Anupam Poddar’s Devi Art Foundation—India’s first private contemporary art museum—is a sign of the times: emblematic of both the influx of private money into the country’s contemporary art scene and, conversely, the near absence of publicly funded support for the same. DAF stands at a threshold, somewhere between private collection and public space, gallery and museum. Appropriately (and annoyingly) located in the peri-urban corporate sprawl of Gurgaon, an hour’s drive from central Delhi’s colonial-period government buildings and bungalows, the museum is intended to serve as a platform for introducing edgily contemporary art to a broad audience. It remains to be seen how many visitors will make the trip.
Poddar, who is thirty-four, established his position as the country’s most influential private collector and arbiter elegantiae through a combination of prescience, courage, and capital: His collection is legendary for its large-scale installation pieces, picked up at a time when few others were interested. “Still Moving Image,” DAF’s inaugural exhibition, focuses its attention on another of his collection’s strengths: photography and video art. With works by twenty-five artists, the exhibition nearly manages to fill the museum’s alternately cavernous, cramped, and subterranean gallery spaces with a survey of the experimental sensibility that has emerged on the Indian scene in these media since the mid-1990s. Vivan Sundaram’s Great Indian Bazaar, made in 1997 for the Johannesburg Biennale, is a midden of street-market snapshots in cheap cherry-red aluminum frames that pays tribute to the makeshift aesthetics of street-side commerce, evoking the vendors’ fragile impositions of order and their anxious adherence to vernacular conventions of display.
While Sundaram’s piece, along with a rarely seen Nalini Malani installation from 1998, lends the show historical perspective, some of the newest works on display point to the arrival of an idiom based on technological savvy and conceptual derring-do: As visitors enter Shilpa Gupta’s huge interactive video projection Untitled (Shadow 3), 2007, their silhouettes appear in real time on the wall in front of them; they soon find themselves participants in a new-media shadow play, pinned by cables that ferry down from the top of the screen a clutter of ambiguous cargo and junk that eventually submerges their shadowy doppelgängers in a junkyard sea of heaving refuse.
