Curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala
Choosing the moment of Indian independence and its fiftieth anniversary as the temporal anchors for this show, curator Lokhandwala will draw together works in a variety of media for an expansive exhibition of modern and contemporary Indian art. Works by major figures including painters M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, and F. N. Souza are sure to be among the highlights. Perhaps the greatest challenge in mounting such an exhibition is to relieve the art of the burden of cultural representation and instead to explore, in all their complexity, questions about art, modernity, and globalization that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and transcend the Indian context. Related themes that were examined by Lokhandwala and colleagues in a symposium in 2012, when the exhibition was being conceptualized, will be revisited in a forthcoming publication with contributions by Iftikhar Dadi, Geeta Kapur, Saloni Mathur, and Rebecca M. Brown, among others.
