Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition 2019020442, 2019021637, 9780815382102, 9780429316166

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Along the Indian Highway: an introduction
2 “Cancel that flight to Delhi . . .”: Serpentine Gallery, London 2008
3 “Indianness and the urgency of transmission . . .”: Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo 2009
4 “There might be an Indian background, but the theme is global”: HEART Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning 2010
5 Transcultural dissonances in the contemporary art world: Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, Rome 2012
6 Indian Highway VI finally on its way to China: Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing 2012
7 Shared exoticisms or the limits of the national exhibition: some final observations
Index

Citation preview

“In the past two decades, Europe has seen more than a dozen exhibitions of Indian contemporary art, but none as dazzling and complex as Indian Highway, which was originated by celebrated curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and traveled between 2008 and 2012 . . . Bublatzky’s richly detailed analysis sheds new light on a key analytic of studies of globalization: mobility.” Karin Zitzewitz, Interim Chair, Department of Art, Art History, and Design and Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Michigan State University, Kresge Art Center, USA “This book is a fresh and pioneering ethnographic work about the dynamics of art exhibitions in a transcultural context. Not only is the case study of Indian Highway’s journey through Europe and to China fascinating and unique, Bublatzky’s clear and creative approach to reading the material makes this book a must-read for students and scholars interested in contemporary cultural production.” Christiane Brosius, Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies, Germany “Cathrine Bublatzky has made an important contribution to exhibition history and the emerging understanding of the global milieu of contemporary art production and viewing with this book. It situates its reader squarely where the action is.” Raqs Media Collective, Delhi, India

Along the Indian Highway

This book is an ethnographic study of the travelling art exhibition Indian Highway that presented Indian contemporary art in Europe and China between 2008 and 2012, a significant period for the art world that saw the rise and fall of the national exhibition format. It analyses art exhibition as a mobile “object” and promotes the idea of art as a transcultural product by using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and multi-media studies as research method. This work encompasses voices of curators, artists, audiences, and art critics spread over different cities, sites, and art institutions to bridge the distance between Europe and India based on vignettes along the Indian Highway. The discussion in the book focuses on power relations, the contested politics of representation, and dissonances and processes of negotiation in the field of global art. It also argues for rethinking analytical categories in anthropology to identify the social role of contemporary art practices in different cultural contexts and also examines urban art and the way national or cultural values are reinterpreted in response to ideas of difference and pluralism. Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars, students and researchers of modern and contemporary art, Indian art, art and visual culture, anthropology, art history, mobility, and transcultural studies. Cathrine Bublatzky is a visual and media anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Germany. As a trained photographer, she received her Magister in Anthropology with a focus on South Asian History and Visual Anthropology in 2008. In her research and teaching, she investigates contemporary visual practices in the field of art and photography, with a main interest in migration and diasporic studies, citizenship, and urban contexts in South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

Visual and Media Histories Series Editor: Monica Juneja, Heidelberg University

This Series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing meanings, maintaining aesthetic values and relations of power. Through individual studies, it hopes to chart the trajectories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important premise here is the conviction that the making, theorising and historicising of images do not exist in exclusive distinction of one another. Opening up the field of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously anchors vision to other media such as audio, spatial and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls for closer attention to inter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing layers of readings and responses are brought alive. Through its regional focus on South Asia the Series locates itself within a prolific field of writing on non-Western cultures which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies, and to perceive temporalities as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe debates and conceptual categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating the historical dimensions of visual practice implies close attention to specific local contexts which intersect and negotiate with the global, and can re-constitute it. Examining the ways in which different media are to be read onto and through one another would extend the thematic range of the subjects to be addressed by the Series to include those which cross the boundaries that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship – sculpture, painting and monumental architecture – from other media: studies of film, photography and prints on the one hand, advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings, and cityscapes on the other. Women Architects and Modernism in India Madhavi Desai No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia Edited by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Hussain and the Idea of India Edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence Edited by Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition Cathrine Bublatzky For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Visual-and-Media-Histories/book-series/VMH

Along the Indian Highway An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition

Cathrine Bublatzky

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Cathrine Bublatzky The right of Cathrine Bublatzky to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bublatzky, Cathrine, author. Title: Along the Indian Highway : an ethnography of an international travelling exhibition / Cathrine Bublatzky. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020442 (print) | LCCN 2019021637 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Indian Highway (Exhibition) | Art, Indic—21st century— Exhibitions—Social aspects. | Nationalism and art—History—21st century. | Art and society—History—21st century. Classification: LCC N7305 (ebook) | LCC N7305 .B83 2020 (print) | DDC 709.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020442 ISBN: 978-0-8153-8210-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31616-6 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Leonel

Contents List of Figures

x

List of Plates

xi

Acknowledgements

xii

Preface

xiv

1

Along the Indian Highway: an introduction

2

“Cancel that flight to Delhi . . .”: Serpentine Gallery, London 2008

36

3

“Indianness and the urgency of transmission . . .”: Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo 2009

62

“There might be an Indian background, but the theme is global”: HEART Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning 2010

90

Transcultural dissonances in the contemporary art world: Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, Rome 2012

115

Indian Highway VI finally on its way to China: Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing 2012

142

Shared exoticisms or the limits of the national exhibition: some final observations

166

4 5 6 7

Index

1

192

Figures 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 5.1 5.2 7.1 7.2 7.3

Dream Villa II – 2007 (2008) by Dayanita Singh. Entrance to the Indian Highway Exhibition, HEART Museum, Herning. Map of venues where Indian Highway was exhibited, 2008–2012. Khoj International Artists’ Association at Khirkee Extension, New Delhi. Street View. Mumbai. National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai. Clark House Initiative in Mumbai. Entrance. Street View. Khirkee Extension, New Delhi. Street View. Lado Sarai. New Delhi. Street View. Lado Sarai. New Delhi. Street View. Hauz Khaz. New Delhi. Astrup Fearnley Museum at Dronningens Gate 4, Oslo. Entrance. Street View. Tourist Map, New Delhi. Vadehra Art Gallery. Defence Colony, New Delhi. Vadehra Art Gallery. Bookstore, Defence Colony, New Delhi. HEART Museum of Contemporary Art. Birk Centerpark in Herning. National Museum of Twenty-First Century Arts, MAXXI. Rome. National Museum of Twenty-First Century Arts, MAXXI. Rome. Indian Pavilion. Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode. Insight View, 54th Venice Biennale. Jaipur House, National Gallery of Modern Art. New Delhi. Exhibition Everything Is Inside by Subodh Gupta. Anish Kapoor Exhibition. Entrance of the National Gallery of Modern Art. New Delhi.

xviii 7 14 21 22 23 24 25 26 26 63 80 85 85 93 119 119 168 184 185

Plates 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1

4.1 4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3

Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (detail) 2008 Video, featuring fiberglass sculptures. Dimensions variable. Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (detail) 2008 Video, featuring fiberglass sculptures. Dimensions variable. Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (detail) 2008 Video, featuring fiberglass sculptures. Dimensions variable. An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007) by Bharti Kher. Bindis on fiberglass 173 × 300 × 116 cm; Come Give Us a Speech (2008) by N.S. Harsha; Curry (2005) by Subodh Gupta. Stainless steel utensils. Dream Ville II – 2007 (2008) C-Print by Dayanita Singh. Entrance to the Indian Highway Exhibition, HEART Museum, Herning. Exhibition view, Indian Highway, HEART Museum, Herning. Artworks: An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007) by Bharti Kher, Come Give Us a Speech (2008) by N.S. Harsha, Tales of Good and Evil (2008) by Nalini Malani. Exhibition view, On the Road to the Next Milestone, “show within the show” curated by Bose Krishnamachari. Art object: Left Leg Series (2008) by Riyas Komu. HEART Museum, Herning. Exhibition view, On the Road to the Next Milestone, “show within the show” curated by Bose Krishnamachari. Art object middle: Untitled (from Love) (2006) by Sudarshan Shetty; in the back: Between One Shore and Several Others (Just What Is It . . . After Richard Hamilton) (2008) by Vivek Vilasini. HEART Museum, Herning. Darkroom (2006) by Sheela Gowda. Tar drums, tar drum sheets, asphalt, and mirrors. 238.8 × 259.1 × 304.8 cm. HEART Museum, Herning. Date by Date (2008) by Subodh Gupta. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. HEART Museum, Herning. Strands (2011) by N.S. Harsha (detail), Mural on MAXXI museum, forecourt, Rome. Strands (2011) by N.S. Harsha (detail), Mural on MAXXI museum, forecourt, Rome. The Shroud (2007) by Ravi Agarwal, C-print, Size 152 cm × 92 cm. I Love My India (2003) by Tejal Shah, DVD, HEART Museum, Herning. I Love My India (2003) by Tejal Shah, DVD, HEART Museum, Herning. I Love My India (2003) by Tejal Shah, DVD, HEART Museum, Herning.

P-1 P-1 P-2

P-2 P-3

P-3

P-4

P-4 P-5 P-5 P-6 P-6 P-7 P-7 P-8 P-8

Acknowledgements

While researching Indian Highway, I encountered a multitude of people without whose support this project could not have been possible. In particular, I am grateful to the artists and curators in India and Europe who welcomed me into their studios and institutes and kindly shared their insights, experience, and knowledge. Although it is impossible to name them all here, I would like to single out for thanks those who contributed to my research in a number of significant and specific ways: Ravi Agarwal, Atul Bhalla, Giulia Ferracci, Ranjit Hoskote, Nidhi Khurana, Gunnar B. Kvaran, Meera Menezes, Peter Nagy, Sreejata Roy, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Shukla Sawant, Vidya Shivadas, Ruchin Soni, and Stinna Toft. Our conversations have been personally, spiritually, and intellectually enriching and have helped me to find my way “along the Indian Highway”. There are no words to express my gratitude to Christiane Brosius. She not only introduced me to the art scene in Delhi and lent her generous support to my work there, she also encouraged me to participate with her in a number of joint field trips to India, which I remember as being inspiring and instructive. Our frequent conversations and exchange of ideas, both academic and informal, have been invaluable. Special thanks also go to the Heidelberg Centre of Transcultural Studies, where I was fortunate to be part of a lively and stimulating academic community that included project initiatives such as B4 “Transcultural Visuality Learning Group”, B20 “Anthropology of Art”, and Net 1 “Arts and the Transcultural”. This environment provided countless invaluable opportunities for exchange with scholars in the field of Indian Art and Museum Studies. Kajri Jain, Monica Juneja, Franziska Koch, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Kavita Singh, together with Thomas Maissen, Barbara Mittler, and Melanie Trede, have all contributed in one way or another to developing and furthering my research and writing. It has been a long road towards the completion of this book, and I am especially grateful and indebted to Monica Juneja, editor of the Routledge series Visual and Media Histories, for her unfailing support and belief in this project. My deepest thanks go also to Karin Zitzewitz, who was willing to critically engage with this project in its very last phase – her sensitive and exacting feedback has helped me to push this book to its final stage. I would also like to extend a heartfelt thanks to my friend and colleague Karin Polit for her friendship, her moral and academic support, and our many fantastic moments together in India.

Acknowledgements |

xiii

Many thanks also to the directorate of the Heidelberg Centre of Transcultural Studies, and especially to Christiane Brosius, who in addition to facilitating my daily duties as a teacher and assistant, enabled my work on this project in virtually every way. Their generous financial support has made this book possible. It is a pleasure, furthermore, to acknowledge the entire Routledge team in New Delhi, and Shoma Choudhury and Rimina Mohapatra in particular, for their kind and patient assistance throughout the publication process. I appreciate the efforts of the two anonymous reviewers; their comments were particularly helpful and supportive. I would also like to thank Angela Roberts for her careful copyediting and for her encouragement. Thanks and acknowledgement are also due to the artists Ravi Agarwal, Raqs Media Collective, Sheela Gowda, N.S. Harsha, Bharti Kher, Riyas Komu, Nalini Malani, Sudarshan Shetty, Tejal Shah, Dayanity Singh, and Vivek Vilasini, who have permitted me to reproduce my photographs of their artworks from the Indian Highway exhibition in this book. Finally, and most personally, I would like to thank my family. I am so very grateful for their loving and tireless support and patience and for their constant belief in me. Special thanks, of course, must go to my partner, Nils, who stepped into my life and managed to stay. My last word of thanks is reserved for my son Leonel. This work has shaped our life in so many ways, and it was always my heart’s desire to finish this project for us.

Preface

When visitors to the London Serpentine Gallery’s “Wall to Wall” show in 1994 found themselves face to face with the artist Lothar Baumgarten’s installation Imago Mundi. L’autre, L’ailleurs (The other, the elsewhere), they experienced an unusual situation. They looked at the map of the world, recast using Kodak color codes: while black masks carried the names of the five drifting continents, four other colors stood for the diverse people of the planet. The viewer, whatever position he or she might choose, could from nowhere grasp the totality of the world map. Moreover, each viewing position involved being “viewed” at the same time from another location on the map. Imago Mundi’s staging of the simultaneity of looking and being looked at captured a larger, demanding dynamic of representational praxis that strove to interpret and translate the “other” and the “elsewhere” as, for instance, when art created at one of the “off-centers” 1 of the globe is curated as a show by experts at sites located in Western metropolises. Fourteen years later, in 2008, the same London gallery was the space of one such enterprise: the exhibition Indian Highway, whose title spells both mobility and modern technology, was created by three celebrated curators – Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Gunnar Kvaran – to showcase contemporary art from India in institutions of Western Europe. Indian Highway epitomized mobility in more than one sense: it journeyed from London to Oslo, Herning, Lyon, Rome, and thence to Beijing, the only site in Asia. Further, it marked the moment when contemporary art from India had become mobile. Unhindered by the legal restrictions applicable to objects classed as “heritage”, such art could travel to wherever it was sought after; it was seen and sold at art fairs and in galleries across the world. Cathrine Bublatzky’s monograph is an ethnographic investigation of the complex and often contradictory processes that follow from this genre of mobility. It is both a fine-tuned description of how actors and institutions partake of the global art world and, at the same time, a situated account of multiple, uneven structures and hierarchies; it is an investigation of the many temporalities that characterize a seemingly shared art world, of the encounter of idioms and grammars, of translations and how to deal with the untranslatable. The increased mobility of contemporary Indian art during the first decade of the twenty-first century meant its enhanced visibility in global circuits and institutional spaces, as museums and galleries responded to the demand to end cultural marginality simply by according more space to the work of non-European artists. This in turn meant that the curator became an increasingly pivotal player in the world of contemporary art – a mediator between art, artists, and their publics – indeed, the one who determined the terms of visibility. Along the Indian Highway takes us through the layers of disjunctiveness that marked these developments – between art and the site, between available languages of representation and the poetics of the work, between the urgency of its politics and the burden of legitimation. Cultural marginality was no longer a matter of invisibility,

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xv

rather one where an “excess of visibility”, as Jean Fisher puts it, made cultural difference into a readily marketable commodity.2 While discussions of the Indian Highway bring home the slowness of aesthetic theory to effectively grasp culturally formed symbolic orders as well as the intrinsic transcultural characteristics of contemporary art without locking such art into a frame of ethnicity, the processes analysed in this study sketch a simultaneous transformation of the exhibition space into a meeting ground for a plurality of visual grammars and languages of artistic address from the enigmatic to the utopian or playful. Following the controversial discussions surrounding the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989, Indian Highway can be said to mark a moment of growing awareness that the art practice of “distant” regions was not about returning to an imagined purity, but a material process that adopts “postcolonial impurity”3 as a means to set free its expressive power. Situated at a transitional moment between such shows where artistic production was meant to serve as a repository of discrete signs that spelt cultural difference and the proliferation of global circuits and interactive channels that allow artists to trespass institutional walls and experiment with modes of co-production, Indian Highway found itself grappling with the challenges that an exhibition defined as a national survey brings with it. As its ethnography unfolds in this book, we encounter an exhibition bearing a national label, therefore ostensibly meant to “inform” viewing publics at different venues about the entity India; at the same time, we read it as a project conceptually committed to being with the times, to celebrating the spirit of globalisation, articulated in curatorial statements through terms such as “exchange”, “dialogue”, or “reciprocity”. The former agenda was bolstered through a galaxy of cultural programmes that accompanied the show – they ranged from literature, dance, and performance to lectures and food festivals, all conforming to habits of cultural consumption that they, in turn, shaped or reinforced. While art critical reports of the show abounded with buzzwords such as “hybridity” or “blending”, they also struggled with the tyranny of the diverse labels they had to negotiate – Indian, global contemporary, or Indian contemporary? The “Indian contemporary art” assembled along the Indian Highway did not meet expectations of a linear art historical narrative about a self-circumscribing modernism committed to utopian possibility being succeeded by a distinctively worldly contemporary art. Instead, the hetero-temporal and at the same time specifically situated “Indian contemporary” on display at the exhibition featured four generations of artists – ranging from the iconic founding figure of Modernism, M.F. Husain (1915–2011), to a generation born in the 1970s – whose collective presence appeared “festive in its diversity” and whose practice worked in its collectivity to unsettle canonical certainties through a simultaneous engagement with a plurality of aesthetic modes and discursive stances.4 The long-term workings of the Indian Highway – as Bublatzky’s revisiting of the show brings out – can help us make sense of the contingent textures of the contemporary, of the ways in which contiguous sites of production can generate a non-totalizing map of simultaneity and discontinuity. The workings of this travelling exhibit meant crossing and partly dissolving existing boundaries, the breakdown of cultural and locational hierarchies, at the same time as it reinforced others or created new ones. The contingent conditions of the contemporary become visible especially in the way exhibitions such as this one effected transformations in urban infrastructures within Indian localities – even though India did not figure in its itinerary – that have worked in

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different directions. While galleries, artists’ associations, or institutions such as the India Art Fair have proliferated in urban settings, it has also meant that much of contemporary art – in spite of its forays into sites beyond the gallery – has come to be insulated within exclusive spaces that draw a clear boundary between the institutions of “art” and other genres of visual or material creation. The outcomes of the Indian Highway as an epitome of a globally circulating praxis have been measured according to different yardsticks. Its long-term effects have been judged as boosting the process of making contemporary Indian art a marketable commodity: India as a cultural reference for art objects made it into a “desirable brand” within the dazzling array brought forth by neo-liberal capital.5 Such pivotal agency ascribed to the art market has been further detected in the fresh roles the market has assumed, those of “producing the discourse through web-resources, auction catalogues and books . . . building the archive of modern and contemporary art”.6 Ascriptions along these lines have in turn been eloquently countered by the assertion that the Indian Highway was an important milestone in generating a culture of “responsible and responsive encounter” . . . a catalyst that gave art practice “strategic and imaginative freedom” to unfold beyond the “radar range of the market”.7 Along the Indian Highway is a skillful and rich account that encompasses a broad field of forces, an agonistic space animated by contrary pulls and endless negotiations. Its importance lies no less in the historical perspective it opens up by examining the pitfalls and promises of a one-nation show and thereby allowing us a vantage point from which to view more recent enterprises to rethink the nation as a frame. Monica Juneja

Notes 1 The notion of “off-centers” has been coined by Okwui Enwezor to designate a location “structured by the simultaneous existence of multiple centers”, Okwui Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 109.3 (2010): 595–620, here 601–602. 2 Jean Fisher, “The Syncretic Turn: Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism”, in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008: 233–241, here 235. 3 Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems around Art and Eurocentrism”, Third Text, 6.21 (1992–93): 35–41, reprinted in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory, eds. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt and Ziauddin Sardar, New York: Continuum, 2002: 267–273, here 269. 4 Ranjit Hoskote, “Signposting the Indian Highway”, in Indian Highway: The Catalogue, eds. Kathleen Madden and Sam Philips, London: Koenig Books, 2008: 190–193, here 193. 5 Manuela Ciotti, “Post-Colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness’, Contemporary Art and the Market in the Age of Neoliberal Capital”, Third World Quarterly, 33.4 (2012): 633–651, quote 637. 6 Kavita Singh, “A History of Now”, Art India, 15 (2010): 26–33, here 32. 7 Hoskote, “Signposting”, 191, 193.

Figure 1.0 Dream Villa II – 2007 (2008) by Dayanita Singh. Entrance to the Indian Highway Exhibition,

HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

1 Along the Indian Highway An introduction

T

he international travelling exhibition Indian Highway was the second exhibition conceived and organised by the Serpentine Gallery (London) in collaboration with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo). Between 2006 and 2015, the cooperating institutes focused, in a kind of geo-aesthetic mapping, on the contemporary art of five major cultural regions: America, China, India, and subsequent to this, Brazil and Europe. The exhibition Indian Highway (2008– 2012) featured a “timely presentation of the pioneering work being made in India today, embracing art, architecture, film, literature and dance” (Peyton-Jones, Obrist, and Kvaran 2008, 7). The participation of internationally celebrated curators, distinguished artists from India, and wellknown museums, paired with exciting site events, promised to make this exhibition an outstanding platform for discourse about Indian contemporary art outside its national borders and thus a travelling transcultural contact zone. Moreover, Indian Highway marked an important moment in the history of the internationalisation of Indian art, as it turned out to be one of the last regional survey shows of its kind. It allowed artists, curators, and audiences to encounter the phenomenon of globalised Indian contemporary art at various art institutions in London, Oslo, Herning, Lyon, Rome, and Beijing, and, as this book will demonstrate, the exhibition itself became an identifier for a critical transcultural discourse with and about the “self” and the “other” in the international art world that can be described as a “scene of translations” (Maharaj 1994, 28). Growing and reshaping itself along the different venues and creating translocal and transcultural intersections between the global and the local, the exhibition came at a moment of – and even acted as a facilitator for – the global marketing and consumption of Indian art as a postcolonial renaissance of Indianness in the age of neoliberal capital (Ciotti 2012).

