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13/10/2011

The Matter Within

YBCA - Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco

curated by director of visual arts Betti-Sue Hertz

YBCA is pleased to present The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India, an exhibition of photography, sculpture and video by artists of India living inside the country as well as in the diaspora. Inspired by material culture, literature, spirituality and social and political aspects of the history of the South Asian region, the exhibition is organized around three thematic threads that resonate from contemporary India—embodiment, the politics of communicative bodies and the imaginary. Of particular interest are the artistic practices that either incorporate these concepts or operate within a gap between these rich thematic categories. Whereas sculpture and painting have a long history within both sacred and secular traditions of Indian art in recent years, photography and video have emerged as significant media as well.

"We decided to create an exhibition of contemporary art of India to coincide with the presentation of the Maharaja exhibition that will be on view in the fall at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum," said the exhibition’s curator Betti-Sue Hertz, YBCA’s director of visual arts. "Our exhibition will give San Francisco and Bay Area audiences an opportunity to see a range of current artistic practices. And while it was not designed to be directly related to the works in the Maharaja exhibition, I think it will trigger comparisons between the old and the new. I certainly see some artists mining the colonial past, including Nikhil Chopra and Rina Banerjee. At this moment, with Indian contemporary art gaining ground within the continent and with growing awareness internationally, it is very exciting to present established and mid-career artists in a dialogue with much younger artists, as a way to communicate the artistic and thematic trajectories most actively sought out by artists of India."

Photography
Until very recently, contemporary Indian photography has had little exposure in the United States. With a focus on "straight" and "staged" approaches, the photographic works utilize either reality-based settings such as the informal street shoot or a formal portrait, or constructed realities and imaginary personas. These photographs merge the vision of the artist with the social dynamics of India’s vast cultural landscape to create a revealing narrative of contemporary life in an ever globalizing world.

Photographer Tejal Shah (Mumbai) recently turned to relational performance as a form most suited to her interest in alternative gender and sexual identities; Sunil Gupta (London and New Delhi) alternates between the imaginary and the reality of gay life styles and the AIDS/HIV epidemic; Anup Matthew Thomas (Bangalore) captures images of India in a characteristically seductive aesthetic while presenting a subtle critique of the validity of society’s lawmakers and moral ambassadors; Pushpamala N. (Bangalore and New Delhi) inhabits various female characters including icons from Indian sacred traditions and French painting and photography; Nikhil Chopra (Mumbai) embodies multiple personae from the colonial era to explore and document, in large scale drawings, spaces undergoing change, communicating a sense of nostalgia for a past era and of adventure in the seizing of the future; Dhruv Malhotra (New York and New Delhi) rediscovers India’s streets through the personal and intimate lens of people sleeping, in turn unveiling a private space within a very public one; Bharat Sikka (New Delhi) documents contemporary visions of India in the faces and forms of people and spaces that harbor an inherent sense of calm and solitude, presenting an alternative to traditional images of India steeped in vibrant color and activity; and Gauri Gill’s (New Delhi) intensive relationship with one village family in Rajasthan yields a large body of work that reveals the intimacy of family bonds and friendships.

Sculpture
Sculpture has a long tradition within both sacred and secular art of India, and its rich legacy of materiality and iconography have had an impact on contemporary art. Human and animal bodies continue to play an important role in new perspectives on nationhood as well as ancient pasts. This is evident in an adherence to traditional forms as well as in expanded imagery and physical forms signaling the future.

Sculptors include Thukral & Tagra (New Delhi), who focus on the globalization of the art market and its repercussions; Sudarshan Shetty (Mumbai), who combines pop sensibilities with Hindu ritual; Shilpa Gupta (Mumbai), whose politically forthright work is set within an elegant conceptual and linguistic framework; Anita Dube (New Delhi), whose deep relationship with materials, feminism and the politics of social upheaval push sexual metaphor to the brink of violence; Rina Banerjee (New York), whose fantastical sculptures constructed of found objects that typify eras and spaces throughout history, reclaim specific colonial concepts from the perspective of complex diasporic experiences; Srestha Premnath (New York and Bangalore), who combines an interest in historical icons with the avant-garde’s adherence to aesthetic formalism; and Siddhartha Kararwal (Baroda), whose mutated figures mark a new, more relaxed attitude towards form making and permanence when considering the politics of materiality and the embodiment of unnameable forces.

