Asia

Seher Shah’s “The Black Star,” 2007

Last year in the exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the
Collection
, we had the opportunity to show a selection of works from The Black Star
(2007), a portfolio of twelve digital prints by Seher Shah (Pakistani, born 1975).
Though acquired in 2008, the work was exhibited for the first time in this exhibition,
in a gallery devoted to the suggestion of using the past as a means of interrogating
the present.

C-MAP on the Subcontinent: New Delhi, Goa, Bangalore & Dhaka

In late January 2016, a team of seven from The Museum of Modern Art’s C-MAP Asia Group traveled to India and Bangladesh. The itinerary began in New Delhi, where the India Art Fair was underway, continuing on to Goa and Bangalore (with side-trips to Baroda and Bombay by individual group members), and concluding in Dhaka…

5 Questions with Sabih Ahmed

This interview featuring Asia Art Archive (AAA) Senior Researcher Sabih Ahmed is part of post’s new theme Challenging the Global: C-MAP Experts Respond to 5 Questions. Here, Ahmed shares his thoughts on considering practices from the ground up and looking to lateral associations.

Art-Driven Adaptive Reuse in Several Indian Cities

Preservation and reuse drive the art-driven adaptation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in cities across India, including Kochi, Goa, Mumbai. This essay explores how such sites can be spaces not just of preservation but of alternative making and institutional critique. From the 1960s revival of SoHo in downtown Manhattan to the 2009 opening of the Sharjah…

Xu Bing’s “Series of Repetitions”

In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Xu Bing relocated to the countryside for two years. The 1987-8 woodcuts in MoMA’s collection reflect this pastoral atmosphere while anticipating the artist’s later turn to Conceptual art. The set of woodcuts by Xu Bing (Chinese, born 1955) in MoMA’s collection depicts rural…

Photography and Modern Indian Architecture (1949-1990s)

Ram Rahman (photographer, designer, curator and activist) discusses key examples of modernist architecture in post-colonial India. Using photographic documentation and archival materials, he surveys the landscape of architects, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals working (primarily in New Delhi) between the 1950s and 1990s. This presentation is excerpted from a closed-door session with MoMA’s C-MAP Asia…