Mobile spaces of encounter Outlining the moment when Indianness as a selling point in the art markets incited critical debates in India and beyond about a re-empowerment of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) in the field of art, this exhibition became a meaningful, mobile space of knowledge production in which the dynamics of cultural critique, of dialogical relations with an “other”, and thus the relation between space and cultural difference (Gupta and Ferguson 2002, 13) operated. Exploring Indian Highway as a European invention that generated various

2 |

Along the Indian Highway

intersections between different cultural and spatial settings, this book provides an ethnographic case study along the Indian Highway and examines its symbolic dimension of mobility and the geopolitics of knowledge (Rodríguez 2007, 4). But the question of what sort of knowledge is actually produced when the field of visual art appears as a field of knowledge production remains (Maharaj 2009). Borrowing from profound anthropological debates and their more “sophisticated understanding of processes of objectivation and the construction of other-ness in anthropological writing” (Gupta and Ferguson 2002, 13) from the 1990s, anthropology has much to offer those attempting to critically engage with recent forms of contemporary art exhibition. Forging ahead with the discussion on decolonisation and how to empty authoritarian spaces of representation, such as museums (Mirzoeff 2017), the study comprises insights into the internationalised and cosmopolitanised Indian contemporary art world. In doing so, it tracks and traces the art exhibition in different venues in Europe and Asia as an “organically” changing and growing travelling contact zone (Clifford 1997a), one that has been established through successive interventions and engagements by an array of urban and institutional sites, curators, artists, and audiences. In this sense, the exhibition opened a window onto particular European strategies of presenting art from India and the corresponding resonances in parts of the local Indian art scene that were closely intertwined with Indian Highway and Delhi-based international art events. This book examines the intersections of different positions as a fundamental contribution to the dynamic nature of the global art field that unfolded alongside the powerful emergence of hyped individual figures such as star curators and artists, institutional networks, and “must-have” works of Indian contemporary art for established and emerging creative cities on the global art map (Florida 2003; Carta 2007; Andersson, Andersson, and Mellander 2011; O’Connor and Shaw 2014; Gerhard, Hoelscher, and Wilson 2017). The at times dizzying internationalism of the twenty-first-century global art world presents a phenomenon par excellence, according to Arjun Appadurai’s visionary discussion of the cultural dimensions of globalisation (1996), especially when observing probably one of the last survey exhibitions on contemporary Indian art in Europe. Globalism appears, according to the cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania, at “an enabling rather than an alienating distance from the logic of regional and national narratives” (Adajania 2010). The adoption of a globalist position allows us then to see that the destinies of certain societies and regions “are shaped through the mediation of intricate webs of exchange, conflict, diffusion and mutuality, which may sometimes extend across oceans and continents” (ibid.). Such intricate webs are established along the route of the Indian Highway exhibition and through various moments of dissonance and asymmetric knowledge production inscribed into the field of art as it interconnects Europe and Asia (represented by India and one exceptional venue in China). By taking travelling cultures and representation politics (Clifford 1997b) in the field of art and exhibition-making as one starting point, this study conceives international mobility in the art world and its covering of large distances, with a regular back-and-forth between particular sites over a limited time frame, as moments of displacement. These are strung together by artists and curators who create complex infrastructures of knowledge production (Maharaj 2009), cultural entanglement (Maharaj 2009; Adajania and Hoskote 2010), and symbolic dimension (Rodríguez 2007) for art of postproduction (Bourriaud 2007). In the context of accelerating mobility, the promotion of Indianness as a marketing category in European exhibition projects

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is only the tip of the iceberg in what I shall discuss as the actual sites of transcultural encounter: that is, the sites where the translation and transformation of cultural products evolve to contest and negotiate contemporary art. In order to understand how exhibitions can generate spaces for mutual identification, I will explore how they are put together, what they show, how they are displayed, and how the exhibits are talked about. This intense anthropological investigation will provide crucial insight into the quality and influence of global flows of people, objects, and ideologies in this sector and how this leads to the creation of cultural differences and commonalities, as well as creative, urban hot-spots. Enhancing the methodology of a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 2009), this study’s most notable endeavour will be to explore an exhibition project that is distinctive in its mobility across different cultural and institutional destinations and in its potential to create and interconnect old and new creative hubs. This book, therefore, offers a rare anthropological engagement with the contemporary art world, which is built on contested politics of representation and struggles with a space that Nicolas Mirzoeff describes in reference to Hanna Arendt and Jacques Rancière as unequal, exclusive, and “where hierarchy and substitution enables authority and dominance” (Mirzoeff 2017, 7–8). Similar to defining globalism as a conceptual tool that allows us “to break free of several restrictions, some that are external, others that arise from within” (Adajania 2010), the term “art world”, as it is used here, partly breaks with Arthur Danto’s philosophy of an art-historical system that defines an object as art (Danto 1964). Instead, it redefines Bourdieu’s definition of the “field of production” in which different agents, according to their relationships with each other as well as with the art objects, produce the value of the artist and the art object (Bourdieu 2003, 261). For an updated critical reflection on this field and its formation, questions such as who has the right to appear, where, and when must be raised (Mirzoeff 2017, 7). Generally, I will use both “global” and “international” to refer to the “contemporary art world”, to specify art practices in India that were seen from the late twentieth century onwards, and to decipher in which sense contemporary art “is a fully formed cultural project with certain defined parameters, complete with logics of inclusion and exclusion not so different from those of the modernist project” (Aranda, Kuan Wood, and Vidokle 2009). In view of Indian art, it may be that the contemporary art market followed the meaning and value production of Indian modern art by employing “Indian” as its central category for comparison and valuation (Khaire and Wadhwani 2010, 1281). In order to move beyond the marketing value of Indianness, however, it is worth turning to the discussion “What Is Contemporary Art?” (Smith 2001).1 With the presumed failure of recent universalisms, such as globalisation or fundamentalism, the idea of the “contemporary”, according to Terry Smith, “has become – in its forms and its contents, its meaning and its usages – thoroughly questioning in nature, extremely wide-ranging in its modes of asking and in the scope of its inquiries” (2001, 2). More intriguing is its second quality, that of “contemporaneousness” – being “contemporary with oneself, with others, with everything in the world and with all time” (3) – which leads to the third and deepest dimension, that of the “cotemporal”: namely, “the coexistence of distinct temporalities, of different ways of being in relation to time, experienced in the midst of a growing sense that many kinds of time are running out” (2001, 3–4). In view of contemporary art in India and its internationalisation, it is worth questioning the function of European initiatives such as the Indian Highway project: Do the exhibition and its branches at the institutional sites in Europe and China reveal productive dynamics of meaning and knowledge production and circulation produced by distinct

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temporalities and pluralistic perceptions? How do its resonances in the various Indian art scenes contribute to the constitution of the contemporary? It may be intriguing to position Indian Highway as a space of cultural complexity in which the coexistence of distinct temporalities is created, generating a form of contemporaneousness; however, the complexity of temporalities arises, it seems, from the critical negotiations and entanglements within and between a macro level, with its specific historical and modernist approaches in the field of postcolonial debates and art history. With and within a micro level, it unfolds with particular individual viewpoints and practices that see the contemporary art world as encompassing those different dimensions on the one hand, but struggling, on the other, with qualitative and cultural differences. In this sense, this book seeks to underscore the “multiplicity of relationships between being and time” (Smith 2001, 4) and the “contemporaneity” that shapes art “most profoundly” (2001, 6) as, the most evident attribute of the current world picture, encompassing its most distinctive qualities, from the interactions between humans and the geosphere, through the multeity [sic] of cultures and the ideoscape of global politics to the interiority of individual being. (2001, 5)

The research on Indian Highway helps identify the inscribed complexity of cultural entanglements and nuances as they contribute to shaping the field of Indian contemporary art. In other words, one can argue that Indian Highway unfolded a present world picture with its particular struggles of decolonisation (Tuck and Yang 2012; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). With its focus on exhibitionary and artistic practices in close interrelation with network politics and institutional strategies of creating “arty” and creative hubs in urban contexts, this ethnography draws attention to these practices, which go far beyond the construction of Indianness as a cultural value. Along with the notion of postproduction and how art reprogrammes the world (Bourriaud 2007), the transformation of artistic techniques and materials as they circulate on the cultural market make it necessary to rethink any idea of “cultural origin” (2007, 13). However, alongside the complexity of contemporaneity as it generates interactions between humans in various localities, connecting different cultures and ideoscapes, art has seemingly preserved its relationality and effective power (Bourriaud 2002; Bishop 2004). The strategies used to exhibit art from India in a way that underlines “cultural difference” and its originality while simultaneously trying to avoid a homogenised picture of it have turned out to be a truly conflictual and deeply transcultural endeavour. In this sense, the exhibition functions as a promising entry point with which to study the turbulent dissonances of mutual repulsion and attraction and the processes of translation and interpretation inscribed in the global establishment of relations between the “self” and the “other” and to look beyond hegemonic Western universal curatorial tropes (Perkins 2013, xv). The resulting perspectives on contemporary art from India as they are inscribed into the different exhibition versions of Indian Highway would necessarily form more than one possible outcome of those interactions. In addition, exhibitions and “art as a way of acting in the world cannot be separated from its overall cultural context and translation, inasmuch as that is a synonym for cross-cultural and cross-temporary communication and is an essential component in art history” (Perkins 2013, xvi). With their specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts, curators, exhibitions, as well as artists and their work function as cultural translators of a certain knowledge or as

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“long-distance cultural specialists” (Harris 2006, 699). As creators of definite and often distanced fields of cultural production, they link up with diverse histories of travel and displacement, of institutional and cultural knowledge that, despite all their expertise and professionalism, are limited in their potential as cultural translators. As an actual perspective on curatorial responsibility (Raqs Media Collective 2010) and “to certain localizing strategies in the construction and representation of ‘cultures’” (Clifford 1997b, 19), such practice is an essential part of a field that Sarat Maharaj described in the 1990s as a “meeting ground for multiplicity of tongues, visual grammars and styles” that “do not so much translate into one another as translate to produce difference” (1994, 28) and even a notion of its untranslatability (ibid.). I will argue throughout this book that the mobility and circulation by curators, artists, and art objects in shared yet culturally distinctive spaces imply different regimes of seeing that have a critical impact on the production of knowledge as a whole (Mirzoeff 2017, 13). Inherent to such discussion is a culture-as-travel relation (Clifford 1997b, 26), alongside which, as one example, the cultural and economic value of contemporary art is narrated anew in each moment of travel and dwelling in a specific setting. Moreover, the perspective on travelling cultures (and I take travelling as modality of mobility) allows firstly to pinpoint those people, objects, and ideologies that are constantly in motion and yet travel at different speeds. Secondly, travelling implies that one always has cultural ties somewhere else, at a presumed origin; and thirdly, being on the move also means to dwell at the same time in this condition and, retrospectively, to build relations with changing spatial settings. Though not immediately recognisable, the understanding of the interrelation between travel and the contexts in which travel/dwelling take place is nevertheless crucial to the subsequent discussion. In our view, participating cities and art institutions in Europe and Asia seem to be lined up to form a more complex network along which agents and spaces in the art field are encountering, crisscrossing, interrelating, and shaping each other, before disconnecting again. This situation of global interconnectivity requires a transcultural approach in order to investigate the (dis)translation and (dis)interpretation of encounters mediated by visual and creative practices.

Indian Highway – a transcultural fabric Indian Highway was not the only initiative to present contemporary art from India in European museums and galleries. Rather, it came on the heels of a three- to four-year period of Indian contemporary art shows around the years 2008–2009.2 From the late 1990s onwards, international interest in Indian art had steadily grown, and the Indian Highway exhibition sometimes appeared to mimic this global art trail, particularly in terms of its repetition of established artists or works. The stronger interest in Indian art in general has been linked to economic and political developments in India, including the economic liberalisation that has swept the country since the 1990s, but it can also be linked to a growing trend in the international art market, where a proliferating interest in contemporary art from various regions in the world, such as China, Africa, and South Asia, has developed. Following the end of the Cold War, which brought about a reorganisation of global powers, the art world also began to change to accommodate the emergence of new networks on an international scale. The rise of new global art hubs and art institutions as “global

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forms” (Ciotti 2014), which grew alongside the biennial system, saw the increasing mobility of non-Western artists, and their access to the international art markets signalled that the world of contemporary art had begun to accept a greater diversity in artistic practices (for example, multimedia installation artworks or video and internet art) from various regions across the world. However, as Manuela Ciotti argues, in the market for contemporary Indian art, and Indianness as the vehicle for globalisation and neoliberal capital flows (Ciotti 2012, 631), the art’s “contents underneath Indianness as a representation of self and difference” is worth deciphering (ibid.). Ciotti’s argument can also be applied to the Indian Highway project, where Indian art objects acquire their agentic power through “the contemporary dynamics between capital investment and culture that emerge from a post-colonial context” and “the alignment of nation, commodity and buyer under the rubric of ‘Indianness’” (ibid.). It was under these conditions and in light of recent trends that the three renowned European curators – Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, both from the Serpentine Gallery in London,3 and Gunnar B. Kvaran,4 from Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo5 – planned and organised Indian Highway. Similar to earlier travelling exhibition projects such as Cities on the Move, which Obrist had conceptualised with Hou Hanrou (1999), Indian Highway travelled from one venue to another, as can be seen in the following map (Figure 1.1). Its route across Europe and to China followed the network tracks established by Obrist, Peyton-Jones, and Kvaran in earlier cooperations. After its inauguration on 10 December 2008, it was featured at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo from 2 April to 23 August 2009; at the HEART Museum of Contemporary Art in Herning (Denmark) from 13 March to 12 September 2010; it travelled to Museé d’Art de Contemporain de Lyon (MAC)6 from 24 February to 31 July 2011; and finally landed at the Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) in Rome7 from 22 September 2011 to 29 January 2012.8 After circulating within Europe, the show travelled to Asia where it was shown from 24 June to 26 August 2012 at UCCA, the Ullens Foundation for Contemporary Art, in Beijing, China.9 The exhibition ended here prematurely and contrary to earlier announcements. The overall vision for the exhibition was represented in the encompassing curatorial concept and the touring of various art institutions in Europe and Asia. Embracing different institutions and curatorial approaches, Indian Highway changed, and its scale grew in terms of the number of participating artists and selected artworks. Local curators at the hosting art institutes were asked to add their own curatorial perspective to the exhibition by including new artists and artworks in the show. Furthermore, Indian Highway featured a specific model of curation where each venue had a “show within the show”. These sections were each curated by one of the exhibited artists or groups who invited additional artists and works, not part of the main show, to participate. The artist-curator feature was meant to present an insider’s view on contemporary art practices in India and the artist’s perspective on Indian contemporary art. This encounter between views from Europe and India was meant to encourage participants to critically engage with each other and to ensure that the exhibition was not overwhelmed by a dominant Western view on India’s art practices. The invitation of alternative perspectives on diverse art practices went beyond the representational boundaries of a national survey show, since Peyton-Jones, Obrist, and Kvaran tried to

Figure 1.1 Map of venues where Indian Highway was exhibited, 2008–2012.

Source: Cartography by Nils Harm (2014)

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establish encounters between the global and the local art worlds in which canonical criteria and established conventions of viewing and presenting art would be dismantled. Yet this intention raised many questions: Who initiates this encounter and where? What or whom does Indian art represent in the context of contemporary social life? Is it still justified to ascribe the particular meaning associated with “Indian” to art in today’s globalised world? How do agents such as artists, curators, or audiences perceive artistic practices from India in an exhibition? Can the art be read as a representation of Indian culture? For whom? And who decides? These questions were important points of departure for this ethnographic project, which began at the Serpentine Gallery in London in early 2009. While it is true that anthropologists research the making of art and exhibitions and different categories of art and artefacts, and also that the various roles played by art and its institutional contexts in modern and postcolonial discourses have been of interest for a long time, the investigation of contemporary art in the context of an international travelling exhibition can potentially uncover the impact of mobility on the complex web of meanings woven between the “movement” of bodies and objects, the cultural representation of space, and the politicization of transitory subjectivities (Rodríguez 2007, 8). Furthermore, this study moves toward a plural relationality and seeks to contribute to what Mignolo and Walsh have only recently described as the aim to “interrupt the idea of dislocated, disembodied, and disengaged abstraction, and to disobey the universal signifier that is the rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality, and the West’s global model” (2018, 3). It may be too early to embed this ethnography in recent decolonial discourses; however, instead of studying the success and pitfalls of the exhibition along marketing strategies of Indianness and any reverberations with the nation-state (Ciotti 2012, 638–639), this project nevertheless aims to shed light on the role of art and exhibition in a decolonial realm as both a connecting and a bringing “together in relation – as both pluri- and interversal – histories, subjectivities, knowledge, narratives, and struggles against the modern/colonial order and for an otherwise” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 3). In light of this “understanding and project of pluriversal and interversal decoloniality” (ibid.), this ethnographic project will be inspired to see the pluriversal and Western [curatorial and Indian artistic] thought as part of it (ibid.). “In order to tackle the construction and global legitimization processes of cultural imaginaries” (Rodríguez 2007, 2), I will investigate condensed spaces in which participating agents move in and along the paths established by the Indian Highway exhibition. These spaces were exclusive localities related to the professional art world: artists’ and printing studios in Delhi; sites of production and display, such as museums, galleries, exhibition openings, or art fairs, in Delhi and Europe; spaces of discourse and debate, such as conferences, symposia, workshops, or art writing in catalogues, and magazine articles, interviews, and work discussions. In addition to these public occasions, I also interacted with my interlocutors in spaces that manoeuvre between semi-work and privacy, such as coffee bars, restaurants, or parties. Approaching the multi-temporality and multi-sitedness of these very exclusive places in the global art system and its politics of mobility was one challenge that accompanied this study of the transcultural shifts in the international contemporary art system (Rodríguez 2007). In documenting the multiplicity of position-taking, the strategies of identification, and the meaning-making processes, the transcultural fabric of culture entails a grappling with the pluralistic social spaces and symbolic discourses that are deeply embedded in

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migration and mobilities (Petersen 2018). This urges us to ask: What does it mean when agents, artists, and curators share a common ground of aesthetic knowledge due to their professional training but are nevertheless members of different cultural groups with different cultural dispositions? When Indian and Western art history meet, how does this find reflection in the specific ideas on cultural identity and how it is expressed and created through art, not to mention the different dispositions of the artists, who are Indian but are very differently located socially? In this sense, this ethnography engages with the exhibition’s function as a trailblazer that created spaces of translation and representation as nodes of one possible network all over Europe and partly in Asia and which triggered transcultural encounters between people and with artworks. Moreover, the involved agents who participated in and were connected to Indian Highway did not share the same dispositions and aesthetic competences in the field of Indian culture. It is in such contexts that a general attitude or, in Bourdieu’s terms, “habitus”, which presumably characterised the agents’ differing engagement with the art and their different levels of emphasis on the “Indian” aspect of it, can pave the way towards transcultural consciousness in the field of art. This, it can be said, goes beyond the notion of crossing cultural boundaries to suggest a potential to create “an awareness and mediation of the unfamiliar” as well as “defying such boundaries” when they “remind us that cultural difference is at best a fragile concept, often undone by perceptions that create sudden affinities between ourselves and others apparently so different from us” (MacDougall 1998, 245). Methodologically speaking, these shifts, earlier described as mutual repulsion and attraction, marked a clear path for this study: that is, to “follow” the echoes that the exhibition produced and the resonances, dissonances, and paradigm shifts that it evoked. Those were not always “visible” and often became more evident at “off”-places – spaces located outside the Indian Highway route but interlinked with it in such way that created a resonance, like an echo in a cave. This metaphor has less to do with flows or waves as facilitators of movement from A to B and much more to do with the idea of pluriversal entanglements between the global and the local – that is, a mutual form of exchange through communication and networking practices. This sort of entanglement – fluid, but in a temporal sense partly expressed in dissonances – created a multiplicity of conjunctures and disjunctures. Thus, this transcultural fabric extends the field of local cultural production and inscribes it onto a shared art world that has deep connections and anchors in diverse local cultural situations. It is a vision of recombinant art histories (Jeffery and Minissale 2009) that has allowed a new way of looking at the continuum beneath binaries like global/local and their perceived disjuncture (2009, x). It became, therefore, a task of this ethnography to focus on the contemporary art world as it entangles an us/them and here/there and develops an understanding and localising anew of the space “where the belief in the value of art and in the artist’s power of valuable creation is continually produced and reproduced” (Bourdieu 2003, 259–260). Such cross-cultural interactions between international curators and local artists demonstrate ways in which the politics of representation as a form of reinventing the “national” or “West/Non-western” paradigm and “geoaesthetic mapping” (Rodríguez 2009) are questioned, contested, and overcome. Engaging “transculturality” (Welsch 1999; Benessaieh 2010; Juneja and Kravagna 2013; Ernst 2015; Bublatzky 2018) as an alternate analytical perspective foregrounds a “conceptual landscape for considering cultures as relational webs and

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flows of significance in active interaction with one another” (Benessaieh 2010, 11) and can be best “understood as a cross-cultural competence, a cohesive identity that transcends frontiers or time, a cohesive identity of self for individuals and communities who see themselves as continuously shifting between cultural flows and worlds” (2010, 28). With a closer look into this social morphing of societies in the field of art one can highlight the existence of the “transformatory processes that constitute art practice through cultural encounters and relationships” (Juneja 2011, 281) as being significant in curating, exhibiting, and creating art. And while Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez critically addresses, in the context of exhibiting Latin American art, geoaesthetic mapping as a failed geopolitical revisionism from a Eurocentric perspective (2009, 98), the present ethnography shall extend this study while proposing an attribution of clear agency performed by participants on both the national and international level. With its empirical agent-oriented study, this book will also provide insights into “transculturality as [a] practice” (Pütz 2008) constitutive to the contemporary art world.

