South Asia

“Picabia Bothers Me Every Morning”: A Conversation with Atul Dodiya

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…

Revisiting India: MoMA Staff Visit Kochi, Mumbai and Delhi with a Stop in Sharjah

In March 2015 MoMA’s C-MAP Asia team took a nine-day research trip to Sharjah and three cities in India. This was C-MAP’s very first field trip focused on India, however not the first time MoMA curators have conducted research in the country. Besides the Sharjah Biennial 12: (The Past, the Present, the Possible), the second Kochi…

“Partition is what we are living even now”: A Conversation with Nalini Malani

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…