who are depicted in them and most affected by them in turn. He has put very considerable investments of time and funds into a continued presence in the remote Indian locales on which his films have focused. For Lightning Testimonies (2007), the site of filming and later screening was the state of Assam; and, for The Sovereign Forest (2012–), a place of continued display was established in Odisha. This direct involvement importantly exists alongside Kanwar’s ongoing screening and exhibiting within both cinematic and artistic contexts, making his practice a unique example of one that engages activism and art at the same time. Kanwar was very insistent that he does not see a contradiction or problem in inhabiting these multiple contexts, and thus different spheres of comprehension, at once, arguing that the problems his works engage—whether sexual violence or economic disenfranchisement, to name just two important examples—are of the broadest consequence.

As our conversation was closing, Kanwar mentioned something that has stuck with me: once he has documented something or completed a film, he is always deeply preoccupied with what he experienced in the moment of shooting but, nevertheless, did not manage to record. This insight struck me as profound in the context of a world that is evermore mediated. Despite our increasing capacity to record everything, there is still so much, for better or worse, that will continue to elude capture.

4. TRANSFIGURATIONS: The Sculpture of Mrinalini Mukherjee

On the flight home from Dubai, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mrinalini Mukherjee. For me, a jam-packed trip always creates a collection of lingering afterimages—Dayanita Singh’s collection of “museums” installed in her studio; the brightly colored boats in the Sharjah Creek, which we followed to find Michael Joo’s installation; the gently turning forms of the wind garden that Haegue Yang had installed in a small courtyard in Sharjah’s Heritage District—and occasionally an image that’s insistent, refusing to fade, staying at the front of my mind until I can get back to the library and start digging up more.

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was a leading sculptor of her generation in India. However, her work wasn’t widely exhibited internationally, and so for me, the monographic exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, organized by Peter Nagy, was revelatory. I had seen three intriguing examples in the Gwangju Biennial last fall, installed there with photographs by Lionel Wendt, but this show covered it all. Her practice comprised an in-depth material experimentation and relied primarily on dyed hemp fibers for nearly five decades, before she turned to embrace ceramics and later bronze. Her works simultaneously suggest figurative and botanical forms, arising from both nature and modernist strategies, capable of both structure and formlessness.

As a student at the University of Baroda, Mukherjee was exposed to the pedagogical philosophy of K. G. Subramanyan, which embraced equally craft and “high art” techniques and strategies. This intersection can often be a thorny one, difficult to navigate, and it is one of the topics that’s touched on in the current exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from The Collection. Mukherjee addressed this issue head-on in a 1994 interview, noting, “In India the arts have always existed alongside each other, at different levels of sophistication. India has an enormous wealth of craft, and I believe in an integrated approach to art and craft, so I enjoy working with the linguistics developed by the practice of craft. It is through my relationship to my material that I would like to reach out and align myself with the values which exist within the ambit of contemporary sculpture.” (“An Interview with Mrinalini Mukherjee.” In Mrinalini Mukherjee: Sculpture, 11. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1994.)

5. Beom Kim at the Sharjah Biennial 12

By Laura Hoptman

Beom Kim (Korean, born 1963 in Seoul; lives and works in Seoul) is a conceptual artist who has used many mediums including, most notably, drawing and video to display his particular kind of dry humor, which is delivered with words, figurative drawings done in a childlike style, and multimedia installations. A central figure in the contemporary art community of Seoul for the past twenty years, Kim has become increasingly well-known internationally in the last decade. I first saw his work in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003, but it has subsequently been included in the 2005 Venice Biennial, in a one-artist exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which traveled to Redcat in Los Angeles, and in a number of surveys of contemporary Korean art. One of his best-known works is a small installation called A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird in which a video of the artist lecturing a stone on avian transformation plays on a screen located within a facsimile of the set in the video.

A selection of Kim’s drawings and a single-channel video work were on display at the Sharjah Biennial 12, as was a group of Kim’s works that was notably different from any work by him that I had seen before. A cycle of thirteen paintings that the artist began creating in 2008, it was collectively entitled Untitled (Intimate Suffering). Extremely simple, even austere, the series consists of shaped canvases in a variety of sizes that are covered in rough, sepia-colored linen. Some have minimal interventions in black that resemble readable symbols like a dash or a cross. These paintings were displayed in several galleries at the Sharjah Art Museum. The last canvas in the series, Untitled (Intimate Suffering #13) was created specifically for the biennial and hung at the SAF Art Space. It consists of a sixteen-foot-high canvas that has been systematically covered with black crosses so that the whole creates a kind of maze-like pattern that causes, when looked at, what Bridget Riley has famously called a “visual tickle.” The elegant simplicity of this group of paintings is a surprising turn for an artist known neither for his minimalist aesthetic nor for his work in this medium. In fact, this work is less connected to Kim’s oeuvre of humorous, mildly absurdist multimedia installations than it is to the history of Korean avant-garde art and, specifically, the work of the Dansaekhwa group, who began exhibiting in the late 1960s. The name Dansaekhwa, which means “monochrome,” refers to artists who were experimenting with the idea of the non-metaphoric painting/object in which space is expressed through concrete, non-illusionistic means that might include staining the surface of the canvas or punching holes in it, or replacing canvas with more porous materials like burlap or paper. In his Sharjah canvases, Kim deliberately places himself in a Korean avant-garde context, one that belies the more generic lingua franca of the Biennial-type installation for which he is best known. This statement of allegiance, clearly abetted by the curator’s choice to represent Kim in this startling way, is visually stimulating, but also exemplary of a personal politics and a point of view. The paintings as paintings are beautiful, and the gesture, as a conceptual move in a varied career, is as bold as it is moving.

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