Travelling and the notion of Indian A central condition to establishing such agency is that of travel. Implied in this is the notion that the translocality generated by curators, artists, and art objects, which are in permanent transgression of geographical borders and urban contexts, is crucial to the field of contemporary art. “Travelling” is a dominating paradigm of recent times; in the words of the Mumbai-based art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote, travel can lead to the insight of direct encounter – to the dismantling of canonical criteria and long-established conventions of viewing and representation. It can help the cause of de-exoticising the “Other” as a subject of inquiry or an object of desire and display. It can help restore suppressed or excluded content. It can make for a confluence of energies and perspectives. (2010, 309)

In this sense, contemporary art “unfolds as an agonistic space where ideas are engaged in permanent dispute” (Mercer 2007, 8). If we are talking about agonistic spaces where curators and artists locate themselves as well as each other as this or that, cultural or national identification seems to be exploited and emptied of its meaning. But does this imply a crisis? Suggesting that identification formation has to be seen in the context of a processuality of contestation and negotiation in which contemporary art plays its own part, the question raised is how belonging can be possible at all? In Art India magazine, Zehra Jumabhoy, an art critic and art historian based in London and specialising in contemporary South Asian art, queries the travelling modus of artists and artworks in current times. In reference to continuing survey exhibitions on Indian contemporary art that “cement a nation’s claims and unravel those of its competitors”, Jumabhoy (2013, 33) grapples with the importance that travelling “bestows upon Indian art – when it finally lands on foreign shores” (ibid.).10 Noting the voices who claim that the “craze for surveys is just another form of Imperial domination” (34), Jumabhoy joins the chorus by asking “Is the boost Indian artists achieve from dangling their bindis, bartans and beads abroad a legacy of Colonialism? Are such

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travelling shows just a means of reproducing exotic India for Western consumption?” (ibid.). With this critical comment, she pinpoints the entire dilemma: Even while critiquing this phenomenon Indian artists (and “critics”?) find themselves drawn to the seduction of exposure. Does this bring us to the hard truth that surveys not only present a shallow version of the subcontinent, but – soliciting flashy easy-to-interpret works – instigate their production and dissemination too? (ibid.)

Acknowledging that there are certainly more serious and prestigious endeavours, such as solo shows or inclusion in documenta, the problem arises that Indian art made outside India is reduced to some ethnic indicators (41). Jumabhoy claims that the Indian art world must fight for the responsibility to control its own art history (42). Her strong words contrast with what Hoskote observed some years earlier as one result of today’s travelling culture – namely, the rise of new forms of human encounter that can lead to a breaking up of existing conventions of viewing and representation between the “self” and the “other” (2010, 309). When Hoskote argues that travelling “can help the cause of de-exoticising the ‘Other’ as a subject of inquiry or an object of desire and display” (ibid.), we come to the heart of what Jumabhoy sees as the responsibility of Indian art history, and what, from my point of view, the responsibility of everybody participating in a global world has to be: establishing a consciousness for these in-depth encounters, understanding the concrete repercussions and predicaments of culture in today’s globalised world, and not erasing one’s own role in a larger “we” or abdicating responsibility for this erasure to others. As the chapters in this book will elaborate, it’s time to bring critical awareness to the transcultural experience as the basis for contemporary art practice. This is within view of Hoskote’s observation that “the globalisation-era potential of the Indian art world was most productively realised in the variety of transcultural experiments in dialogue, encounter and travel beginning in the late1990s” (Hoskote 2008, 192) as well as his declaration that “the most revolutionary outcome of these transcultural experiments [such as residencies, workshops, conferences, collaboration, and exchange in India and overseas] was the transformation of perspective for an entire generation of Indian artists who abandoned the colonialist centre-periphery model of the world – in which the West was always the donor and the non-West always the recipient of contemporary culture” (ibid.). At this intersection of self-perceptions, I am immediately tempted to draw a direct comparison with the somewhat naïve and self-congratulatory stance of international star curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist, who sees himself as “a catalyst and sparring partner” (Jeffries and Groves 2014). Obrist claims that curating today means at least four things: “[I]t means to preserve, in the sense of safeguarding the heritage of art. It means to be the selector of new work. It means to connect to art history. And it means displaying or arranging the work” (ibid.). This relates, if you like, to a very classical understanding of the Latin curare/caretaking, but Obrist also sees his role in relation to the exhibition as a mass medium and a ritual. Thus, the curator sets it up so that “it becomes an extraordinary experience and not just illustrations or spatialised books” (ibid.). But at what’s and whose cost? Does Obrist acknowledge the political role of such projects and their impact

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on local art worlds when he admits “But for me, it was important to be close to artists and not subordinate their work to the curator’s vision. I’ve realised that the curator’s role is more that of enabler” (ibid.)? At this point, and later on in discussing curatorial activities in Delhi, it becomes very clear: the desires of international curators and those of artists and professionals from India often diverge. This illustrates the opposing expectations shaped by different speeds and dynamics at the edges of the contemporary art world. But as these expectations intersect and interact, they not only define junctions between the global and the local, but also show how these interactions create new dynamics within regional art worlds which, in turn, shape the global. Although international curators and local Indian artists participate in a shared contemporary art world with specific homogenising trends, it cannot be assumed that the contemporary art world is homogenous in its totality or that it is based on true equality. Instead the art world consists of and produces various social groups of participants who follow different premises, interests, and historical conditions. And even though many contemporary artists from India are internationally established, they are still members of their local art communities, which in themselves are heterogenous and hierarchic. Local art infrastructures that provide advantages but also boundaries to daily artistic life and careers are strongly shaped by unbalanced international attention. The Delhi-based gallery owner and curator Peter Nagy (Nature Morte Gallery, Delhi) points to the “logical” way in which the Western art world “first digests the material just through a nationalistic or geographical packaging. And then . . . people see those shows and they start to pull out individual artists for other projects, who are just for solo shows at galleries” (Peter Nagy, Delhi, 22 February 2010). When the (still) dominant Western art world follows a certain system of establishing new art trends and artists, the emerging dynamics indicate politics of in- and exclusion and the unreliability of the art world and its markets. Such developments often create many struggles for artists and their expectation of gaining access to and being perceived in line with their contemporary peers all over the world. But the logic behind the acknowledgement of artists follows in main the logic of networks and how they shape the search for identity, individual or collective, ascribed or constructed. Manuel Castells describes our current period as an age of social networks. When “identity is . . . the main, and sometimes the only source for meaning in an historical period characterized by widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural expressions,” he argues, “[p]eople increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are” (2000, 3). And the essential function of networking activities for gaining success and visibility guarantees that identity markers such as individuals, groups, regions, and even nations are eventually and selectively switched off and on, “according to the relevance they play in fulfilling the goals processed in the network” (ibid.). “Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self” (ibid.), and this also proves to be true for the art world when the notion of Indianness functions as a particular identity marker distinguished by both conscious empowerment and condemnation. In this regard, large-scale art projects like Indian Highway are significant international events and thus are not so different from art biennials in their ability to produce meaning and value for contemporary

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art (Gardner and Green 2016). Where members of various art communities and networks participate according to their different political agendas and cross-cultural interconnections, generally hidden networks of the international art business gain a certain visibility. The art world community as global village (Bydler 2004, 265) is a very restricted and limited circuit of people, and it involves a web of relations that is far from comprehensive and stable. It does not imply a homogenous, liberal stage of equality on “eye-level”. In fact, it encompasses a certain group of professionals in a market-driven field that is characterised by inclusion and exclusion, by finances, and by the “imaginary” of a community (Anderson 1991) that perceives itself as authoritative, in Bourdieu’s sense, to define certain standards of aesthetics and originality. Thereby, the field is predominantly shaped by an instability in its temporal and spatial permanence, as the interruptive, frictional relationship between the global art community and its specific local companions continually reflect. Global “glass” networks temporally appear – often engaging at the surface with the local artistic scenes – only to vanish into thin air after a certain art event or trend, as the art historian and artist Shukla Sawant from Delhi pointed out to me. This causes a “sudden” appearance and relatively “short” interaction between European curators and Indian artists, which still makes an important impact, not only in terms of the visibility of involved agents, but also in their effect on the global/local web of relations and the related notions of “self” and the “other”. In one of our personal conversations, Shukla Sawant expressed her critical view on related international developments when she called many of these networking activities between European curators and local agents a “fiberglass network” which operates on the surface without penetration at any other level (Shukla Sawant, Delhi, 24 February 2010). When we met in her office at the School of Arts and Aesthetics (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), she described a scenario in which international curators usually rely on their research from abroad instead of visiting local galleries. This results in the creation of a PowerPoint file of artists’ works compiled by local agents who already have an established international standing in the field of art history or in exhibition-making, such as the Delhi-based alternative artists association Khoj (Figure 1.2) or the artists’ collective Raqs Media Collective, who have “made connections of different kinds [with] new media networks, new media practice networks or collectors” (Shukla Sawant, Delhi, 24 February 2010). Sawant problematises the existing gaps between international and national operating networks, which only include a small number of local agents. Her critique is that such network practices and the resulting international art interventions at local sites often do not provide deeper insight into the complexity of operating artists in India. In this context, she acknowledges with respect to the Indian Highway exhibition, the curatorial feature of the “show within the show” as an interesting component. However, the independent curator and art historian Niyatee Shinde, who was associated with Indian Highway as coordinator, argues for more collaboration between Asian countries in such situations: “[I]nstead of applying for financial and institutional strategies from the West we should create and nurture our own that suit the local temperament” (Shinde 2010). And although “[t]he Asian continent is quite large [and] despite its size and inherent diversity, one can feel a certain sensibility that culturally binds this continent and all that emerges from here” (ibid.), which makes collaboration in these countries central to creating and developing better conditions for the arts there.

Figure 1.2 Khoj International Artists’ Association at Khirkee Extension, New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2014)

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It should be noted that Indian Highway made connections – in a spatial template – between different localities and societies. Thus, it responds to Edouard Glissant’s philosophy of archipelagos and mondialité (globality) for a “form of worldwide exchange that recognises and preserves diversity and creolization”, and with which he creates a counter image for the homogenising forces of globalisation (Glissant and Obrist 2011, 4). The proximity to Glissant’s mondialité as a fundamental concept of Indian Highway is undeniable. The exhibition created along its journey a very specific geography of archipelagos for the internationalisation of Indian contemporary art based on exchange and diversity. However, the structure on which the exhibitionary journey was built still reflected a long-established Eurocentrism in which Europe is not only the initiator of the international dispersion of Indian contemporary art, but is also responsible for how Indian art is defined and perceived. It is thus very likely that the “art-culture system” acted as an “authenticity machine” (Clifford 1988, 100) when Indian Highway traversed different kinds of meanings over the course of its journey and when the different curatorial perspectives in the changing venues of Europe and China established new narratives around the exhibits. As a response to a highly contested politics of cultural representation, the ethnography locates the analysis of Indian Highway in the context of a sensorium of the global art world that appears to be determined by markets (Bydler 2004; Belting and Buddensieg 2009; Zarobell 2017). As a consequence of the dynamic emerging economies and art markets in the Global South and Asia, the upcoming international biennial system in various corners of the world amplifies cultural and artistic engagements between diverse global and local settings (Belting, Buddensieg, and Weibel 2013). Since the exhibition was thought to offer a discursive environment (Hoskote 2010) similar to other art hubs such as biennials, festivals, and large-scale exhibitions (Filipovic, van Hal, and Ovstebo 2010; Velthuis and Curioni 2015), Indian Highway intertwined the global art world with emerging new art scenes. Moreover, it triggered for some art experts in the local art communities a critical engagement with its own format and its representation of art as Indian. When institutional events like art fairs and biennials, as well as a growing network of museums and galleries, appear as important signifiers of global progress and development, we can follow Manuela Ciotti’s argument about situating art institutional global forms in a neoliberal era. This enables us to interrogate “the meaning of global as cultural production not solely through a ‘from the west to the rest’ lens but by thinking of art institutions as emanating contents, engendering new conversations, and producing novel circulation trajectories as they settle in new locations” (Ciotti 2014, 52). As regards such innovative strategic forms, it seemed logical that Indian Highway was conceived as being accompanied by an extensive cultural programme, where organisers at each venue invite visitors to experience other cultural genres from India, such as dance, food, film, and literature programmes. The notion of art as a “cultural destination”, to borrow from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), encourages participating institutes to employ the strategies of the international art world in order to turn themselves into centres of cultural entertainment. As cultural theme parks, institutions thus become one among many cultural centres in the “creative city” (Andersson, Andersson, and Mellander 2011).

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Contemporary Indian art and the creative city When cities attempt to identify themselves as “creative cities” (Hospers 2008) by establishing mega-art events, new cultural institutes, and museums, the main goal is to attract both international art markets and art tourism.11 In this sense, hosting a prestigious survey show like Indian Highway can benefit institutes as well as cities. With its stated aim of showing India’s pioneering work “embracing art, architecture, film, literature and dance” (Peyton-Jones, Obrist, and Kvaran 2008, 7) in combination with additional fields of cultural production, it is reminiscent in some sense of the global establishment of the Festivals of India during the period after the 1980s. These events, “not unlike the earlier colonial exhibitions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”, exoticised and homogenised India when they “brought together the arts and crafts, theatre, architecture, and other cultural products of India and presented them in gallery, museum and larger exhibition settings all over the world during the early twentieth centuries”, presenting India, in spite of the large diversity of exhibits, as a single culture (Brown 2009, 40). It would be oversimplifying, however, to argue that the rhetoric behind the exhibition can be understood along the same lines as Brown’s critique that the Festivals of India served to reinforce “a colonial valorization” (2009, 40). Instead, and this is worth deciphering, there are different perspectives and shifts in the meaning production of India’s culture(s) that emerged in relation to the different urban contexts along the Indian Highway route. In considering the “art of being global” (Ong 2011a, 3), there is “an array of often overlooked urban initiatives that compete for world recognition in the midst of inter-city rivalry and globalised contingency” (ibid.). Global cities, as noted by Saskia Sassen (2001, 2010), stress the role of new art museums such as, for example, the MAXXI (Rome), in their attempts at “being global”. And a city presents a “field of intervention for solving an array of problems associated with modern life and national interests” (Ong 2011a, 3). Thus, an alignment between a city’s aspiration to strengthen its national status and to locate itself within the global art world, an architectural project like MAXXI, and the display of the Indian Highway exhibition all require attention. Showcasing Indian Highway can be seen as an attempt to highlight a city’s status quo through a nexus of situated transnational ideas, institutions, actors, and practices drawn together (Ong 2011a, 4). This finds reflection in the way the curation creates and positions “others” – here Indian culture. It allows us to contextualise art institutions like the MAXXI museum within urban developments, practices, and aspirations, as well as the hyperbuilding as an urban spectacle and a sign of national arrival on the global stage (Ong 2011b, 205). Along with the urban phenomenon largely known as the “Bilbao effect” (see, for example, Faires 2007), the undertakings of unpopular cities to (re)create themselves with great architecture in order to position themselves as popular cultural destinations with museums as “hyperbuildings” represent a “worlding practice” (Ong 2011a, 4). The grid along which artworks, artists, curators, and other art experts travelled on the Indian Highway project and between the Global South and the Global North not only included renowned art institutes like the Centre Pompidou in Paris and other equivalent institutes in London and Berlin, it also created other circles with lesser-known art centres, which included institutions that had just recently been modernised or had been newly built by well-known star architects. Such spectacular projects fuse architecture and art into an art-architecture complex that defines contemporary culture (Foster 2011). As this is also exemplary for emerging urban creative centres undertaking financial

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investments to strengthen their positions and visibility, it remains in question how the junction of star architecture and Indian Highway affects Indian art’s valency. Moreover, the production site of the exhibition is certainly not only prestigious for the hosting cities in Europe, taken together with the inherent networking and market-driven practices of the art world, it can be interventive for Indian cities and for their local art scenes, as seen in Delhi. Certainly, the fact that the exhibition has never been on display in India is fundamentally problematic; however, I base my argument of possible synergies on the production of creative yet critical capital along the exhibition’s “side-routes” and the activities of the European curators’ focus, for example, on Delhi, where the bulk of the curatorial research happened. Although other cities, such as Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore as well as several art institutes and participating artists located there, also formed part of the curators’ research tour, Delhi hosted a large number of art interactions with the European curators. These events contributed to or at least reflected on Delhi’s becoming a creative city in the Floridan sense (2004), and as Amit Desai observed in the case of Chennai: “Central to this imagination is the production of a ‘creative city’ able to nurture artists, entrepreneurs and others who make the city more attractive for inward investment” (Desai 2016, 109). Delhi-based institutions like the Indian Art Fair or the Devi Art Foundation (both founded in 2008) as well as established art galleries and innovative art initiatives are consequently contributing to urban developments in which “creativity” turns into a political and economic capital that defines creative classes and orders places and spaces as well as the production of goods and ideas. Another prominent example is the international artists’ association Khoj in Khirki (Delhi), which was founded by a group of artists that included Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anita Dube, Ajay Desai, and Manisha Parkeh as well as the curator and art consultant Pooja Sood. Committed to experimentation and exchange between international and local artists, its PEERS residency programme became one of the main alternative artist-run sites of workshops, artists performances and talks, and exhibitions in Delhi (Menezes 2011): “Khoj Studios and Open Circle12 in Mumbai, among others, formed alternative spaces. As artist initiatives, they challenged the gate-keeper’s role of the critic and gallerist” (Sinha 2010, 16). Other events happened in line with Indian Highway in the context of local art infrastructure, such as preparatory workshops for the exhibition at, for example, the Reading Room at Vadehra Art Gallery or Obrist’s participation at the Speakers’ Forum during the Indian Art Summit (2011).13 These developments of international exchange in the creative sector reached their peak between 2007 and 2013, which occurred in tandem with European exhibitions of Indian contemporary art and European initiatives in India, which saw its own peak in 2009. As one of the side-events accompanying the Indian Highway exhibition, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist organised the Khoj marathon at Lodi Garden in cooperation with Khoj.14 In the introduction to the event, Obrist called the marathon format “a new rule of the game where lots of interdisciplinary encounters will happen, people from all disciplines will meet and all kinds of time zones could also come together” (ibid.). The marathon was meant “to provide a critical understanding of art practice, its varied contexts and its value – other than in monetary terms . . . it [also] hoped to provide a spirited research into the world of ideas and thought that also influence artistic practice in India” (eflux 2011). However, these events, which travel the world and bring Western institutional formats to other regions, face quite a lot of critique; this is particularly true when the facilitator

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is the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a superstar among international curators who is based at the influential Serpentine Gallery in London. Obrist, famous for his highly energetic personality, “[f]irst appeared on ArtReview’s most-powerful list in 2002, and by 2009 he had risen to the top. His rolling-suitcase approach to life seemed to reflect signal changes in the art world, which was becoming faster, bigger, and vastly more international” (Max 2014). As a person of his time, Obrist belongs to a super elite group of contemporary curators who are characterised by their enormous mobility and activities. Sardonically called jet-lag curators, they travel the world at a frantic pace, and their international curatorial research is often accused of lacking the necessary depth and engagement with different local art worlds. As they travel the world at high speed and in short trips, they advance and at the same time contribute to networks that provide the environment for globalising flows of art, artists, and exhibitions, of which the marathon series is also a part. The venue in Delhi belongs to the series of interview marathons first inaugurated by Obrist with the Serpentine Gallery in 2006 – an exhausting format of lengthy interviews with artists, intellectuals, or scientists conducted by Obrist, though often in cooperation with another person (ibid.). The Khoj marathon was organised to take place during the Indian Art Summit (2011) when a large number of international art professionals were already in the city. The reactions to the marathon were mixed, and some expressed their disappointment at the event. A large number of art professionals from Delhi and beyond criticised the session for its lack of transparency in the selection of participating artists and for including only the top list of mostly Delhi-based artists, thus neglecting many other important practitioners in the country. It is also problematic that such international events generate a form of language discrimination, excluding artists who are unable to present and express themselves adequately in English. The raising of these critical voices presents a very different picture of the Khoj marathon, but although such comments must be treated with caution, they do indicate the flip side of the creative city discourse and the creation of inequalities in and between creative cities (Gerhard, Hoelscher, and Wilson 2017). When an internationally renowned curator brings Indian artists to the stage, the event runs the risk of turning into a spectacle that is more about the curator than the art or the artists. However, there were also platforms for an open discourse. At the Speakers’ Forum at the Indian Art Fair, this aspect was critically addressed, and alternatives were debated so that interventions could operate on a reciprocal level. Obrist, who participated in one of the panels, was asked by the audience how reciprocity could become realised in future projects. In his response, he emphasised the need to find new formats to exhibit art that go beyond the survey show, such as theme shows or “all kinds of possibilities to go more into depth” (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January 2011). But is it really possible for a solo show to provide a base for reciprocal exchange? When “reciprocity” is used in modern societies to describe an exchange relation where all parties are at, so to say, eye-level, it is difficult to imagine such a relationship between international curators and local artists. Even though Obrist claims to be a pathfinder for artists and their projects, this agenda cannot overcome the reality of interdependence and the exclusive nature of international networking practices. Obrist’s statement is even more problematic, since the perspectives and motivations of the participating artists from India remain largely unattended in this discussion.

