In the history of art one of the most important developments of the twentieth century may be the emergence of a new humanist Asian art. Or will it be the opposite that is remarkable? Will the desperately practical needs of Asia prelude art for the first half-century of their independent power?
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While the convergence of filmmaking and a gallery-based art world in India appears as a cutting-edge and recent phenomenon, it was leading artists in the mid-late 1960s who pioneered the trend.
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My parents, architect Habib Rahman and classical dancer Indrani Rahman, moved to Delhi with my sister Sukanya from Calcutta in 1953 on the urging of Jawaharlal Nehru (he brought my father to the Central Public Works Department from the West Bengal PWD).
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From the late 19th Century onwards, the westernisation of men’s clothing in the Indian subcontinent had fundamentally changed the sartorial landscape of the country.
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Gyanonandini Tagore from Calcutta made this style of wearing the saree popular, where the upper end of the cloth was draped over the left shoulder. It is recorded that Gyanonandini was inspired by the gara in Bombay, in an ensemble comprising of European inspired bodice blouses, petticoats and Western-style leather shoes.
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The Americans is a series of photographs of the Indian community in North America that Gauri Gill began in 2000 and completed in 2007, five years after her graduate years at Stanford University. The work that began as a portrait of her family in 1993-94 later grew into an investigation into a community that was seldom represented in the museums and galleries of the continent.
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There they stand, in black and white – we say, omitting grey – in colour, in the light, exposed, but withdrawn behind their eyelids, into their own personal, elected blackness
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Part journey, part memoir, at once hallucinatory and monumental, few works of art explore the immersive and transformative properties of blackness and night with more intensity and imagination than Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s Nightskin.
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An icy, spectral light hovers above the sleeping roofs of factory sheds in Dayanita Singh’s Blue Book (2008/2009). It bestows, on the details it touches, a specificity that they lack as anonymous elements in the scaffolding of industrial modernity.
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To talk about the work of Iona Brown under the aegis of blackness presents one with the quandary that is the fact that her art is so black that to ponder it under the position of blackness is difficult, to say the least. It is so black that it at times, coincidental to her artistic endeavor and at other times, so prominent that it becomes the focal point of a work.
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