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…
Diana Campbell Betancourt shares her thoughts on Bangladesh’s art history being written out of the dominant narratives of South Asia on account of its once being East Pakistani.
Sabih Ahmad shares his thoughts on considering practices from the ground up and looking to lateral associations.
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.
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…
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…
On June 22, Dr. Sonal Khullar visited with C-MAP and viewed Bhupen Khakhar’s painting Kali (1965). This painting, which MoMA purchased in 1967, is one of the artist’s early works. Less researched, it was made when he was still developing his vernacular language for what would later be considered Indian Pop art. In this video,…
Tyeb Mehta once warned Atul Dodiya against referencing Francis Picabia, who is but one reference on a long and abundant list that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and surprisingly Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian—although Dodiya has never been an abstract painter. Dodiya also appropriates diverse forms and inspiration from daily life, such as…
This informal conversation took place in March 2015 in Nalini Malani’s studio in Mumbai during a C-MAP trip to India. Gayatri Sinha and Stuart Comer talked to Malani about her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The discussion focused on Malani’s early lens-based experiments, her interest in psychoanalysis, her activities in the 1980s…