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A very different kind of engagement, cooperation, and working with the local art community in Delhi and the Indian art world in general is realised by the gallery owner Peter Nagy. In a conversation at his gallery, Nature Morte, in Delhi back in 2010, Nagy presented a differentiated perspective on the dimension of existing network activity and the arising predicaments for artists when he shed light on what artists expect from their relations with international curators. Nagy recalled discussions with artists in his gallery who struggle with the question of participating in such survey exhibitions or not. According to Nagy, Indian artists want to be understood as artists who are contemporaries of international contemporary art practitioners, not as Indian artists alone. The position of international curators and that of artists in the field of contemporary Indian art have changed in dissimilar ways during the last few years, and they have shaped different interests accordingly. The numerous international survey exhibitions on Indian contemporary art have contributed not only to the international establishment of the notion of Indian contemporary art, but also to a new self-awareness on the part of artists who now “want to take it to the next step. They are ready for that, but the curators aren’t. Because the curators are all just coming and they are all doing their India show for the first time” (Peter Nagy, Delhi, 22 February 2010). It should be noted that even though an exhibition project like Indian Highway can function as a facilitator for the flows of people, finances, and goods between Europe and India, the networks behind it are dictated by finances and investment and are therefore highly unstable and unreliable. In general, any creative city discourse requires critical reflection on the question of initiators and involved agents. Largely, the creative city phenomenon is discussed alongside governmental and policy-making activities in the city. In Delhi, in particular, the creative sector is mostly run by individuals, private sponsors, and commercial agents and not by constant governmental and public support; thus, art fairs like the Indian Art Summit established in Delhi in 2008 (India Art Fair since 2012) provide the only available economic platform to attract local and international art stakeholders. Generally considered an important manifestation and driving force of the integration of the international art world, its successful inauguration and attraction for foreign artists, galleries, and international buyers signify further evidence of the emerging new art scene (Vermeylen 2015, 32). However, such market-driven developments exposed their dark side when the economic boom sparked tremendous crisis. In 2008 the global financial crash provoked a sudden descent, which was followed again by years of ups and downs in the globalising art markets (Velthuis and Curioni 2015; Bydler 2004). Such times are extremely turbulent and unsettling for the dominating influence of art markets and for the commercialisation of contemporary art in India. At that time, the art market, “or the kind of utopia of the commerce” “when artworks have been transacted for millions” (Sawant 2010) particularly dictated quality and content, but also individual life stories. The crises had serious consequences and entailed the shutdown of many of those young galleries in urban centres, such as Delhi and Mumbai, after only a few years. Despite the fact that contemporary art attracted interest from investors, many of whom were Indians living abroad, galleries closed as fast as they opened. This was a difficult time for many artists, particularly for younger ones who attended art school during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and those who had formerly experienced sudden success found themselves struggling with high bank loans that they had obtained to answer the demands of the market (ibid.). Other senior artists also spoke about difficulties before and while the market collapsed and the problems young artists faced when trying to enter the market. As Shukla Sawant

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explained, the major problem was the heavy commercialisation of art and the ways this changed art practices. The market had created a demand for “Indian” contemporary art, and artists had to choose between adapting to this demand or foregoing recognition. This instability and the short-term nature of developments were also reflected in several new art events and prizes, such as the Skoda Prize, which was an annual award for just three years, or the United Art Fair in Delhi, which was founded in 2012 by the businessman Annurag Sharma and promoted as a free, artist-driven fair. This had a very short life, despite the fact that the second edition in 2013 was curated by an exciting and highly professional curatorial team. Headed by Peter Nagy and envisaged as a democratic platform for diversity, particularly for young artists struggling to find gallery representation, the team comprised local art experts and professionals Alka Pande, Mayank Kaul, Heidi Fichtner, Meera Menezes, and Ram Rahman (Sharma 2013). With its aim to function as a middleman, as Peter Nagy put it in this interview, the fair intended to sell artists’ work (ibid.). It was an exceptional initiative; however, in subsequent years, no further news about venues for UAF came to light. While local art institutions and galleries slowly entered the international markets, first through auctions, now in art fairs, and potentially through exhibition collaboration, as the Indian art critic, theorist, and curator Geeta Kapur argued in an interview, the discrepancies between the Indian context and the international curatorial interest and impact have become increasingly visible in the “lack of museums and gallery initiatives in the public domain” (Kapur 2011). The high-speed developments over a short period of only a couple of years reveal the tremendous impact that the symbolic economy of international art markets can have in local settings. In relation to the growing interest in non-Western art, the local market for contemporary art in India rapidly evolved in urban centres like Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, alongside the growing empowerment of local art communities in such centres. In close relation to larger economic progress and the emergence of the creative middle classes in India and its diasporas, consumer behaviour and lifestyles in urban India change and illustrate significant trends with strong influences on the creative and art sector.15 However, these trends faced by the international art markets and networks in the local settings are based almost exclusively on private and commercial sponsorship for public art events, art collecting, and trade as reflected by the growing system of galleries and educative initiatives. This situation in the Indian art scene misses any systematic urban investment, policy-making, or city planning. In Delhi, but also in other cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Kolkata, the spatial situation of the “art infrastructure” has been very fragmented. There is no particular area or “creative sector” where most of the institutes or galleries are located. Galleries are in many cases difficult to access for interested art publics. Often, they are located hidden from the view of the publics in wealthy residential neighbourhoods or the upper floors of business and trading houses. For instance, Sakshi Gallery (Figure 1.3), Chemould, and Tarq, or Project 88, are all located in Collaba, Mumbai’s famous and busy tourist and commercial area, where the National Gallery of Modern Art (Figure 1.4), international centres like Goethe Institute, and alternative art spaces such as Clark House (Figure 1.5) are located.16 In Delhi again, many national institutes and museums, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Indira National Centre for the Arts, and the National Museum, are situated near the national

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monument, India Gate. But recently established private foundations such as the Kiran Nadar Museum are located in the new commercial centres of the city such as the Select City Walk Mall in Saket – near which Khoj also has its offices in Khirki, an urban village (Figure 1.6). Founded by collector Kiran Nadar in 2010, the museum is located in a side wing of one of the busiest shopping centres in Delhi, in the Saket Malls. Nadar, who finds that “80 percent of Indians have no art sensibilities or interest” in art and talks about “the intelligentsia and not about the masses” who go to museums only when they want to buy art as an investment (Zaman 2011), clearly adopts a philanthropic ideology. Another example is the Devi Art Foundation in the new urban gated community of Gurgaon in the southeast part of Delhi, which was founded by the collectors Lekha Podder and her son Anupam Podder in 2008. Besides these contemporary art collectors who dedicate their collections in (usually) private non-profit institutions, one influential gallery that invests in this sector is the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi (since 1988). In 2006 it launched the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) to support young artists and visual arts education with regular workshops and talks as well as with fellowships, awards, and grants.

Figure 1.3 Street View. Mumbai.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2015)

Figure 1.4 National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2015)

Figure 1.5 Clark House Initiative in Mumbai. Entrance.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2015)

Figure 1.6 Street View. Khirkee Extension, New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2012)

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These different sites address very select audiences; as individual spots they are most busy during an opening or an artist talk (in Delhi the peak is during the Art Summit) but remain otherwise deserted. Several such art districts have developed all over Delhi in former urban village neighbourhoods with few paved roads and small shops (though with low rents at that time). These areas have now been gentrified into districts that host young galleries, artists’ studios, and magazine branches. Lado Sarai (Figure 1.7) in the south of Delhi is one such example containing several galleries, including Exhibit 320, which showcases artists from South East Asia; Threshold Gallery; and Latitude 28, which also runs the art magazine Take on Art. (Figure 1.8) Other neighbourhoods such as Hauz Khaz (Figure 1.9) or Shahpur Jat are increasingly well known for artists and gallery presence or for artistic activities and new initiatives, such as street art festivals. The latter, in particular, generates important art hubs in public spaces that actively attempt to approach and include the local publics living and working there. The government-run museums are the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and Mumbai and the Lalit Kala Academi, with its various branches all over India. Inaugurated in Delhi in the same year as the NGMA in 1954, Lalit Kala plays a crucial part in India’s art infrastructure because it operates on a national level

Figure 1.7 Street View. Lado Sarai. New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2011)

Figure 1.8 Street View. Lado Sarai. New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2011)

Figure 1.9 Street View. Hauz Khaz. New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2014)

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and connects several regional art organisations, thereby providing important facilities for artists in terms of payable artist studios, exhibition venues, gallery space, and other institutional support. In this situation of limited state presence, a demand for better accessibility to art and art education has led to the creation of important art schools, such as the School of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. During this research project, I visited all these different sites, often more than once, for studio visits, talks, and openings.

About this book This book presents the material from my ethnographic research on Indian Highway, which was conducted at the different sites of the exhibition and the local art scene in Delhi between 2009 and 2014. It investigates data ranging from participant observation to in-depth interviews, as well as art and media analysis, and provides insights into exhibitionary settings and the positions of curators, artists, and audiences at the different localities and cultural settings in relation to contemporary art from India. The following chapters are structured along the ethnographic route, which oscillated between different exhibition venues in Europe and China and the local art scene in Delhi. Along with the changing research sites, the highly dynamic but also temporally limited field of research deals in many ways with “experts” such as curators and artists, but also with museum visitors. In doing so, the notion of a para-ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2006) will determine the scope of this study – that is, when ethnographers define “objects of study that are no longer on the border between the encroaching West and the transforming traditional, but are fully located within the shared, but differently situated and located, predicaments of contemporary life” (2006, 35). In this sense interlocuters and their knowledge practices were “in some sense parallel to the anthropologist’s” (ibid.). Applying the notion of the contemporary predicament to this ethnography – namely, to trace these constitutive practices and entanglements between and among ethnographer and informants – this ethnography engages the fragmented nature of Indian Highway as research site as well as the “empirical data” gathered: much of the data originated from qualitative empirical research and interviews conducted during shorter field stays at the exhibition venues in London, Oslo, Herning, and Rome and longer ones at the local art scene in Delhi (India), as well as participant observation during exhibition openings, guided tours, and visits to artists’ studios. Empirical data was generated from alternative/grey or secondary sources and material, such as international and local art magazines and journals, exhibition catalogues, institutional websites, and online communication platforms produced by experts in the contemporary art world – in India in particular. The entire field of research, even though it spanned long distances, different localities, and different times, remained relatively small and was restricted to a limited number of similar people participating in the field. Additionally, conversations and interviews often took place with people whose writings and presentations during conferences and workshops became important sources. Material published by these experts in exhibition catalogues or magazines as formerly “thin” data turned out to be relevant for “thick” ethnographic description (see also Holmes and Marcus 2006). Alongside these different approaches, it became possible to keep informed about public discourses in the art world while researching the exhibition journey as well as the activities of individual curators and artists or developments in the Delhi-based art scene. The complexity of sites posed a challenge which was not simply a logistical

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one, but was also rooted in the shifting field of experts and localities and the constantly changing conditions for accessing this field in flux. This required not only multiple and experimental, but also shifting methodological and conceptual, approaches. Doing ethnography, in this sense, cannot mean reading a particular cultural manuscript (Geertz 1973) or following people to the multiple sites (Marcus 2009). Instead, it implies how each place is composed of processes that link a multitude of locales around the globe. It studies the echoes that the exhibition produced and the resonances and dissonances, as well as the paradigm shifts, that were evoked. Accordingly, the following chapters evolve changing themes according to the different research settings, in order to investigate horizontal and “translocal”, but also vertical and “transcultural”, forms of knowledge production. This is particularly important when asking, with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “What does it mean to show?” (1998, 2). Chapter 2 elaborates on the first venue of the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, with a strong acknowledgement of the talks at the related conference, the media reaction, and the art critical responses from writers and critics based in London, who reviewed the exhibition and the art selection in a critical and postcolonial manner. Proceeding with the analysis of the exhibition and its cultural meaning, the curators’ idea of reciprocal curatorship is discussed as well as the special curatorial feature of the “show within the show” entitled Steps Away from Oblivion and curated by the Raqs Media Collective. In Chapter 3, the second section of Indian Highway at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo is investigated. Aside from analysing the empirical data gained in my interview with the museum’s director and curator, Gunnar Kvaran, a focus lies on a critical analysis of the curatorial conceit of seeking India and of selected art objects, accompanied by reactions from visitors and museum staff. This chapter presents an introduction to the locality of the museum with an ethnographic description about the site and the exhibition space and a main focus on the possibility of the relational aesthetics and sensorial experience of art in a museum. Seeking “India”, “Africa”, or “China” in contemporary art production opens up a controversial situation that creates questions of belonging versus ethnification, both on the institutional site as well as in India. Here, artists, curators, and art critics have to deal with the burden of history as well as the opportunities that contemporary art provides in the field of cultural production, as is the main argument of this chapter. With a focus on the interview with Gunnar Kvaran, curatorial practices and the curator’s understanding of the quality and value of art as “Indian” are contrasted with the artistic positions of artist Subodh Gupta, for instance, as well as with critical reactions from art professionals based in Delhi. Further insights into the transcultural situations of cultural production are provided with the discussion of the curatorial format of Indian Highway, defined as a ‘laboratory effect’. Chapter 4 discusses the third venue of the exhibition, at the HEART Museum in Herning (Denmark). The ethnographic encounter and collaboration with the curator, Stinna Toft, leads to analysing the exhibition as a transcultural contact zone. This includes empirical insights and data about the exhibition site, the curatorial conceits, and the predicaments of an exhibition on Indian contemporary art, as well as the perceptions of the visitors. The curatorial subjectivity is analysed as an important impact on the processes of meaning production with regard to the art objects and the exhibition and turns towards the understanding that “art can move” or the “emotional effectiveness” of art. Chapter 5 provides an ethnographic vignette of the MAXXI museum, and pays special attention to the museum building as a prestigious project for Rome. In the context of debates on “world cities” or the “global city”, the Bilbao effect is understood to be highly

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influential for the displayed exhibitions. The Italian venue of Indian Highway therefore exemplified a moment between Europe and India that was not only shaped by fundamental discrepancies but also, as the interview with Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective indicates, requested resonances between European and Indian perceptions on Indian contemporary art shows. With a focus on the art scene in Delhi and the critique that was raised about the European reception of Indian contemporary art, this chapter argues that “transcultural” and “translocal” practices do not imply participation of different localities and agents in the same global cultural processes. Instead, they act as ways of engaging with different localities, histories, and cultural crises. In this sense, the different temporalities and resulting dissonances/resonances are elaborated on and investigated as transcultural practices. Chapter 6 introduces the Ullens Foundation (UCCA) as an influential Western art institute in Beijing. It is argued that the arrival of the exhibition in China presented another important intersection between global and local network practices, and it is demonstrated that the venue in Beijing, at the end of the European tour, meant an important change of meaning for Indian Highway, particularly due to an unexpected incident of censorship. With the help of media analysis, the UCCA Foundation and some major developments in its agenda are discussed, as well as the ways in which Indian Highway was perceived by local art critics and audiences. The notion of “ghettoification” is also taken up to compare the specificities of contemporary art from China and India in the international art world, the role “Western institutions” play in this, and the relation between the Indian and Chinese art worlds. Unexpected moments of crisis and conflict can help make these often-invisible entanglements more transparent. Along with a media analysis, this chapter investigates an incident of censorship, where Indian politicians asked the exhibition organisers at UCCA to remove a video work by the multi-media artist Tejal Shah. According to the definition of “cultural intimacy” (Michael Herzfeld 1997), it is argued that this act of censorship dismantled a nexus of complex translocal and transcultural entanglements. With the venue in Beijing (2012), the journey of Indian Highway came to an end. However, in the last chapter, with its focus on “Shared exoticisms or the limits of the national exhibition”, some final observations are made on a wider range of Indian art exhibitions in Europe which happened more or less in parallel during 2011 and marked an important moment of critical debate about the European curation of art from India. It juxtaposes European and Indian curatorial strategies of displaying contemporary Indian art in an international context using the examples of Indian Highway (Lyon), Paris-Delhi-Bombay (Centre Pompidou, Paris), and the Indian Pavilion entitled Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode at the 54th Venice Biennale. With the aim of contrasting the different curatorial conceits emerging in the West that validate the notion of contemporary art as a national representation, the Indian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 was an outstanding attempt by the Mumbai-based curator Ranjit Hoskote, who attempted to go beyond the national exhibition format and to present Indian artists according to their own transcultural practices. Oscillating between different production sites, this book provides ethnographic vignettes and themes both along the Indian Highway and at the respective sites. These vignettes recall and trace a significant period in the contemporary art world when the national exhibition format for displaying Indian contemporary art came to an end. In sum, this book envisages an interdisciplinary readership located in various fields. It will hopefully attract multiple practitioners including

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curators and exhibition-makers, as well as artists, scholars, and students who work on contemporary art in the era of globalisation and who seek to engage with its striking potential to generate dialogue and mutual recognition.

Notes 1 See also “Contemporary Art World” publications by the project “GAM – Global Art and the Museum” initiated by Peter Weibel and https://zkm.de/en/project/gam-global-art-and-the-museum (accessed 17 February 2019). 2 Exhibitions like Horn Please: Narratives in Indian Contemporary Art supported an international circulation of contemporary art from India. Bernhard Fibicher curated the exhibition in cooperation with Suman Gobinath, an independent curator from Bangalore (South India). Horn Please was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Berne (Switzerland) from 21 September 2007 to 6 January 2008. In the United States, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University (New Jersey) was the first institute to show “very recent works of art that come directly from the studios of contemporary artists in India, as well as from private collections and galleries in the United States and India” (2008). Another exhibition that travelled internationally between 2008 and 2009 was Chalo! India, organised by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and curated by Akiko Miki. The exhibition travelled to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea (from 17 April to 7 July 2009) and to the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg in Austria (2 September to 1 November 2009). Parallel to Indian Highway, the exhibition The Empire Strikes Back. Indian Art Today opened at Saatchi Gallery in London (29 January to 8 May 2010). In France, the exhibition Paris Delhi Bombay ran at the Centre Pompidou (25 May to 29 September 2011) at the same time as Indian Highway in Lyon, and the exhibition Generation in Transition. New Art from India was exhibited at the Zachęta Museum in Warsaw (3 September to 6 November 2011), then travelled afterwards to the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius in Lithuania. To name only a few of exhibitions that took place in 2012, the exhibition Art Now: India at the Danish Arken Museum in Copenhagen is worth a mention, as well as the exhibition Critical Mass – Contemporary Art from India at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, from 1 June to 8 December 2012. 3 See the website of Serpentine Galleries: www.serpentinegalleries.org/ (accessed 19 January 2019). 4 Hereafter Gunnar Kvaran. 5 See the website of Astrup Fearnley Museet: http://afmuseet.no/en/hjem# (accessed 19 January 2019). 6 See the Indian Highway IV page on the MAC Lyon website: www.mac-lyon.com/mac/sections/fr/ expositions/2011/indian_highway_iv (accessed 25 March 2017). 7 See the Indian Highway page on the Fondazione MAXXI website: www.maxxi.art/en/events/indianhighway/ (accessed 14 February 2019). 8 In addition to these major venues, a selection of video works was shown from 9 September to 10 October 2010 as the Indian Highway Contemporary Video Show at Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland). 9 See the Indian Highway page on the UCCA website: http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/indian-highway/ (accessed 14 February, 2019). 10 Jumabhoy refers to exhibitions in the USA and Europe in 2011 and 2012: The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India at the Yerba Buena Centre for Arts, San Francisco (15 October 2011–29 January 2012); India: Art Now at the Arken Museum, Copenhagen (18 August to 13 January 2013); Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India at the Guggenheim, New York (2 March to 6 June 2012). 11 For further discussions on urbanity and creativity, see, among others, Richard Florida’s book, Cities and the Creative Class (2004) and Maurizio Carta’s Creative City: Dynamics, Innovations, Actions (2007).

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12 Open Circle, 1998 to 2008, worked on multimedia and the topics of communities and urban change and was set up by the artists Sharmila Samant and Tushar Joag “to seek a creative engagement with contemporary political issues through the integration of their and praxis” (Sinha 2010, 16). 13 In 2012, the name Indian Art Summit was officially changed to India Art Fair. 14 For photographs showing the Khoj marathon in progress (2011), see the Khoj workshop website: www. khojworkshop.org/project/11240 (accessed 17 January 2019). 15 For a discussion of the growing middle class in India, see Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China by Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer (2008), Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society by Mark Liechty (2008), India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity by Christiane Brosius (2010), and Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (2011). 16 For a discussion of “Cosmopolitanism in the Art World of Bombay/Mumbai: Kekoo Gandhy”, see The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India by Karin Zitzewitz (2014).

References Adajania, Nancy, “Time to Re-Stage the World.” Springerin, January, 2010. www.springerin.at/en/2010/1/ zeit-fur-eine-neuinszenierung-der-welt/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Adajania, Nancy, and Ranjit Hoskote, “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies.” Independent Curators International Research (blog), 2010. http://curatorsintl.org/research/notes-towards-a-lexicon-of-urgencies (accessed February 19, 2019). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Andersson, David Emanuel, Åke E. Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds., Handbook of Creative Cities. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011. Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds v. 1. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, “What Is Contemporary Art?” Eflux 11, no. 1 (2009). www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61342/what-is-contemporary-art-issue-one/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Baviskar, Amita, and Raka Ray, eds., Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. London: Routledge, 2011. Belting, Hans, and Andrea Buddensieg, eds. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009. Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2013. Benessaieh, Afef, “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” In Amériques Transculturelles, edited by Afef Benessaieh, 11–38. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010. Bishop, Claire, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October Fall 110 (2004): 51–79. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, edited by Randal Johnson. Repr. European Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2002. ———, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Repr. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2007. Brosius, Christiane, India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity. 1. publ. Cities and the Urban Imperative. London: Routledge, 2010. Brown, Rebecca M., Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

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Bublatzky, Cathrine, “The Problem with a Geoaesthetic Approach to the Indian Highway Exhibition.” In Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, edited by Laila Abu-Er-Rub, C. Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, and Susan Richter, 317–329. London: Routledge, 2018. Bydler, Charlotte, The Global Artworld, Inc. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2004. Carta, Maurizio, Creative City: Dynamics, Innovations, Actions. Actar Coac Assn Of Catalan Arc, 2007. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Ciotti, Manuela, “Post-Colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness’, Contemporary Art and the Market in the Age of Neoliberal Capital.” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2012): 633–651. https://doi.org/10.1080/0143 6597.2012.657422. ———, “Art Institutions as Global Forms in India and beyond: Cultural Production, Temporality, and Place.” In Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research, edited by Hilary E. Kahn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Clifford, James, ed., The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. ———, “Museums as Contact Zones.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by James Clifford, 188–219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997a. ———, “Travelling Cultures.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by James Clifford, 17–47. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997b. Danto, Arthur, “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy, Eastern Division Sixty-First Annual Meeting 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584. Desai, Amit, “Art and the Making of the Creative City of Chennai, India.” In Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe, edited by Maruska Svasek and Birgit Meyer, 107–130. Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. eflux. “The KHOJ Marathon by Hans Ulrich Obrist.” 2011. www.e-flux.com/announcements/the-khojmarathon-by-hans-ulrich-obrist/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Ernst, Jutta, “Einleitung. Transkulturelle Dynamiken- Entwicklungen und Perspektiven eines Konzepts.” In Transkulturelle Dynamiken: Aktanten – Prozesse – Theorien, edited by Jutta Ernst, 7–31. Mainzer historische Kulturwissenschaften 19. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Faires, Nancy Dean, This Is Not a Museum: The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Reno: University of Nevada, 2007. Filipovic, Elena, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on LargeScale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Florida, Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life. Reprint. North Melbourne, Vic.: Basic Books, 2003. ———, Cities and the Creative Class. London: Routledge, 2004. Foster, Hal, The Art-Architecture Complex. New York: Verso, 2011. Gardner, Anthony, and Charles Green, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art. 1. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures. [55. Dr.]. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1973. Gerhard, Ulrike, Michael Hoelscher, and David Wilson, Inequalities in Creative Cities: Issues, Approaches, Comparisons. 2017th ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Glissant, Édouard, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist. 100 notes – 100 thoughts; 38. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011.

