The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican, with Shanay Jhaveri, Anita Dube, and Nalini Malani) (2024)

Contemporary artists Nalini Malani and Anita Dube, and curator Shanay Jhaveri, journey through two decades of cultural and political change in South Asia, from Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the State of Emergency in 1975, to the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998, in the 2024 exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India.

Titled after Sudipta Kaviraj’s 1991 text, this landmark group exhibition in London explores the ways artists articulated this period of transitions. Beyond the focus on the moment of independence and Partition of British India in 1947 - often reflecting Western/European-centric interests in South Asia - the works consider the challenges of instituting democracy and modernity in a late 20th century and post-colonial society. Its curator, Shanay Jhaveri, talks about the diversity and plurality of works on display, and how working and travelling across borders has shaped his own practice.

Nalini Malani unpacks her video installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), addressing nuclear competition with Pakistan and China, and the deteriorating environment globally, to Gaza and Palestine today. We discuss violence and forced displacement, drawing on the literature of Saadat Hasan Manto, and their own lived experiences, born in Karachi, and practicing in Bombay (now Mumbai). Nalini details encounters with Marxist and subaltern thinking as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting Noam Chomsky, Alain Resnias, and Chris Marker, and, before then, in India’s many film and cine-clubs, showing communist, Soviet Russian, and Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European (CESEE) cinema. Nalini shares their collaborations with Vivan Sundaram, and connects their theatrical animations with ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ kalighat reverse glass paintings, as modernist forms.

First training as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube was a leading member of the Radical Group in Baroda (now Vadodara). She continues to organise globally and locally, from residencies with the Triangle Network and KHOJ Studios, to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, of which she was the first woman to curate. Anita details the work of contemporary women like Gogi Saroj Pal and Sheela Gowda, plus the public reaction in New Delhi to her ambiguous, bodily installations, exploring religion, spirituality, and craft in popular culture. We discuss access, gendered architecture, and the brutalist context of this display.

⁠The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. ⁠Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970⁠, and the ⁠Darbar Festival⁠, ran during the exhibition in 2024. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.

Nalani Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood runs at Tate Modern in London through 2025.

Hear more from Nalini Malani in the EMPIRE LINES episode from My Reality is Different (2022) at the Holburne Museum in Bath, and with curator Priyesh Mistry, on The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and Nalini Malani (2022) at the National Gallery in London. You can also read my article in gowithYamo.

For more about artists Bhupen Khakar, Nilima Sheikh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Arpita Singh, and Imran Qureshi, listen to curator Hammad Nasar on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009), and read into the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and The Box in Plymouth, in my article in gowithYamo.

About Imran Qureshi, hear artist Maha Ahmed on Where Worlds Meet (2023) at Leighton House in London, and read about the exhibition in my article in recessed.space.

About Partition, hear Sonal Khullar on Bani Abidi’s Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum (2016/2018).

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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