Video
Some of the single channel videos provide a unique window into the lives of ordinary people. The artists are able to extract poignant and powerful narratives from complex situations, providing opportunities for alternative forms of storytelling. Video also provides an opportunity for shaping multi-referential narratives examining contemporary conditions such as displacement and community formation, unlikely personages and lost artistic legacies, often against the backdrop of colonialism and other forms of occupation. Video artist Ayisha Abraham (Bangalore) tells stories about Bangfalore through the appropriation of old Super 8 footage to recast history in terms of recent migration and immigration; the Raqs Media Collective (Delhi) blends poetics with archival footage to forge a new philosophy about progressive global cultures from the Indian perspective; CAMP (Mumbai) is working with underrepresented populations in a variety of countries that form a cross-cultural compendium of the impact of religious fractiousness on daily life within urban villages; and The Otolith Group (London) uses archival footage to doggedly investigate temporal slips and Utopian dreams of the past.

Working with ideas that are both highly personal and representative of the shifts and changes taking place in the global sphere, these artists are navigating the complex routes between the historical past and the present, new and old identities or fact and fiction during a period of societal flux. As India begins to play a more central role on the world economic stage, the work of its artists will become even more widely acknowledged vehicles for expressing new ways of being that are hard to convey outside the terms that art provides. This exhibition hopes to further this potential by contributing to a better and deeper understanding of current shifts, and their emotional, intellectual and spiritual effects on the artists and their communities, as well as the potential for representing new aspirations.

The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India is organized around YBCA’s Big Idea SOAR: The search for meaning.

Participating artists are Ayisha Abraham, Rina Banerjee, CAMP, Nikhil Chopra, Anita Dube, Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Sunil Gupta, Siddhartha Kararwal, Dhruv Malhotra, The Otolith Group, Sreshta Premnath, Pushpamala N., Raqs Media Collective, Tejal Shah, Sudarhan Shetty, Bharat Sikka, Anup Mathew Thomas, and Thukral and Tagra.

An accompanying catalogue will be published with essays by Nancy Adajania, Parul Dave Mukherjee and Abhay Sardesai.

The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India will be on view simultaneously with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum's presentation of the Maharaja exhibition touring from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, on view in San Francisco from October 21, 2011 until April 8, 2012.

Image: Anup Mathew Thomas, Most Rev Dr T C Cherian, Presiding Bishop, St. Thomas Evangelical Church of India, Metropolitan Series, 2006 — credit: courtesy of the artist and Gallery SKE/DEVI – Delhi

YBCA’s programs are made possible in part by: Abundance Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Koret Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Adobe and Novellus Systems.

The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India supported, in part, by Rena Bransten, Priya H. Kamani, Peter Bransten and Leela de Souza Bransten, Samira Rahmatullah and Munir Alam and the Asian Cultural Council (ACC).

As part of the exhibition, YBCA presents two public programs:

"Trading Ideas: Emerging Discourses on Asian Contemporary Art" a two-part panel discussion
November 9, 6:30 pm

"Making India Visible: Visual Culture and Modern Art in Contemporary India" a three-day symposium
November 10–12, 2011

Press contact:
Maureen Dixon 415.321.1307 mdixon@ybca.org

Opening Night Party: Friday, October 14, 9:30 p.m.–12:30 a.m.
$5 advance; $7 at the door; free for YBCA members
Join us as we celebrate the unveiling of The Matter Within with sub-continental dancing, food, drink and other activities

YBCA Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94103
Hours:
Thu–Sat 12–8 pm
Sun 12–6 pm
First Tuesdays of the month (FREE) 12–8 pm
Ticket:
Gallery Admission: $7 regular; $5 students, seniors, teachers; free for YBCA members

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