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Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” In The Anthropology of Globalization, edited by Jonathan Xavier Inda, 65–81, 1. publ. Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Hanru, Hau, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Cities on the Move. 1st ed. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1999. Harris, Clare, “The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts Towards a Transnational Art History.” Art History 29, no. 4 (2006): 698–720. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2006.00520.x. Herzfeld, Michael, Cultural Intimacy. New York: Routledge, 1997. Holmes, Douglas R., and George E. Marcus, “Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst.” In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, edited by Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey, 33–57. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Hoskote, Ranjit, “Signposting the Indian Highway.” In Indian Highway: The Catalogue, edited by Kathleen Madden and Sam Philips, 190–193. London: Koenig Books Ltd., 2008. ———, “Biennials of Resistance: Reflections on the Seventh Gwangju Biennale.” In The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, 206–321. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Hospers, Gert-Jan, “What Is the City But the People? Creative Cities beyond the Hype.” In Creative Urban Milieus: Historical Perspectives on Culture, Economy, and the City, edited by Martina Heßler and Peter Borsay, 353–375. Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2008. Jaffrelot, Christophe, and Peter van der Veer, eds., Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China. New Delhi: Sage, 2008. Jeffery, Celina, and Gregory Minissale, Global and Local Art Histories. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Jeffries, Stuart, and Nancy Groves, “Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Art of Curation.” The Guardian, March 23, 2014. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/hans-ulrich-obrist-art-curator (accessed February 19, 2019). Jumabhoy, Zehra, “Now, Voyager. Travelling around Has Become More Than a Lifestyle Choice for Artists and Their Artworks.” ArtIndia, 2013. Juneja, Monica, “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’.” In Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, edited by Hans Belting, 274–297. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011. Juneja, Monica, and Christian Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism.” In Transcultural Modernisms: Model House Research Group, edited by Moira Hille, Christian Kravagna, and Marion von Osten, 22–34. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013. Kapur, Geeta, “On the Curatorial in India (Part 1 & 2).” Interview by Ginwala, Natasha, 2011. www. afterall.org/online/geeta-kapur-part1 (accessed December 14, 2018). Khaire, Mukti, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, “Changing Landscapes: The Construction of Meaning and Value in a New Market Category: Modern Indian Art.” Academy of Management Journal 53, no. 6 (2010): 1281–1304. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.57317861. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Destination Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Liechty, Mark, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Chautari Books Series 40. Kathmandu: Chautari, 2008. MacDougall, David, “Transcultural Cinema.” In Transcultural Cinema, 245–278. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Maharaj, Sarat, “‘Perfidious Fidelity’: The Untranslatability of the Other.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher and Rasheed Araeen, 28–35. London: Kala Press, 1994. ———, “Know-How and No-How: Stopgap Notes on ‘Method’ in Visual Art as Knowledge Production.” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 2 (2009).

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Marcus, George E., “Multi-Sited Ethnography: Notes and Queries.” In Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon, 181–197. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Max, D. T., “The Art of Conversation: The Curator Who Talked His Way to the Top.” The New Yorker, 2014. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/08/art-conversation (accessed December 14, 2018). Menezes, Meera, “Search Engine: Interview with Pooja Sood.” Art India: The Art News Magazine of India, 2011. Mercer, Kobena, “Introduction.” In Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, edited by Kobena Mercer. Annotating Art’s Histories, 6–36. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, “Empty the Museum, Decolonize the Curriculum, Open Theory.” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 25, no. 53 (2017): 6–22. Nagy, Peter, Nature Morte, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 22, 2010. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Speakers’ Forum, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January, 2011. O’Connor, Justin, and Kate Shaw, “What Next for the Creative City?” City, Culture and Society 5 (2014): 165–170. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2014.05.0101877-9166. Ong, Aihwa, “Introduction. Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global.” In Worlding Cities, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 1–26. Studies in Urban and Social Change. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011a. Ong, Aihwa, “Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty.” In Worlding Cities, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 205–226. Studies in Urban and Social Change. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011b. Perkins, Morgan, “Foreword.” In Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation across Borders, edited by Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins, and Olivier Krischer, xv–1. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. Petersen, Anne Ring, Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World. Rethinking Art’s Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Peyton-Jones, Julia, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and B. Gunnar Kvaran, “Directors’ Foreword.” In Indian Highway, edited by Kathleen Madden and Sam Philips, 7–9. London: Koenig Books Ltd., 2008. Pütz, Robert, “Transculturality as Practice: Turkish Entrepreneurs in Germany.” In Islam and Muslims in Germany, edited by Ala Al-Hamarneh and Jörn Thielmann, 511–535. Muslim Minorities 7. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Raqs Media Collective, “On Curatorial Responsibility.” In The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, 276–289. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Rodríguez, Joaquín Barriendos, “Global Art and Politics of Mobility: (Trans)Cultural Shifts in the International Contemporary Art-System.” ASCA, 1–38, 2007. ———, “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region.” In The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Emanoel Araújo, 98–114. Karlsruhe and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———, “The Global City: Strategic Site, New Frontier.” In Accumulation by Dispossession, edited by Swapna Banerjee-Guha, 33–54. New Delhi: Sage, 2010. Sawant, Shukla, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 24, 2010. Sharma, Kamayani, “A Bouquet of Curatorial Voices.” Art India, 2013.

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Shinde, Niyatee, and Anna Holm, “Interview: Niyatee Shinde – Independent Curator and Art Historian.” Kopenhagen: Aktual Information Om Samtidskunst, March 31, 2010. Sinha, Gayatri, “Introduction: New Persuasions in Contemporary Indian Art.” In Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 8–24. Mumbai: Radhika Sabavala, 2010. Smith, Terry, What Is Contemporary Art? Critical Issues Series 6. Woolloomooloo, N. S. W: Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2001. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 40. Velthuis, Olav, and Stefano Baia Curioni, Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Vermeylen, Filip, “The India Art Fair and the Market for Visual Arts in the Global South.” In Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art, edited by Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni, 31–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Welsch, Wolfgang, “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today”. In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, edited by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage, 1999. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.” The International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610. www.jstor.org/stable/30037750. Zaman, Sahar, “KNMA: The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.” Art & Deal: The Magazine for Contemporary Indian Art, 2011. Zarobell, John, ed., Art and the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

2 “Cancel that flight to Delhi . . .” Serpentine Gallery, London 2008

I

n late 2008 the Serpentine Gallery (London) announced the upcoming Indian Highway exhibition of contemporary art from India and a related conference planned for London in early 2009. In the international public media, only infrequent information was available on the Indian art world, which was seen as the business of art historians and art experts. In an introduction text on the Serpentine Gallery website, the art historian and anthropologist Saloni Mathur, author of the book India by Design (2007), referred to the Indian Highway conference on Indian contemporary art using the theoretical maxim of Indian modernity’s complex history and the problem of difference: “[W] ith mapping its distinctly colonial and/or postcolonial career and with uncovering the alternatives presented by marginal or subaltern groups to the totalising narratives of a dominant Euro-Western order and its bourgeois beneficiaries in the non-Western world” (Serpentine Gallery website 2009). The first venue in London was special in several ways. It not only marked the official start of the exhibition tour which would visit venues in Europe and China, but a related conference also opened a new chapter of discussion between curators, artists, and critics in the field of art and culture. For this ethnographic research, which also took London as its starting point, the conference paved the way for a fundamental observation on the contemporary art world: namely, the complex entanglements between different experts and their engagements in a wide field of interests and practices. For example, artists like Raqs Media Collective were not only artists but also curators and contributors to a broader theoretical discussion in the art world. Other individuals, including the Delhi-based photographer Ravi Agarwal, turned out to be not only artists but also ecological activists. These overlapping engagements and interests seemed to be strongly related to the notion of a contemporary global art world in which not only did market dynamics shape the field, but the idea of “contemporaneity” also revealed itself. At the conference in London, people approached the art not only for “art’s sake”, but also from an intellectual and discursive point of view. This produced an impression of an art world that was strongly characterised by theoretical debate and not restricted to the art practices and objects per se, but included their semiotics in a globalised context. It seemed to fulfil a specific demand for exchange in the art world, especially when many initiatives and art events that had been created in the twentieth century began to establish platforms for these debates. The intellectual and scientific engagement with contemporary art, often with a focus on India in particular, remained an important part of this ethnographic

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project – during conferences, in conversations with agents in the local art scene in Delhi, and in the context of the Indian Highway venues. After 2002, when documenta XI generated a new format in Okwui Enwezor’s global platforms for an intellectual and transcultural exchange of art, other art events like Art Basel or the 2008-founded Indian Art Summit in Delhi also began hosting discussion rounds and speakers’ forums, featuring not only experts from the art field, but also philosophers, sociologists, and cultural theorists. These have formed essential sites where the art world constitutes itself as a field in which permanent revisions as well as a re-definition of its own subjects, such as the meaning of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, take place. Before we turn to a discussion of this conference, an introduction to the exhibition site at the Serpentine Gallery is required in order to acquaint us with some of its major features, including the curators, the artists, the exterior installation by artist Maqbool Fida Husain, and the “show within the show” curated by Raqs Media Collective. In addition, I was interested in hearing any critiques that the exhibition might receive, especially considering it had been promoted in a video with the slogan “Cancel that flight to Delhi, for a true taste of Indian culture hotfoot it down to Kensington”.1

The Serpentine Gallery and the first encounter with Indian Highway Mulling over the question of whether art generates a cultural destination in my mind, I arrived at Kensington Gardens – the public park where the Serpentine Gallery is located. As it was early in the year, the sky was already turning dark, but the building was made visible by the brightly illuminated showcases presented to the viewer outside, which contained colourful paintings by the modernist Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain.2 The front exterior with the showcases framed half the entire gallery and was black in colour. This produced a strong contrast not only with the colourful paintings, but also with the entire building. The Serpentine Gallery is the park’s former tea pavilion, and it is very small in size compared to the other museums in London, such as Tate Modern or the National Gallery. However, despite being located in the extensive grounds of Kensington Gardens, the gallery is one of the most famous art institutes in London, with a respected history of architectural and artistic projects stretching back to 1970. The temporal exterior structure for Indian Highway was designed by the German, Frankfurt-based architect Nikolaus Hirsch3 and his colleague Michel Müller.4 To a viewer conscious of India’s history, this contrast might appear to reflect an interesting historically based tension, or it may have been envisaged by the architects as a dialogue between the early twentieth-century European architecture of the gallery and the large-scale paintings by Maqbool Fida Husain entitled Imprints of India (2008). The paintings themselves are a powerful presentation of India’s history and are conceptualised on a three-dimensional storyboard. Maqbool Fida Husain, at that time more than ninety years old, was known to many in India as well as Europe. Popularly called “India’s Picasso” in Europe, he was an important modern artist in post-independent India, one who – along with Francis Newton Souza (F.N. Souza), Syed Haider Raza (S.H. Raza), and Manishi Dey – founded the influential avant-garde Progressive Artists’ Group5 in Bombay in 1947.

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In a catalogue article entitled “Dismantling the Norm” (Kapur 1997), the art historian and curator Geeta Kapur, author of the influential book When Was Modernism (2007), identified Maqbool Fida Husain, like other modern artists in India, as national artists. Moreover, Kapur saw them not only as representatives of the nation-state but also of its people: In the postindependence [sic] ethos, M.F. Husain (b. 1915) is the primary example of the national artist, marking the conjunction between the mythic and the secular and then between secular and aesthetic space. Along with a selection of his peers, Husain has helped to make modern art in India autonomous – but that, of course, is already an institutionalised notion in bourgeois society. And, by virtue of the socialist register in the liberal society of postindependence India, the modern artist occupies yet another institutionalised cultural space: as the peoples’ representative. (Kapur 1997, 60)

The notion of the modern artist as a people’s representative was very much disputed and was particularly torpedoed by Hindu nationalistic groups, including the Shiv Sena. These groups not only attacked him physically, but also attacked his artworks in galleries and exhibitions in India and other places in response to his pictorial depiction of the Indian nation as a naked female deity Bharat Mata (Mother India).6 After these incidents, Maqbool Fida Husain decided to live in self-imposed exile in Dubai and London, where he died in June 2011. In Kensington Gardens, Husain’s colourful paintings on the exterior of the Serpentine Gallery functioned as guides to the interior. The paintings introduced visitors to a visual history of some of India’s most important moments and influential figures. Perhaps this was in line with the curators’ intentions; however, not everyone perceived the exterior structure or the decision to include Husain in this exhibition of Indian contemporary art as positive. The curatorial decision to design the exterior structure this way, which created tension between the architectural structure, the paintings, and the building, was criticised. The independent curator and art critic Denise Robinson, for example, pointed out that the installation of the paintings referred neither to the public space nor to the exterior of the museum, and she described the curators’ aim that Husain’s work would function as a valid frame or contextualisation for the other, younger artists in the show as “burdensome rhetoric” (Robinson 2014). In her review of Indian Highway in Frieze,7 Devika Singh also criticised the missing historical contextualisation of the paintings by Husain. She describes the thirteen posters of works by M.F. Husain: “broad slabs of colour inscribed in dark contours depicted a late colonial tiger-hunting scene, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa and included references to Hindu deities and the Last Supper” (Singh 2009). Singh suggests that, beyond the fact that “Husain, who lives in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, has become a standard-bearer for India’s secular art world since he was violently threatened by Hindu nationalist groups for having painted Hindu goddesses in erotic poses” (ibid.), there was no clear relation between him as a modernist and the art of the younger contemporary artists exhibited inside the gallery (ibid.). If the curators’ ambition was to make a historical statement about the developments within the sphere of artistic production in India, ranging from the modern to the contemporary, this might have been

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problematic. However, the depiction of India’s history in Husain’s paintings, along with the presentation of important historical figures and scenes, also provided an artistic interpretation of India and its history – a visual introduction to a country many of the visitors may not have been familiar with. The Guardian’s chief art critic, Adrian Searle, also commented on the inclusion of Maqbool Fida Husain in the show, presenting another perspective in his article “An Eye-Popping Passage to India” (2008) and questioning the political debate on Husain and his artistic work in more general terms: If Husain were a Western artist, it would be unlikely that his work would excite the kind of protest it has. His is an insipid sort of figurative modernism that doesn’t appear to have developed much since the 1950s. Recent large-scale paintings hang beside full-size reproductions of older works on the walls that now surround the Serpentine. The paintings abound with a cavalcade of indeterminate gods, humans and animals. Mother Teresa and Gandhi are in there somewhere, as well as a moustachioed officer of the Raj, posing with a cuddly blue elephant and a dead tiger. This is as pointed as things get, so far as I can tell. (Searle 2008)

Searle’s judgment of the artist – comparing his work with artistic developments in Western modernism while depicting him as an outsider who produced work that was less worthy by Western standards – is far too simple and short-sighted a view. Indeed, from a historic-anthropological standpoint, I would argue that it is Searle’s dominant Western position that requires further scrutiny. Undoubtedly at play here is the (sometimes unconscious) practice of comparing artists from the West with those from other regions. Other comparisons, such as referring to Maqbool Fida Husain as the “Picasso of India” or Subodh Gupta as the “Damien Hirst of Delhi”, are seen as complimentary attempts to categorise artistic work and artists through favourable comparison with Western standards. In this sense, the prefix “Indian” also needs to be understood as a categorisation, even in its regional accentuation and thus in its simplest form. But in a deeper sense, this “prefix” also has a history, which means that it is used by different people in different historical contexts. In the context of the representation of art, Saloni Mathur distinguishes between three different levels of history in the practices, ideas, and discourses of display in different times. She calls these levels the imperial, the nationalist, and the postcolonial. Mathur argues that the category of traditional India, with its clichés of the timeless, authentic, romantic, and exotic, was carefully constructed (2007, 11). Her argument that the imaginations of Indian culture have profoundly shaped the modern understanding of the Indian subcontinent (170) is particularly important in light of the recent discourses of display: “[C]ontemporary Indian painting is often praised for its authentic and essential ‘Indianness’, viewed, paradoxically, as both offering a ‘timeless vision’ of India and marking a radical break from the traditional Indian art of the past” (3). When displays generate their own agency (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998), the “exhibitionary complex” and its “pivotal role in the formation of the modern state . . . [as] a set of educative and civilizing agencies” (Bennett 1988, 79) provides a context for the permanent display of

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power to organise and order things, particularly when aimed at the presentation of “otherness” (1988, 80). This order organised the implied public – the white citizenries of the imperialist powers – into a unity, representationally effacing divisions within the body politics in constructing a “we” conceived as the realisation . . . of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples. (1988, 92)

Even though this “order was a totalising one, metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time” (ibid.), Mathur states that a stable Eurocentric national tradition of representing India visually cannot be assumed. Rather, this has to be regarded as a complex history of cultural displaying that has been disputed throughout the eras of colonialism and nationalism (2007, 6). The “modern complex historical negotiation in which the very meaning of categories such as Indian ‘art’, ‘culture’, ‘craft’, ‘ornament’, ‘village’, ‘tradition’ and ‘artisan’ was radically played out on the international stage” (ibid.) shapes the contemporary displays of Indian culture to this day. The complex dynamics of reproduction, as Mathur observes, constitute a set of visual clichés about India which must be considered in the contemporary politics of displaying Indian art in Western museums. In particular, the role of the curator as a “cultural broker” (Ramirez 1996) or translator must be revealed as his or her decision-making around the inclusion and exclusion of works as well as their display has a strong influence on audiences and the way they experience exhibitions and perceive artworks. This is the question that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett raises when she asks, “What does it mean to show?” (1998, 2). Her argument that objects “became ethnographic through processes of detachment and decontextualisation” (ibid., 3) was (though she was not dealing with ethnographic objects but rather with contemporary art) equally important, since the art objects became “Indian” through a similar process. That art critics scrutinised each new project at Serpentine Gallery is not astonishing: London is a vibrant and influential hub in the international art scene, and as the capital of the United Kingdom, it also plays a leading role in politics, nationally as well as internationally. London is, of course, also filled with physical reminders that it was once the capital of the British Empire during the colonial nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And this historical/colonial backdrop has meant that art critics from India as well as Europe followed the opening of the ambitious Indian Highway project at a leading British art institute with particular interest. Although it was not necessarily the curators’ intention, since history always impacts present times as well as influencing reactions to an exhibition, Indian Highway was perceived as “Britain’s first serious exhibition devoted to the full range of contemporary Indian art” (Graham-Dixon 2008). The Serpentine Gallery provided information to visitors in a free booklet about Indian Highway. The booklet included excerpts from the exhibition catalogue and gave an overview of the artists included in the show.8 Most of these artists were permanently included in all the other upcoming Indian Highway exhibitions. However, the same names do not automatically mean the same artworks. In London, Bharti Kher, for instance, was represented by her work The Nemesis of Nations (2008), but in Oslo and Herning An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007), in which a life-size

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whale heart made out of fiberglass was covered with small bindis, was displayed. The permanent artists were also accompanied by a changing group of additional artists. Thus, the exhibition changed continually along its journey and provided the viewer with insights into different kinds of artistic production in India – in terms of technique, material, and theme. The Serpentine Gallery show in London, for instance, included works by photographer Dayanita Singh (b. 1961). Singh, who has a predominant interest in mobile museums and books, employs photography in her book projects in order to engage with alternate ways of producing and looking at photographs. Singh expanded on this in another project, the mobile museum projects known as Museum Bhavan for which she has become known during recent years.9 In her photographic series Dream Villa 11–2007 (2008), which was one of the permanent works included in Indian Highway, Singh explores the mythic transformation of light and places in Indian cities at night. The large-scale photograph exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery depicts a crossroad illuminated by yellow street lights from a bird’s-eye view. The streets interrupt the cityscape like a lifeline; they are submerged in deep bluish darkness and present a powerful interplay of colour and scale. Along with contemporary photography, all kinds of artistic languages were featured in the exhibition. Another strong and deeply disturbing example of this is the eight-channel video piece The Lightning Testimonies (2007) by documentary filmmaker Amar Kanwar, in which Kanwar engages with sexual harassment against women in India. In this montage the filmmaker combines different stories ranging from incidents of rape during the 1947 partition to anti-rape protests in the northeastern state of Manipur in 2004.10 Yet another work of this kind can be seen in the installation Date by Date (2008) by Subodh Gupta. Arranged as an office room, the installation consists of found objects, including shelves, tiffin lunch boxes wrapped in cloth (part of the hot-lunch delivery system run by dabbawalas – deliverers – in India), and old-fashioned typing machines on desks which are chained on the floor. Overall the installation (re)creates the dusty and sleepy atmosphere of a “typical” government office in India (Plate 4.6). N.S. Harsha’s large work Reversed Gaze (detail) (2008) was a site-specific wall painting that covered parts of the gallery space. Harsha’s work Come Give Us a Speech (2008), which would become part of the Indian Highway later, follows the same style of his acrylic paintings in depicting human figures, often as part of large masses, and demonstrating a particular interest in the panoramic view of life. Both Reversed Gaze and Come Give Us a Speech deal with the visual interplay between persons in the painting and the viewer. In addition to these artists, Indian Highway hosted the “show within the show”, which commenced in London with a curated show by the artistic group Raqs Media Collective from Delhi. At the next exhibition venue in Oslo, the same section featured different artists curated by Bose Krishnamachari.

Media reactions and critique The Serpentine Gallery is a small place, and this meant that at the Indian Highway exhibition in particular it was hard to navigate through the packed exhibition space. A comprehensive introduction to the overall theme in the exhibition space was missing, as was a broader narrative that might have allowed the visitor to look at the artworks in the context of the main theme of

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the exhibition – the highway. The limited space of the gallery and the pragmatically displayed works of about twenty artists meant that the atmosphere felt cramped and did not offer much of a chance to linger or contemplate the artworks or the atmosphere of the exhibition. Thus, a minimal amount of information was provided in the exhibition space itself, and only the catalogue and the small exhibition guide offered more material about the curatorial concept and the artists. First reactions, as stated in the following, will provide further information and impressions on Indian Highway in London. One major focus will be the contradictions concealed in both the curatorial self-perception and the art critiques. During its inauguration in London and the opening on 10 December 2008, the exhibition was a dominant topic of conversation in mainstream and online media: newspapers, art journals, blogs, and even conferences all discussed it. This flurry of interest was somewhat surprising, since earlier survey exhibitions of contemporary art had not received as much attention and considering that many of today’s existing online platforms had not yet been implemented or were still relatively young at the time. The internet had not yet become the complex communication medium for critical reporting, documentation, networking, and exchange about art, supplementing the traditional local art magazines or daily newspapers, that it is today. For example, Art Radar Asia, one of today’s leading independent online writing sources about contemporary art from Asia and beyond, was only founded in 2008.11 This platform provides interviews, reviews, critiques, and other information, along with continuous updates about the latest trends in contemporary art in Asia. In addition to online publishers, international research, and publishing exhibition networks like Former West,12 founded in 2008, provide readerships with research texts, interviews, and talks. Further, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, along with blogs edited not only by private persons, artists, students, and writers, but also by museums, galleries, and auction houses, have become important platforms for the exchange of information, opinions, and critique. These are, of course, only a few examples of the platforms supporting increasing networks in the global contemporary art world. It is impossible to clearly recapitulate a concrete moment when these digital networks emerged because they were initiated in different places and at different times. In general, and relevant for Indian Highway, the internet became an important medium for many individuals to access the “contemporary art world” digitally during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ethnographic research also benefitted from this development, as it facilitated engagement with the online activities and discussions of art and cultural experts, which included, for example, critical dialogue about the exhibition as the first of its kind on display in a British art institute. It was certainly not the first time that the work of a contemporary artist from India had been exhibited in London, but possibly because the first venue of the entire exhibition tour was in London, this served to underscore the fraught colonial history of the British-Indian relationship. Moreover, London is a wealthy global city with a powerful and sensationalised tabloid press (which delights in mocking things like the Turner Prize), a fully functioning and free national art infrastructure, as well as a private art economy; this, in addition to the colonial framework, made the Serpentine Gallery opening a huge attraction, one that cannot be compared to the attention the exhibition garnered in Oslo, Herning, and the subsequent venues.

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The reaction also involved critical reflection online, for example on the role of European curators (Darwent 2008). Any curatorial decision about which artist to select or to exclude is obviously always dependent on the level of professional expertise the curator and exhibition-maker hold, and on a secondary level is related also to practical factors such as finance, the availability of artworks, and the space to be considered for the exhibition project. Selecting a small number of artists as representatives of contemporary India is a difficult task, especially since the selection might be understood as a statement about what “Indian” means and will mean to Western audiences. In the blog of the British art magazine Frieze, for example, the art critic Zehra Jumabhoy asked, “Where does the line between ‘Indian enough’ and ‘international’ lie?” (Jumabhoy 2009). In this posting, Jumabhoy addressed the tensions between the expectations forced on artists to perform national stereotypes and their artistic freedom to not be defined by them. Using the notion of “identikit art” (ibid.), she criticises international curators for insisting that talented artists from India become “ambassadors” for what they call “new art from India” (ibid.). In addition, the question of who belongs to the “international art scene” equally depends on the question of who holds the power to judge (ibid.), and therefore, “international” or “Indian” art might be defined differently according to the person asked. This is true in India as well – and based on the reactions by local artists and curators based in Delhi, I observed that they also turned out to be rather ambivalent about the question of “what Indian art might be” and whether this category is even helpful to define the contemporary art production of Indian artists. The curatorial concept of poly-vocality – and the fact that different curators would “create” the exhibition Indian Highway anew at each venue – demonstrate that a search for alternatives was attempted. However, it also (re)defines the international curator as a powerful agent, gatekeeper, key informant, and “tastemaker” who can generate and project their own perspective on contemporary art from India.

On curating As envisaged in the context of the exhibition format of Indian Highway, the discussion on “curatorial discourse” and reciprocity remained one-dimensional. To put the figure of the international curator at the centre of developments meant to perpetuate fine but divisive geographic and demographic borders, as well as to neglect the participation and impact of those from previously marginalised parts of the world – for example, art theorists and, mainly, the artists. In other words, an understanding of “reciprocity” acknowledges a transcultural and translocal field of production – one that considers parties who have the same prerequisites but are from different cultural-historical backgrounds. As demonstrated in the former discussion, an evolving discomfort mainly stemmed from the impression that Obrist still seemed to represent a biased perspective, one that did not envisage artists from India as culture producers in the contemporary art world. Instead, art theorists such as Sarat Maharaj, Ranjit Hoskote, and Nancy Adajania; artists like Raqs Media Collective; and organisations like West Heaven, Khoj Artist Association, and Former West now believe that the questions asked by Hans Ulrich Obrist – “What do international curators actually bring back to India?” and “What kind of future format shall come after the survey show?” – are no longer the most important. Further, according to Peter Nagy, many artists clamour for more international attention instead of invitations to “survey shows”, and

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there appears to be a certain disequilibrium that is related to the dominance of the Western art world flanked by underdeveloped art worlds in other regions, such as India. Like a referendum on self-determination, “reciprocity” can be seen as already extant. The reciprocal exchange format – for example, the “show within the show” in Indian Highway – reflects a precarious environment of ambiguity in the international art world. But why and how does the curatorial claim for reciprocity in the context of Indian Highway provide a useful moment to reflect on an existing vacuum that accompanies many of the current collaborative practices in the international art world? Perhaps the main metaphor of the exhibition, the highway or the Indian highway, can provide an instructive nexus in this discourse. When asked about being number one in Art Review’s “Power 100 List”, Hans Ulrich Obrist replied that he had “always thought that curating has a utility for art” (quoted in Higgins 2009) to make unrealised projects happen (ibid.). Obrist positions himself as a catalyst and as a supporter of the artistic spirit, but instead of the idea that modern forms of patronage are needed to support an artist morally and financially, Obrist talks about a different ideology. This links up with the developments in curatorial discourse in the contemporary art world that Paul O’Neill (2012) discusses in the context of the culture of biennials and large-scale exhibitions and the emergence of a globalised curatorial discourse since the 1990s. This has started a search for alternative and collaborative curatorial models that cater to the globalising art world and its increasing interest in non-Western art production. It illustrates the attempt to do justice to an art world that is increasingly shaped by cultural pluralism and by manifold practitioners from different cultural spheres. In this chapter, the idea of reciprocity – which is how Hans Ulrich Obrist defines his collaborative practices with artists and other experts – as an attempt to establish a collaborative curatorial practice in the international contemporary art world of the twenty-first century will be critically reflected upon. Reciprocity unfolds as an integral part of a global curatorial discourse during what O’Neill defined as “the end of the golden age” of the curator (2012, 80). Although some believe that “transcultural curating” came to an end in the 1990s and was replaced by the notion of the “curator as artist”, it experienced some renaissance in the twenty-first century as the observed interrelations between collaborative practices, reciprocity, and the transcultural will demonstrate. This discussion defines the “reciprocal” exchange between curators and artists as the destruction of a single authorship of curatorship and of engagement; however, it remains to be seen whether reciprocity is really a solution to the predicament of cultural pluralism.

Global curator – jet-set flâneur As a starting point, it is worth considering the particular moment when curatorial practices turned into ethnographic research in the contemporary art world. When O’Neill traces various phases of transcultural curation across large-scale key exhibitions such as Primitivism in 20th Century Art (1985) and Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989) up to and including documenta XI (2002) under the curatorial directorship of Okwui Enwezor, he provides a profound overview of this global curatorial discourse since the late 1980s. In this context he identifies biennials as supportive “for an elite network of increasingly mobile and well-connected professionals while contributing to the rise of an ever more dense global exhibitions market” (2012, 85). Particularly in the light of postmodern

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and postcolonial debates, curators of biennials and large-scale exhibitions have “embraced cultural pluralism as a new standard of representation” (ibid.), and they follow a collective method to sustain an inclusive exhibition model. During the 1990s, curatorial authorship and asymmetrical power relations between curators and the curated were common. Transcultural curatorial practices seemed to foster, more than ever, the possibility of finding alternative curatorial models, the destruction of the curator’s hegemonic role, and the power of curatorial authorship. However, in this discussion, the “transcultural” is mostly understood in terms of large-scale exhibition formats that try to embrace the plurality of contemporary culture without “fetishising the otherness”. O’Neill argues: Curators and critics alike have articulated mega-exhibitions as history-making institutions in and of themselves. They have only just begun to recognise the limitations of the biennial construct. This noted by shifts beyond the parameters of both the single exhibition-event and the individually authored exhibition model. And finally, biennials have contributed to a widening of a “curatorial turn”, with the activity of curating extending beyond exhibition-making practice toward that of discoursive production. (2012, 85)

Indian Highway, along with its curatorial model of “travelling” and the “show within the show”, seemed to fit into this discoursive production model because collaboration between curators and artists, including curatorial self-reflexivity and reciprocal approaches, are seen as likely to deconstruct a curatorial grand narrative about Indian contemporary art. In an interview with curator Gunnar Kvaran, he stressed the limitation of a “single-voice exhibition” on Indian contemporary art. The “show within the show” invited artist-curators to contribute to Indian Highway and aimed to dissolve the hierarchical relationship between the curator and the artist. However, in spite of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s suggestion, it is critical to expect a reciprocal exchange in order to solve the problem of a dominant Western perspective on cultural pluralism: the exchange only integrates practitioners who are already well established in the Western-dominated international system. Major parts of the local Indian contemporary art world and its experts remain widely ignored. In this way, the plurality and diversity of artistic practices is reduced to a very small, and not representative, selection of artists. The exchange happens only among elites and does not include practitioners from the field whose work may not easily fit into a Western perception of “Indian” art. Thus, recent ideas on reciprocal exchange allow a necessary critical reflection on the role of the curator and on “transcultural” curation. In the early twentieth century, the curator was seen as a “caretaker” of objects and collections. From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, this profession underwent major transformations and turned into the “curator’s moment” (Brenson 1998). In addition, critical debates erupted on the role of the curator as a dominant authority figure in the art world and the unbalanced power relation between Western curators and non-Western artists. When contemporary curation is perceived as a form of artistic practice where curators become artists themselves and their projects receive as much public attention as the exhibited art or invited guests, the role of the artist and the objects is challenged. Accordingly, transculturality adds another facet to

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these developments. As Paul O’Neill shows in the context of the new progressive biennial system (since the 1990s), the global curator brings “together an increasingly diverse, transcultural and global art world at a single location and time” (2012, 5). When he or she sets “out from a notion of cultural pluralism based on random difference and an ethnographic approach toward the ‘other’”, he or she acknowledges “the impossibility of representing a total world view within a single exhibition” (ibid.). One is aware that it is not possible to represent the entire world in a single exhibition, and expectations have to be adjusted accordingly. But if we take a closer look at the “star curators” who claim to discover new exciting art practices and follow self-declared reciprocal engagements with those artists, I doubt the intention and the success of solving the existing predicaments of curating non-Western art and going beyond the role of the curator-as-author or the curator-as-artist. “Reciprocal curating”, in this context, includes the use of different strategies by curators to take positions in the contemporary art world and engage in what Paul O’Neill has called “‘becoming discourse’ in which curators are willing themselves to be the key subject and producer of this discourse” (2010, 257). In the late 1990s, the art critic Michael Brenson proclaimed the beginning of the “curator’s moment” and noted that the multiple roles of curators “who work across cultures and are able to think imaginatively about the points of compatibility and conflict among them, must be at once aestheticians, diplomats, economists, critics, historians, politicians, audience developers, and promoters” (1998, 16). However, and maybe because of the wide ranges of responsibilities and demands, my observations of and conversations with curators have revealed that the “texture and tone” of the curator’s voice remains decisive and is apparent in the exhibition. When they stress their “rule of the game” when setting up an exhibition like Indian Highway, they think not only of simple organisational issues, but also of the formulation of a curatorial tone. Alternative perspectives or collaboration with artists or other curators can only become part of the “game” but cannot act autonomously. At the same time, and as Brenson describes, being a curator is a great challenge, mainly in the context of increasing network activities and limited finances. The notion of the global curator as a jet-set flâneur, as identified by Ralph Rugoff (1999), still shapes today’s reality in the art world: [T]he new global-style curators are prone to dismiss exhibitions with a local focus as examples of “regionalism”, a bête noire of current practice. Instead, they prefer to play out the role of jet-set flâneur. As 21st-century connoisseurs, their trump card is that they possess information available to only a small number of people, because few can manage to spend the time, money, and energy constantly travelling the globe in order to stay on top of a growing number of ever-changing local scenes. (1999)

Hans Ulrich Obrist particularly fits this description of the global curator. During the Speakers’ Forum at the Delhi Art Summit in 2011, Obrist explained that the decision to focus on art from China, India, and the Middle East was made because these regions had been completely absent in Western institutions (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January, 2011), and he expressed a desire to discover “new” artistic forms. This position taken by the curator – as one

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who discovers art from the outside and also creates new trends in Western art institutions – was already established by the late 1990s and has attracted much criticism. [D]espite admirable efforts to feature artists from areas outside the traditional art hubs, many recent global-style exhibitions end up looking conceptually thin or abstruse; as a group they seem to be instituting a kind of polyglot regionalism as similar casts of international “discoveries” appear in identically “open-ended” shows. (Rugoff 1999)

The following explanation by Hans Ulrich Obrist on the curatorial concept of Indian Highway emphasises the curator’s aim of not providing a final statement on contemporary art from India. It is rather to envisage, through the use of different exhibition venues and the inclusion of artists as curators, an on-going research process. He argues that the show is the most successful touring exhibition the Serpentine has ever had [sic] in its history [and] which shows the enormous interest in the world for Indian art. And the rule of the game means that wherever the show goes it’s a new exhibition. So . . . little by little the exhibition becomes a true periphery and will become one of the biggest exhibitions of Indian art, you know, with thousands and thousands participants [sic]. (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January 2011)

Obrist emphasises the “rule of the game” since every exhibition needs a clear structure, even though the movement of the exhibition, the “show within the show”, and the different artistcurators bring in multiple points of view. This statement is reminiscent of what Paul O’Neill (2010) identifies as “self-referential, curator-centred, and most evidently, in a constant state of flux: Curatorial knowledge is now becoming a mode of discourse with unstable historical foundations” (2010, 257). However, a focus on the deep entanglements that arise from these practices and that unfold in the local art worlds and debates is still missing from the established theoretical discussion. The idea of transcultural curating is not a new one, but it has gone beyond a simple cultural pluralistic point of view on the globalised art world of the twenty-first century when it identifies a focus on the various facets that establish the involvement of curators, artists, and other art experts as a transcultural approach. The following section on the transcultural field of production that was established in the context of Indian Highway will illustrate the cultural capital shared by participating curators, artists, and other members of the Delhi art community that spans across cultural and spatial boundaries. However, varying perspectives on the exhibition concept demonstrate the ways in which those agents from different cultural spheres perceived the value of art as well as their own positions in an international contemporary art world.

Transcultural field of curation In the early 1990s, following the modern period, the Cuban curator and art critic Gerardo Mosquera criticised “the West” for continuing to enact its hegemonic power in the art world. He defined Eurocentrism as a new thirst for the exoticism of postmodernity and identified an interest

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in the “other” and in vernacular and non-Western cultures within “high art” circuits (2010, 419). This “thirst for exoticism”, he explained, functions as a carrier of a second-class Eurocentrism, which, instead of universalizing its paradigms, conditions certain cultural productions from the periphery according to paradigms that are expected of it for consumption by the centers. Many artists, critics, and Latin American curators seem to be quite willing to become “othered” for the West. (ibid.)

Mosquera importantly pointed to the ambivalent system of exoticising and self-exoticising in which curators and artists from the peripheries are willing to participate according to European demands. In another article, entitled “Some Problems in Transcultural Curating” (1994), Mosquera called for a “curatorial correctness” in the transcultural art projects of the West, asking the organisers to include specialists from the curated cultures right from the moment of conception (1994, 137ff). Western centres themselves have begun to make an intercultural circulation of art for the Third World, fulfilling the visions and interests of the centres. Most cross-cultural exhibitions showing one or more cultures to another, take place along the vertical axis from the centres down to the peripheries. They are financed, organised and curated by institutions and specialists in the centres, who are the only ones who have the power and initiative to do it. To paraphrase James Clifford, we could say that the restless desire and power of the postmodern West to curate the world has now begun. (1994, 135)

The asymmetric power relations that emerged from the Western-dominated art field’s growing interest in the art production of non-Western regions have become an important part of the discussions on the art world as a cultural field of production. Even though Pierre Bourdieu saw the competition between agents as a constitutive power of the field (2003, 257), he did not explicitly define the field as one that crosses national or cultural borders. According to Mosquera, one of the most critical challenges was the fact that the curator could play the role of a cultural broker (according to Ramirez) when the flow of art and agents is not one-dimensional or does not follow hegemonic structures (1994, 137). In order to solve this unbalanced centre-periphery oriented system, Mosquera suggested that “[t]he situation would improve if the transcultural projects emanating from the centres were collegiate, including the participation of specialists from the curated cultures right from the moment of conception” (ibid.). Such productive exchanges in curatorial work and a conscious inclusion of local artists and experts into Western curatorial initiatives has since been adopted in many exhibitions and curatorial projects. One can follow the argument made by Paul O’Neill who focuses – in reference to Pierre Bourdieu – on the cooperative nature of a cultural field “in which all cultural producers relate to each other through a common field of reference and shared vocabulary” to express and articulate the experience of art (O’Neill 2012, 102). Independent of the different modes of agency, “artists and curators partake equally in the resistances, conflicts, and divisions that run through the field of cultural production as a whole, equally engaging in the struggles for an expanded conception

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of the world and of art and their operations” (ibid.). Furthermore, by focusing on the multiplicity of their perspectives that act alongside a shared cultural capital as a constitutive role, different forms of identity production can be outlined and underscore its transcultural-entangled nature. Hans Ulrich Obrist never explicitly stated that he aimed to foster inter- or transcultural dialogues with artists. Instead, when he referred to the ideas of reciprocity, reciprocal zones, reciprocal relations, and reciprocal dialogues, he was claiming that exhibitions like Indian Highway were an on-going, never-finished process. In his Biennale Manifesto (2009), Obrist applies “reciprocity” to biennials with a reference to Édouard Glissant’s notion of the archipelago. The biennial is here understood as a reciprocal contact zone that can mediate between museum and city (Obrist 2009). Accordingly, “the current multiplication of biennales means that rather than copying the formats of other biennales, the challenge is to provide new spaces and new temporalities”, “to generate a situation that is receptive to interesting, more complex spaces combining the large and the small, the old and the new, acceleration and deceleration, noise and silence” (ibid.). Obrist follows Glissant’s understanding that “biennales today need to provide new spaces and new temporalities in order to achieve what he calls a mondialité: a difference enhancing the global dialogue” (ibid.). Obrist’s series of interview marathons was a practical solution to the problem of constructing a meaningful dialogue. Published in various books, Obrist’s interview marathons with artists, theorists, and other intellectual practitioners reinvented the idea of stepping into a dialogue for recognising and preserving the diversity of differing artistic production. With regard to the marathon he conducted at Khoj, the artists’ association in Delhi (2011), Obrist argued in an interview More importantly, this will not be a view on India from outside. It’s always a reciprocity. So it’s a meeting of my view on India and an inside view of the country, similar to the Indian Highway show, which is not only about curators from England choosing Indian artists, but also about us inviting practitioners from India. (Zaman 2011)

But not everybody shares Obrist’s idea of reciprocal exchange. The artist Tino Sehgal, for example, sees the curator as “an old-fashioned explorer who visits or rather maps art scenes of different continents, generations, and milieus” (2011, 10). In “straightforward travels, studio visits, meetings, and more recently, interviews” (ibid., 10–11), Sehgal identifies a scientific, empirical, and somehow ethnographic dimension to these activities (ibid., 10). To call them a form of mapping of the contemporary art world may be accurate, and the idea of a curator travelling the world along its different islands of art communities and institutions perfectly fits this picture. On the other hand, the idea that a Western curator has the power to map the art world and decide which are the new centres in, as Obrist calls it, a polyphonic art world also produces a problematic situation: Why do curators have the authority to “map” the art world like an explorer? What kind of information, localities, art communities, and artists does this “map” include? A map always has to be read for the information it shows and also for that which is not shown. In terms of curating art from other countries, Obrist seems to have identified new art centres in China and India. And even though he may initiate many more exhibitions and solo shows and interview marathons,

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this is certainly not enough to create a topography of the global contemporary art world. Mapping means to be selective, to focus on particular aspects, but it is equally important to exclude and ignore others. Also, a map often does not reflect the source of the information or its quality. Certainly, the activities of an international curator who is a renowned expert are difficult to question. But, on the other hand, when he is greeted by global applause, it is equally important to be critical and to pay attention to the weakness of the overall system of international curatorial practice in which star curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist set standards. While approaching Obrist’s activities and his, to a certain extent, discursive approach with respect, it is necessary to be aware of the systematic and political dimension of curatorial gestures. Particularly, the establishment of hierarchies through selection and exclusion produces a crucial contradiction to Obrist’s declared aim of creating reciprocal exhibition formats and dialogues.

On reciprocity At the Speakers’ Forum at the India Art Summit in Delhi (2011), Obrist explained that the idea of reciprocity had apparently come up during their curatorial research in India when the curators had been inspired to invite artists as curators to conceptualise the “show within the show”. He even acknowledged the reactions of the artists they met: “[L]ots of curators come here now and invite artists to exhibitions about artists being an artist but what do they actually bring back?” (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January 2011). “Giving back” reflects some fundamental understanding of social exchange and the circulation of symbolic goods in the art world (Bourdieu 2003) that is accompanied by a sense of cultural recognition. The complexity of social relations established around the exchange in this context relates to a particular logic of giving, receiving, and returning in modern societies as it builds social interaction (Adloff and Mau 2006). To explore the meaning of gift giving and reciprocity, the dichotomy of self-interest and normatively oriented action “has caused forms of social interaction that cannot be localised either on the side of self-interest or on that of morality” (2006, 95). As Adloff and Mau illustrate with examples such as employment relations or the reciprocal arrangements of a welfare state (2006, 113), social interaction on the macro level can be organised by the state or the market (2006, 110). The transfer of art objects in the art world also creates relationships and networks that are based, in some way, on inequality and hierarchies. And although Lewis Hyde, for example, focuses on practices of commercialisation in the art world when he argues that “the true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of gift exchange” (Hyde 2006, 161), it is even more important to consider the production of the identity ties that are inherent in the exchange of art objects and are related to processes of cultural achievement. Adloff and Mau argue that Gifts that are so to speak immobilised in the form of works of art exhibited in museums or professorial chairs are clear examples of the representation of ties of identity and thus express patterns of social relations and distinctions in relation to other social groups. (2006, 117)

When we understand gifts as sign systems and as identity carriers (ibid.), questions arise about what “reciprocity” can actually be in the specific moment of exchange with Indian artists.

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The “highway” as a metaphor As a potential bridge builder and sign of development, the highway allows problematising gaps, interruptions, and paths to develop off the main highway. Seeing these cracks as part of a historicised relation between the Western and the Indian art worlds, as Peter Nagy pointed out in the context of contemporary circumstances, not only reflects the boundaries of the Indian Highway project, but also unfolds its possibilities and opportunities. Instead of its limitations in presenting contemporary art beyond a national paradigm, other perspectives by Sarat Maharaj as well as Raqs Media Collective, who elaborated on the notion of the “highway” during the Indian Highway conference, bridge the gap between the national meaning and their own ideas. Arguments and explanations proposed by several people, from curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, on his understanding of the exchange with Raqs Media Collective, to Ranjit Hoskote and his catalogue entry “Signposting the Indian Highway” (2008), as well as his arguments made in collaboration with Nancy Adajania on “transculturality”, provide different metaphorical interpretations of the “highway”. To combine them in a critical examination of the idea of a reciprocal transcultural and translocal practice in the field of cultural production, of which the Indian Highway project was a part on various micro levels of the art world, has turned out to be of particular inspiration. To begin, I would like to recall the curatorial note on the exhibition in which the curators drew strong connections between the exhibited artworks and the theme of the Indian highway as a metaphor for the recent remarkable and rapid developments in India in the economic, political, and social and cultural fields. Additionally, the theme of the Indian highway was not only translated into the visual arts but also into music: the experimental electronic soundtrack, Expressway, was commissioned for the Indian Highway and was produced by the musicians Mukul Deora and Shezaad Dawood as a special remix featuring ambient samples from Churchgate Station and Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai.13 The soundtrack aimed to translate the Indian expressway that leads from Mumbai to Pune into a combination of electronic sounds and video art.14 This prestigious project of traffic planning was initiated at the advent of economic liberalisation in India in the beginning of the 1990s, and it represents a prominent message of national development, thereby reflecting a perfect allegory for the Indian Highway exhibition.15 The artist duo Dawood/ Deora performed Expressway at Nehru Centre in London as part of an extensive cultural programme of film, dance, music, and literature events that accompanied the Indian Highway exhibition in London. A metaphorical translation of India’s rapid development according to the theme of the national highway into contemporary art – a mapping of the “nation” – cannot be taken for granted, and it became a source of critical reflection over the course of the Indian Highway conference (London 2009). In his presentation, the keynote speaker, Sarat Maharaj, pointed out the need to differentiate between the curatorial and the artistic “capture”. The curatorial capture is about conceptualising or organising artistic practices according to a particular “conceit, a conceit here is of course a ‘highway’” (Maharaj 2009a). This suggests looking at what is “imminent” in the art practices and the notion of diversity that is entertained in the shared activity of the art-making process, which does not necessarily need a theoretical reflection enacted in an exhibition

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(Maharaj 2009a). He proceeds to argue for visual arts as a form of knowledge production that has to be unpacked and asks: What sort of knowledge does it produce? (Maharaj 2009b, 1). Maharaj calls for an investigation of Indian art as a form of knowledge production in its own right and with its own diversity. On a metaphorical level, he relates this to the diversity of highways, in the past as well as the present, as they stretch across Asia and the Middle East. In my interpretation, a curatorial capture can only be taken as a starting point in investigating the art, but it should not be considered as the defining framework. Since artists in India produce and contribute to the moment of contemporaneity, artist production appears independent of the European eye and its translation. In this sense, going beyond a Eurocentric perspective on contemporary art production in India, or other regions, requires a growing consciousness that Euro-American initiatives like Indian Highway are limited in their expected function of defining Indian contemporary art. This also affirms what Ranjit Hoskote has identified as the transcultural experience as a basis for contemporary art practice after the vacuum that was left behind by an “unproductive rhetoric” in the Indian art world between the 1950s and 1990s. According to Hoskote, [T]he anxiety of national identity, typically phrased in the form of apocalyptic binaries such as “Indianness v internationalism” or “tradition v modernity”, has receded; the chimera of auto-Orientalism, with its valorisation of a spurious “authenticity”, to be secured as the guarantee of an embattled local against an overwhelming global, has been swept away. I speculate the vacuum left behind by this lapsed, unproductive rhetoric will gradually be filled by awareness that transcultural experience is the only certain basis of contemporary artistic practice. (2008, 193)

Hoskote speaks about the situation in the Indian art world; however, in the international context, the vacuum still exists, popping up here and there and peeking through the surface of many a glossy, contemporary exhibition project. The results of this vacuum can be localised in the context of the Indian Highway exhibition or in the format of the “show within the show”, as it does not always seem to achieve its aim of an alternative representation format. Analysis of some of the reviews of the exhibition in its first venue at the Serpentine Gallery reveals that “This Westernised view of the subcontinent’s contemporary work does a disservice to artists and visitors alike” (Darwent 2008), and a more pointed criticism of the curatorial practice surfaces later when the same author asks, “What is my problem with all this?” (ibid.). It is that much of the work in this show isn’t very good, but has been included anyway because it looks Indian – or, rather, Indian enough. . . . For the rest, you get the sense of this show’s curators sitting down to decide what “Indian” was most likely to mean to a Western audience and tailoring their choices accordingly. The result is that Indian Highway feels condescending, both to that Western audience and to the artists in the show. I’m sure there is a great deal of good art being made in India today, and equally sure that it is not to be seen here. (ibid.)

This is, certainly, a very critical position. However, it agrees with Sarat Maharaj’s view that the focus should be on the art itself and not on the format of presentation in order to allow an

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understanding of Indian Highway as an attempt to incorporate alternative readings. In this regard, the curatorial feature of the “show within the show” also provides an alternate perspective.

Steps Away from Oblivion by Raqs Media Collective The “show within the show” curated by an artist-curator offers one way of dissolving the curatorial capture. Steps Away from Oblivion, the “show within the show” that Raqs Media Collective curated for the venue at Serpentine Gallery, and a discussion with the artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective in their studio in Delhi in 2012 has revealed some inherent pitfalls that shape the contemporary art world. The artist-curatorial venture Steps Away from Oblivion, by Raqs Media Collective, required an integral contribution and an on-going exchange between the artists and the Indian Highway curators. However, their intervention should not detract from the fact that the “show within the show” was only partly successful as a presentation of reciprocal exchange. This reflects an oblique shift in the obligation of responsibility from the curator to the artist-curator, particularly in terms of its failure (Raqs Media Collective 2010, 278). Since it was meant to present a view on artistic practices in India using artistic insights from the country and its artistic community, the local curators of Indian Highway invited artists to include other artists at each venue. At the Serpentine Gallery, the Raqs Media Collective provided the first artist-curatorial venture. The collective was founded as a group of media practitioners in 1992 by Monica Narula (b. 1969), Jeebesh Bagchi (b. 1965), and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968). It is particularly engaged in debates of urban cultures in the city and media practices. With Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram, they are the co-founders of Sarai, the new media initiative which was designed in 2000 in Delhi “as an attempt to respond creatively and intellectually to the rapid changes affecting the media, social and physical landscape of Delhi in the late 1990s” (Bernardini 2007, 247). In their engagement with Sarai as well as with the art world, Raqs carry on a discourse which looks at the complexities and contradictions of the present, of living in an increasingly technologically mediated and interconnected world (2007, 246–247). Raqs Media Collective, who consider their practice as nomadic (2007, 248), follow “its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures.”16 In this sense their work often expresses our deep and enduring skepticism regarding narratives built out of unexamined ideas about identity, property, progress, memory, and security, or barely examined yet overextended (sometimes to the point of exhaustion) terms like globalization, identity politics, nations, nationality, nationalism, postcolonialism, centers, and peripheries. (Raqs Media Collective 2010, 286)

Among the various practices which deal with art, film, or photography, and for which they collaborate with practitioners in the fields of computer science, architecture, theatre, and literature, is also their profound curatorial practice, notably their curatorial contribution to Indian Highway with the video show Steps Away from Oblivion (2008). For this project, Raqs Media Collective invited eight documentarists to re-work former projects.17 They selected the video works with an

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eye on transformation dynamics and “repose” in India’s landscape today. The catalogue entry in the second edition explained, Much of the current discussion about India’s emergence as a global power seems to fall into an easy intoxication with the promise of wealth, influence and power – an intoxicating oblivion where questions are forgotten. The works in this show are assembled as moves made in the course of persistent attempts to steer away from this vacuum. Thinking back over independent documentary film from the last 15 years – the period of India’s increasing effulgent ascent onto the bandstand of global attention – we were struck by a number of images that seemed to look askance at the parade of contemporary pomp and circumstance, and whose fascination and relevance seemed only to have increased over time. (Madden and Prat 2011, 196)

Accordingly, the artists asked the filmmakers “who authored these images to revisit this material – to re-edit or remix, or to shoot again – in order to see what new resonances might emerge today” (ibid.). In a personal conversation, Shuddhabrata Sengupta explained their curatorial intention of creating a “different sensorial within the exhibition” (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012). Acknowledging that exhibitions such as Indian Highway created an “excess of images” and a “pictorial sensual overwhelming mass of India”, they “were interested in a more replicate, in something that was not so loud; a way of making images that was quieter, more oblique” (ibid.). As a result, they included seven videos: Steps Away from Oblivion if you assume that this headlong rush towards the celebration, towards this new contemporary India that comes on The Economist’s cover and everything is a kind of oblivion, it’s a kind of, while looking at the object, also forgetting what it is [sic]. And we were kind of interested in producing a modest antidote to that phenomenon. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

The curated room thus asked the visitor “to take a step away from the oblivion” (ibid.) as it was meant to be “making room for that possibility of another way of thinking” (ibid.). In the exhibition space, the “steps away” were also visualised by a special display designed by Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, the two architects who also conceptualised the exterior structure of the Serpentine Gallery for the display of Maqbool Fida Husain’s paintings. The “show within the show” was installed in a small, separate – “educational” – room, with walls and floors coated with silver-coloured material and decorated with aluminium stepladders connected to the title, Steps Away from Oblivion.18 This installation created a sort of interaction between the wall projections, screens, overlap of sound, and imagery. Their own film contribution, Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (2008–11 minutes), provided another contribution to the idea of taking images out of oblivion.19 As the following stills suggest (Plate 2.1), this film presents the wandering figures of a Yaksha and a Yakshi, mythic male and female guardians of reassure and keepers of riffles in different Indic traditions. The Yaksha and the Yakshi provide a crepuscular subjectivity to the entire show, their gaze passing softly over the city we live in, and the landscape opened out in the other videos. (Madden and Prat 2011, 196)20

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These two sculptures (Plates 2.2 and 2.3) are fiberglass copies of the sculptures guarding the entrance of the Resort Bank in Delhi. They are the republic’s largest public art commissions in post-independence India’s history and are monumental representations of the state (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012). But although they reflect on the history of modernity in India, nobody really talks about them, and so they wanted to bring them “out from oblivion” and “take them away from this duty of serving . . . as a treasure wards and the guards of the capital and the state and to let them you know let them be to the locations where they come from” (ibid.), namely from the forests and rivers (ibid.). Fixed to one of the ladders in the display, the silent video depicts the solid-looking sculptures of a Yakshi and a Yaksha gently swinging and swimming on the river, creating a calm, almost relaxed atmosphere.21 The art journalist Adrian Searle wrote about the installation Steps Away from Oblivion: All that hardware signals cutting-edge, information-superhighway modernity. The documentary film material they show highlights the collisions between traditional rural, religious Indian culture and a new industrial society. A polluted river flows between pylons, overlooked by sculptures of grinning deities. Planes descend over shantytowns; an old actor mimes bemusement at the world – or maybe he is just following the flight of an imaginary fly around the room. (Searle 2008)

Though interrupted by the sounds and images from other videos, the “education room” at Serpentine Gallery produced, as a reply or in the context of the national Indian highway, a moment of hesitation. In a statement made during the Indian Highway conference in 2009, Sengupta explained that initiatives such as “the show within the show” provide opportunities “to investigate and interrogate at least at the side lines of what it means to construct a national survey. What is this idea of India? What is an Indian Highway as Sarat Maharaj pointed out? Where is it going, right? What is this speed in which we are asked to travel down this highway?” (Sengupta 2009). Accordingly, with their curatorial intervention in Indian Highway, “we hoped to introduce [a] few notes of hesitation if you get sort of overtak[en] by the rush being on the Indian highway then you can always repair yourself at that room and hesitate” (ibid.). It becomes clear that Raqs Media Collective understood this show to be an expression of their artist-curator responsibility, and similar to how they draw attention to documentary practices that might be overseen, they suggested looking at the diversity of India’s art practice. Obrist also promotes difference and diversity when he refers to Édouard Glissant, who encourages his feeling that it is actually possible to “enter into a global dialogue without erasing difference” (Eastham n.d.). In reference to Indian Highway, he underlines the importance that the “show is defined not as a created, boxed exhibition which goes from A to B to C to D without changing, which would be an expression of that homogenising globalisation, but instead that wherever it goes it enters into a dialogue with the local community” (ibid.). This dialogue he sees as emerging from the changing content where each time another artist-run exhibition is set up (ibid.): “We’ve defined the rules of the game, but not the outcome” (Eastham n.d.). The “rule of the game” – like the overall concept and format of Indian Highway – also seems to include the idea of “reciprocity” as part of the dialogue with the local community. But since this

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reciprocity is defined by the curator, it is problematic. This is something that Obrist also reflected upon when he noted: when it does “not fit what the art is about, and then it is the art illustrating the curator’s rule of the game, and that is not as interesting” (Brockman 2008). This encouraged him “to think a lot about just starting with artists, and starting with architects and scientists, and above all, listening to them” (ibid.). This curator-artist dialogue was also an important research format for the Indian Highway exhibition. Further, the title – defined only after the research was completed – was partly an outcome of the conversation between the curators and Raqs Media Collective in Delhi and was meant to underline “the importance of the road in migration and movement as well as the link between rural and urban communities” (Chatterjee 2012). In order to foster a dialogue that resisted the homogenising forces of globalisation, it became important for the curators to stress that there is no “universal language of art”, as Julia Peyton-Jones said in the same article. And, in this regard, the dialogue with Raqs Media Collective became of particular importance for conceptualising the exhibition as a whole. During the previously mentioned panel at the Art Summit in Delhi, Obrist explained that the theme of translocality could be an interesting one since artists and their work have very local roots. But in the same time I would actually reflect translocality and think what translocality was. And somehow the highway seemed to be an [sic] interesting idea and also the exhibition would become in itself a kind of an highway! (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January 2011)

The two-way relationship became particularly clear when Obrist reflected on the processuality of the exhibition along the “highway” and on becoming a “highway” itself. If they, as curators, remained in contact with the local art community in India, it would allow them to accompany and map the art production in India (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January 2011). In this sense the metaphor of the highway was envisioned to allow manifold approaches to contemporary art from India, functioning as a starting point for what Sarat Maharaj calls the “curatorial capture”. This can also be seen as what Maharaj has identified as a “curatorial conceit”. With regard to further elaborations by Raqs Media Collective on the “highway”, including not only the “highway” but also the tracks off the main road becomes an imperative. With respect to the consideration that the exhibition generated a highway, the exclusion of many artistic productions in India, as well as the narrow map of Indian contemporary art created, suggest that the scope for critique has not yet been exhausted. The artistic collective would rather locate itself on both the “national highway” and its off roads, as stated in an interview (Raqs Media Collective in Biswas 2011). To question the “highway” as a metaphor for the linear development of modernity means instead to accept the suggestion of taking into consideration the entire history of the non-structured highways that have grown with time, including the off roads that follow different paths and reach different destinations. They note that their engagement with “other times – modern, non-modern, off-modern – is laden with our sense of their out-of-joint presences” (Raqs Media Collective in Biswas 2011). And they find “the modernist celebration of unidirectional speed, fueled [sic] by the necessity of arousing everyone and herding them towards the future seems archaic and naive at times” (ibid.). In undertaking “close readings of the peripatetic archive of the off-tracks”, their

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practice and that of others contain “a renewal of what it means to ‘sense’ the world, and to render it ‘sensate’ and ‘sensible’” as well as an acknowledgement of what cannot be “direct and unidirectional” (ibid.). Such moves “have ambivalences, they are equivocal, as befits the task of moving on a surface as jagged as that of the contemporary world” (Raqs Media Collective in Biswas 2011). With Steps Away from Oblivion, Raqs Media Collective sought to compel viewers to take a closer look at the archives of the off-tracks leading from the main routes of the Indian highway. In its artistic and curatorial contribution to the art world, Raqs Media Collective views itself as not exclusively within the “Indian nation”, but as translocal and transcultural practitioners who are nevertheless Delhi-based and without disregard for their origin. Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote also consider similar aspects of “translocality” and “transculturality” in their writings about contemporary practices in the art world. In the contribution to the Indian Highway catalogue (2008), Ranjit Hoskote points out that “transcultural experience is the only certain basis of contemporary artistic practice” (Hoskote 2008, 193). Together with Adajania, Hoskote observes a liberalisation of geography but also sees the dilemmas as well as the potentialities of a mode of cultural production that is based on global circulations yet is not merely circulatory; and a mode of life that is based on transnational mobility but is not without anchorage in regional predicaments. (Adajania and Hoskote 2010)

In their publication, “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies” (ibid.), the authors raise, along with the issue of “critical transregionality”, their interest . . . to remap the domain of global cultural experience by setting aside what seem to us to be exhausted cartographies variously born out of the Cold War, area studies, late-colonial demarcations, the war on terror, or the supposed clash of civilisations. In place of these specious cartographies premised on the paradigm of the “West against the rest”, we propose a new cartography based on the mapping of continents of affinity, and a search for commonalties based on jointly faced crises and shared predicaments. (Adajania and Hoskote 2010)

It is this process of finding new ways to approach the contemporary world that are not based on the notion of the “West against the rest”, as well as exploring the role of cultural practitioners, artists, their practice, and their significance in expressing commonalities between different parts of the world, that is most intriguing. Moreover, it is necessary to go beyond existing categories, many of them based on past world political situations, and to search for new approaches, such as dialogue between curators and artists, that are more appropriate to current situations. However, the problem here is that with attempts to avoid global homogenisation and Western dominance, the danger remains that essentialism further emphasises “difference”, as explained by Édouard Glissant. Certain concepts and practices, as formulated by Obrist, Adajania, and Hoskote to regulate the global phenomenon, are not mutually exclusive – instead, they show that a certain balance needs to be found between focusing on affinities and differences. At the same time, there seems to be a contradiction between these two perspectives or, more significantly, between the practices of international curators and contemporary artists.

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With respect to the idea of the direct encounters that arise from the transcultural and translocal practices of curators and artists, Adajania and Hoskote introduce the concept of “convocation” in their “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies” and define the direct encounter as it is also envisaged by many international curators and artists. This can help the dismantling of canonical criteria, long-established conventions of viewing and representation. It can help the cause of de-exoticising the “Other” as subject of inquiry or object of desire and display. It can help restore suppressed or excluded contents. It can make for a confluence of energies and perspectives. At the same time, as is well known, it can produce a dichotomy in the reception of contemporary cultural practice: a schism between mobile publics that travel constantly from one transnational venue to another and anchored publics that embrace a notion of the local that can be defensive at best and parochial at worst. (Adajania and Hoskote 2010)

They note that the activation of conversation between mobile and anchored publics requires the development of new forms of convocation (ibid.) as “this would help participants across the globe to shuttle between regional histories and global histories, re-orienting themselves from one narrative to the next” (ibid.). And even though the “show within the show” can be understood as one such moment of convocation, it remains a critical endeavour. The reason for the critical assessment lies in the lack of visibility in the exhibition space given not only to the artists who curate the “show within the show”, but also to those who are a part of it. Just as the viewpoints of the artists who remain hidden in the curatorial depiction of “reciprocal dialogue” need to be recognised for their commonalities of artistic capital instead of cultural and regional differences so, too, do their efforts. Here it makes sense to ask for a curatorial responsibility that cannot be confused with the idea of “What shall we bring back to the artists in India?” and the gesture of “charity” that is implied in that view. The reciprocal dialogue thus remains unbalanced and preserves the curators’ position as the cultural broker (Ramirez 1996), leaving the artist’s voice somehow fixed in its local setting. The “oblivion” of the artistic practitioner, to paraphrase their “invisibility” using the words of Raqs Media Collective, thus seemed to traverse like a red line throughout all the exhibition spaces of Indian Highway and its “shows within the shows”. In Oslo, the second venue of Indian Highway, the issue of the “invisibility” of the “show within the show” became a topic in my conversation with curator Gunnar Kvaran. It remained an important thread that was touched upon repeatedly during conversations with artists and local curators in Delhi.

Notes 1 See the video “Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery.” 2009. http://youtu.be/TkiUdqTysjA (accessed 22 January 2009 – no longer available). 2 Maqbool Fida Husain was born on 17 September 1915 in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, in Western India, and died at the age of 95 on 9 June 2011 in London. For art-historical writing on the artist, see, among others, Geeta Kapur’s books Husain: Introduction and Analytical Notes (1968) and When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000).

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3 Nikolaus Hirsch has received international attention for his works as both architect and curator. He was the director of the Städelschule, the international art academy in Frankfurt (Germany) (see www. staedelschule.de/news.html, accessed 17 January 2019). He has wide international experience, including a project in India. In context of Sarai, a programme by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi that was founded by the members of the Raqs Media Collective (see www.sarai.net/, accessed 17 January 2019), he – together with Michel Müller and in collaboration with the artist collective Raqs Media Collective – conceptualised The Cybermohalla Hub, a physical, hybrid structure meant to be a growing cultural laboratory (see www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1363&l=en&bookId=258, accessed 17 January 2019). 4 For a photograph of the exterior structure and large-scale paintings, see Imprints of India (2008) by Maqbool Fida Husain. www.minc.ws/index.php?category=2&category_1=0&category_2=68&category_3=0 (accessed 17 January 2019). 5 For publications on the Artists’ Progressive Group, see Yashodhara Dalmia’s publication The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (2006) or Rebecca Brown’s Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009). 6 For a profound historical discussion on visual depictions of the Indian nation, see The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India by Sumathi Ramaswamy (2010b) and her publication on Maqbool Fida Husain Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbul Fida Husain and the Idea of India (2010a). 7 See the Frieze website: https://frieze.com/editorial (accessed 17 January 2019). 8 The artists who participated in the Indian Highway show in London included Ayisha Abraham, Ravi Agarwal, Nikhil Chopra, Raqs Media Collective, Sheela Gowda, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, N.S. Harsha, M.F. Husain, Amar Kanwar, Bose Krishnamachari, Nalini Malani, Tejal Shah, Dayanita Singh, Ashok Sukumaran, and Shaina Anand. 9 For photographs, see Dayanita Singh’s website: www.dayanitasingh.com/ (accessed 17 January 2019). 10 See, for example, a description of the work exhibited at Tate Modern in London (2018), www.tate.org. uk/visit/tate-modern/display/voices/amar-kanwar (accessed 10 May 2018). 11 See the Art Radar website: http://artradarjournal.com/ (accessed 17 January 2019). 12 See the Former West website: www.formerwest.org/ (accessed 17 January 2014). 13 Vocals are by Qusai Kathawala, with a recording of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi (a famous vocalist in India who passed away in January 2011 at the age of 89), with found elements from rapid conversations, factory noise, and other interference. 14 The Mumbai/Pune expressway was officially called Yashwantrao Chavan Mumbai Pune Expressway after the first Chief Minister of Maharashtra Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan (d. November 1984). 15 See the Indian Highway page on the Serpentine Gallery website: www.serpentinegallery.org/2008/06/ indian_highwaydecember_2008_fe_1.html (accessed 26 September 2012). 16 See the Raqs Media Collective website: www.raqsmediacollective.net/default.aspx (accessed 17 January 2019). 17 Raqs Media Collective invited Mumbai-based filmmaker Surabhi Sharma (with Siddharth Gautam Singh) and the film Airplane Descending over Jari Mari (2008) after Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories (2000); Ruchir Joshi (filmmaker and writer based in Kolkata and London) with New Dream Local (2008) after Egaro Mile (1990); Kavita Pai and Hansa Thapliyal (filmmakers based in Mumbai) with It Is Here, It Is Here, It Is Here (2008) after There Once Was a Queen (2005); Debkamal Ganguly (filmmaker, researcher, and film editor from Bangalore) with Videodrone (2008) after Space Bar (2007); Priya Sen (filmmaker based in Delhi) with To Receding (2008) after About Elsewhere (2006); Vipin Vijay (filmmaker from Kerala) with The Perfumed Garden (2008) after Hawa Mahal (2003), and MR Rajan (filmmaker based in Kerala) with Ammanur – the Actor (2008) after Palarnnattam – Ammanur the Actor (1995).

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18 For photographs of Steps Away from Oblivion, curated by Raqs Media Collective, see the Indian Highway catalogue (Lyon). 19 For photographs showing the video, see the Raqs Media Collective website: www.raqsmediacollective. net/works.aspx# (accessed 25 January 2019). 20 See the website of Raqs Media Collective for the video and further information about the work: www. raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx# (accessed 21 January 2019). 21 Thereby, the atmosphere functioned as a kind of counter against the reality of the street in Delhi, where the sculptures in stone flank the entrance of the Reserve Bank of India – but this is information that was not referred to in the exhibition.

References Adajania, Nancy, and Ranjit Hoskote, “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies.” Independent Curators International Research, 2010. http://curatorsintl.org/research/notes-towards-a-lexicon-of-urgencies (accessed December 14, 2018). Adloff, Frank, and Steffen Mau, “Giving Social Ties, Reciprocity in Modern Society.” European Journal of Sociology 47, no. 1 (2006): 93–123. Bennett, Tony, “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4 (1988): 73–102. Bernardini, Elena, “Raqs Media Collective: Nomadism in Art Practice.” In Global and Local Art Histories, edited by Celina Jeffrey and Gregory Minissale, 245–268. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Biswas, Moinak, “Off Modern: A Conversation with Raqs.” Humanitiesunderground: Taking on Mediocrity & Mechanization (blog). August 6, 2011. http://humanitiesunderground.org/off-modern-a-conversationwith-raqs/ (accessed December 14, 2018). Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, edited by Randal Johnson. Repr. European Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Brenson, Michael, “The Curator’s Moment.” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (1998): 16–27. Brockman, John, “A Rule of the Game: A Talk with Hans Ulrich Obrist.” Edge (blog), May 5, 2008. www. edge.org/conversation/hans_ulrich_obrist-a-rule-of-the-game (accessed December 14, 2018). Brown, Rebecca M., Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Chatterjee, Madhusree, “‘Indian Highway’ Presents Art of Transition, Growth in India to World: Curators.” ThaiIndian News, July 26, 2012. www.thaindian.com/newsportal/lifestyle/indian-highway-presents-artof-transition-growth-in-india-to-world-curators_100633631.html (accessed December 14, 2018). Dalmia, Yashodhara, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives. 2. impr. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Darwent, Charles, “Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London.” The Independent, December 21, 2008. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/indian-highway-serpentine-gallery-london1205879.html (accessed December 14, 2018). Eastham, Benjamin, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (Extract).” The White Review (blog), n.d. www. thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-hans-ulrich-obrist/ (accessed January 18, 2014). Graham-Dixon, Andrew, “Indian Highway at Serpentine Gallery.” Andrew Graham-Dixon Archive (blog), 2008. https://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/indian-highway-at-the-serpentine-gallery.html (accessed June 3, 2019). Higgins, Charlotte. 2009. ‘Hyper-Active Swiss Curator Tops Artworld Power List’. The Guardian, October 15. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/15/swiss-curator-tops-power-list (accessed June 4, 2019). Hoskote, Ranjit, “Signposting the Indian Highway.” In Indian Highway: The Catalogue, edited by Kathleen Madden and Sam Philips, 190–193. London: Koenig Books Ltd., 2008. Hyde, Lewis, The Gift. 1. publ. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006.

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Jumabhoy, Zehra, “A Highway to India.” Frieze Blog 2009 (blog). https://frieze.com/article/highway-india (accessed April 21, 2018). Kapur, Geeta, Husain: Introduction and Analytical Notes. Bombay: Vakil, 1968. ———, ‘Dismantling the Norm’. In Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions, Tensions, edited by Apinan Poshyananda, Thomas McEveilley, Geeta Kapur, Jim Supangkat, Marian Pastor Roces, and Jae-Ryung Roe, 1st ed., 60–69. New York: Asia Society, 1997. ———, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Destination Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Madden, Kathleen, and Thierry Prat, eds., Indian Highway IV. 2nd ed. London: Koenig Books, 2011. Maharaj, Sarat, Keynote Lecture: Conference Indian Highway. London, 2009a. ———, “Know-How and No-How: Stopgap Notes on ‘Method’ in Visual Art as Knowledge Production.” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 2 (2009b). Mathur, Saloni, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ———, Indian Highway Conference. 2009. Website Serpentine Gallery. https://www.serpentinegalleries. org/exhibitions-events/indian-highway (no longer available). Mosquera, Gerardo, “Some Problems in Transcultural Curating.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher and Rasheed Araeen, 133–139. London: Kala Press, 1994. ———, “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems Around Art and Eurocentrism.” In The Biennial Reader. An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art., edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, 416–425. Ostfildern Bergen: Hatje Cantz Kunsthall, 2010. Obrist, Hans Ulrich., “Biennial Manifesto.” Flash Art, 2009. www.flashartonline.com/article/biennialmanifesto/ (accessed January 12, 2019). ———, Speakers’ Forum, Art Summit Delhi, 21 January, 2011. O’Neill, Paul, “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse.” In The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, 240–259. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. ———, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2012. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed., Barefoot across the Nation. 1. publ. Visual & Media Histories and Visual & Media Histories 1. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2010a. ———, The Goddess and the Nation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010b. Ramirez, Mari Carmen, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation.” In Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 15–27. London: Routledge, 1996. Raqs Media Collective, “On Curatorial Responsibility.” In The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, 276–289. Ostfildern: Hantje Cantz, 2010. Robinson, Denise, “Superhighway for Indian Art.” Art in Asia, 2014. www.artinasia.kr/content/view/58/34/. Rugoff, Ralph, “Rules of the Game.” Frieze, 1999. www.frieze.com/issue/article/rules_of_the_game/. Searle, Adrian, “An Eye-Popping Passage to India.” The Guardian, December 15, 2008. www.guardian. co.uk/artanddesign/2008/dec/15/art-india-serpentine-gallery (accessed February 19, 2019). Sehgal, Tino, “Forward.” In Hans Ulrich Obrist: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Curating: But Were Afraid to Ask, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and April Elizabeth Lamm, 9–15. Sternberg Press, 2011. Sengupta, Shuddhabrata, Conference Indian Highway. London, 2009. ———, Raqs Media Collective Studio, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 27, 2012. Singh, Devika, “Indian Highway.” Frieze, 2009. www.frieze.com/issue/review/indian_highway/. Zaman, Sahar, “‘They Will Eventually Change the Art World’: Hans Ulrich Obrist on India’s Rising Art Scene.” Art Info, January 28, 2011. www.blouinartinfo.com/market-news/article/36805-they-will-eventuallychange-the-art-world-hans-ulrich-obrist-on-indias-rising-art-scene.

3 “Indianness and the urgency of transmission . . .” Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo 2009

The second leg of fieldwork on Indian Highway took place at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo where the exhibition was held from 2 April to 6 September 2009. In the months after the London exhibition, I conducted intensive research using art magazines and online media to collect information about the artists, curators, and institutes participating in Indian Highway, as well as its general reception. The research in Oslo, which included participant observation in the exhibition space and a conversation with the museum director and main member of the curatorial board, Gunnar Kvaran, provided important insight into the exhibition’s curatorial ideas and modus operandi as a laboratory. The relational aesthetics and effective power of exhibited artworks seen in conjunction with the curatorial approach to Indian contemporary art was crucial to the analysis of the art by several artists in the show. The notion of “seeking India”, in relation to postproduction art, enabled some critical engagement with curatorial practice.

The Astrup Fearnley Museum At the time this research was conducted, the Astrup Fearnley Museum was located at Dronningens Gate 4 in Oslo.1 On this small and quiet street in an office area, the building, despite its grand entrance (Figure 3.1), was hardly recognisable as a museum. Instead, with its manorial entrance and impressive wing gate, it reminded me more of a bank building. To the right of the entrance, showcases were installed facing the street, but the blue glass panes made it difficult to recognise the photographic work on display, which was a city landscape at night by Dayanita Singh, Dream Villa 11–2007 (2008), in dark blue. Behind the museum’s entrance, the lobby contained a museum bookshop on the left, a storage space on the right, and a glass door straight ahead that led to the exhibition space. Next to the museum shop – an open area with walls of glass – the exhibition space was entered through the glass door. Although the museum interior was painted a neutral grey, which created a rather sober atmosphere, the moment the glass door opened into the exhibition space, an orchestra of sounds, installations, and colours assailed the visitor. The show, which featured almost forty artists, was installed across two floors in large halls and smaller rooms, which often contained a single artwork. The exhibition showcased artworks in a variety of media – installation, paintings,

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Figure 3.1 Astrup Fearnley Museum at Dronningens Gate 4, Oslo. Entrance.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2009)

and photographs – and covered topics that not only were relevant to the Indian subcontinent but also had global relevance, including water pollution, poverty, and migration. In this sense the picture of contemporary India produced in Oslo did not fit into any of the clichéd or stereotypical ideas of the country, which are often promoted by travel magazines. In contrast to the popular image of “Incredible India” (the largest democracy in the world and an economic superpower!), a marketing image which has been carefully constructed in India for the outside world, the art objects in the Indian Highway exhibition revealed something completely different. The notion of “India Shining” had been promulgated by political circles in India since the late 1990s (Brosius 2010), and it was carefully (re)created in Bollywood movies, at mega-music parties, and in tourism advertisements which publicised India as an exciting country to discover. This campaign was successful in attracting a new generation of young backpackers and individualistic upper-middleclass European travellers to the country. While the museum’s decision to create a “neutral” environment provided an almost comforting contrast with the familiar trope of India, the message conveyed was also a rarefied and constructed one – namely, that the exhibition space was merely an impartial tool that would focus viewers’ concentration on art that would speak for itself.

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After entering the exhibition, the path went either to the right, where the second part of the exhibition was displayed in several rooms, or straight ahead towards a mezzanine platform, where a flight of stairs led downwards to the ground floor. On this mezzanine balcony, the first artwork was a television with a video recording of a live performance by the artist Nikhil Chopra, which had gone on for fifty-seven hours at the Serpentine Gallery in December 2008. From there, stairs went down to the ground floor, where another installation by Chopra had been positioned. This installation was the result of his live performance From Land to Sea at the Astrup Fearnley Museum and on Radhusplassen in Oslo Harbour in April 2009. The catalogue description2 explains how Chopra performs as both himself and in the guise of fictional characters like Yog Raj Chitrakar, which are related to the context of India’s colonial history. In Oslo, Nikhil Copra, alias Yog Raj Chitrakar, drew a picture of the harbour.3 The performance, during which he transformed into the historical figure, began outside at the harbour and continued in the museum during the exhibition opening. Afterwards, his large canvas drawings and performance utensils were presented to the visitors in the exhibition space.

Inside the museum walls The museum is a space of performance and transformation, especially when it is used to create a sensorial and participatory atmosphere and is turned into a social space of interaction. Besides the exhibition space and the museum shop, the Astrup Fearnley Museum also had a dedicated lounge space containing sofas, books, and catalogues, which invited visitors to rest and read. The room was separated by a wall from the final room of the museum where the “exhibition within the exhibition”, curated by Bose Krishnamachari, was installed.4 Sitting at the back of the museum on one of the comfortable black sofas in this shaded lounge with its high dark glass walls, one could watch the outside world on the street while listening to the Expressway soundtrack by Mukul Deora and Shezaad Dawood that had been commissioned for the show at the Serpentine Gallery. The acoustic work translated the noises of the expressway from Mumbai to Pune into rhythm and sound, and it filled the space with electronic sounds mixed with noises from trucks and “oriental” tones. There could not have been any greater distance between the inside world represented by the Indian Highway exhibition and the world of small draughty streets outside the Astrup Fearnley company’s offshore building, which was within walking distance of Oslo’s major museums and galleries. The interrelation between the city space, the museum, and the exhibition was immanent, and because of the diverse locations, it changed at each of the Indian Highway venues. This also necessarily influenced its meaning in specific contexts, which in turn affected its reception by critics and visitors. Compared to the Serpentine Gallery located in the public park of Kensington Gardens, in Oslo a different range of interrelations seemed to unfold in the city, museum, and exhibition space. With the realisation that outside the museum walls there was an ordinary city (Robinson 2010) filled with normal people going about their everyday activities, the awareness of a “world” inside the museum was re-imagined. Surrounded by electronic music and filled with visual art that performed its very own knowledge about India and the world, the museum, or rather the exhibition world, became more apparent and concrete.

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Carol Duncan’s book Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (1995) has famously explored how museums create a particular liminal zone, according to which visitors enact the rituals and practices of performance within a museum space. There is no escaping the fact that museums are embedded in larger cultural and social contexts and are constructed along particular structures of power, politics, and money, and “as a form of public space, they constitute an arena in which a community may test, examine, and imaginatively live both older truths and possibilities for new ones” (1995, 131). So what role does non-Western art play in the interaction between different cultural groups in an exhibition like Indian Highway, which was held in different urban contexts? This led to another question around the semiotic meaning of art and whether it mediates a specific image of India to Western audiences. Additionally, investigating the curator as the person who creates the “rule of the game” when conceptualising the framework in which the reading of the art takes place and whether it is possible to talk about the ethnification of contemporary art that takes place in this regard requires further elaboration. With insights into the curatorial point of view, as described by Gunnar Kvaran in a conversation about curating Indian Highway, the agency of the curator evolves in specifying what is “Indian” about art. Seeking “India”, “Africa”, or “China” in contemporary art production opens up a controversial situation that poses questions of belonging versus ethnification. Here, artists, curators, and art critics have to deal with the burden of history as well as the opportunities that contemporary art provides in the field of cultural production. The field of contemporary art can enable a move towards establishing new modes of belonging and identity that are not based in the aftermath of postcolonial debates and struggles but are liberated from the historical paradigms stemming from both a shared (post)colonial history and nationalism. In the context of my research on Indian Highway, I wanted to know if international curators contribute to the institutionalisation of Indian contemporary art as representative of India, particularly at a time when the nation-state is no longer the main point of reference for its artists. My conversations with Gunnar Kvaran provided some background information on the curatorial research strategies behind Indian Highway and the curator’s notions of “Indian contemporary art”. The notion of “Indianness” in art and how art is introduced to visitors are, to a great extent, intertwined with the museum and its communication strategies, as Kvaran explained. This also relates to the curatorial strategy of the “show within the show” and the “laboratory effect”, but to a large extent, it is also shaped by the curatorial capture.

Meeting the curator Gunnar Kvaran Following Uncertain States of America – American Art in the 3rd Millennium and China Power Station, Astrup Fearnley Museum in collaboration with Serpentine Gallery in London are now focusing on Indian Contemporary art with the exhibition Indian Highway. (Kvaran n.d., 5) It is with this curatorial comment that Gunnar Kvaran, director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo) and member of the main curatorial board of Indian Highway, introduced the exhibition to the visitor. This introduction was printed in a small booklet that was available

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at the museum’s information desk and the museum shop. The booklet, written in English and Norwegian, also provided – in addition to brief information about the exhibition – an overview of the related cultural programme, including film screenings, talks, and guided tours, as well as a code list. The codes provided visitors with an audio guide that they could access with their mobile phones. Additionally, everybody who bought something received an Indian Highway bag printed with the map from the Indian Highway catalogue, designed with pink and orange street lines and large dots symbolising India’s most influential art institutes. I met Gunnar Kvaran at his museum office on 24 July 2009, and we spent several hours talking, interrupted only by a joint lunch at a restaurant nearby. We discussed many topics, such as the overall concept of Indian Highway, the curators’ motivations, and the challenges they faced while researching artistic production in India, along with the politics of communication in museums and the challenges of doing research in a country like India. Gunnar Kvaran is a person with profound curatorial expertise and strong ties to the international art world and museums in several countries.5 Since 2001, Kvaran has been director of the privately funded Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, which boasts one of the largest private collections of contemporary art in Norway. One of the chief purposes of the museum is to showcase the work of North American artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Matthew Barney, but it also includes artists from Europe, China, Japan, Brazil, and India whose works have been considered important in recent times. The Norwegian entrepreneur and art collector Hans Rasmus Astrup, who is a member of the wealthy family that has owned the Norwegian shipping and oil company Astrup Fearnley since 1869, established the modern and contemporary art collection, which was opened to the public in Oslo in 1993. In 2012, the museum reopened in a new space in one of Oslo’s up-and-coming neighbourhoods, the islet Tjuvholmen, which is located on the fjord. Since he took over directorial responsibilities for the collection in 2001, Gunnar Kvaran has curated shows, including those previously mentioned: The Uncertain States of America, China Power Station, and Indian Highway, as well as important events in other locations such as the Pavilion of Contemporary American Art at the Sao Paolo Biennale in 2001, all of which were well received. In 2013 he was invited to be guest curator of the Biennale de Lyon in cooperation with the artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon (MAC), Thierry Raspail. During the course of our conversation, Gunnar Kvaran provided key insights into the Astrup Fearnley Museum’s agenda, his travel experiences in India, his curatorial decision-making for an exhibition of Indian contemporary art, and his method for selecting particular artists. The main aim was to find “new” artistic production, he explained. This understandable motivation, however, was problematic because it contradicted the curatorial assumption of an objective position towards unfamiliar art production in India. As Kvaran explained, he and his colleagues tried not to become preoccupied with specific ideas or expectations of the art they found in India; however, the anticipation of finding “new” and “original” art (compared to familiar art from Europe, America, or China), as Kvaran put it, raised high expectations. Such processes of producing meaning from artistic practices are part of accepted curatorial judgment, and they include generating and reading “Indianness” into the art as a specific add-on or as a foreign accent tacked onto a common artistic language. Does this represent the way in which

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artists from India are actually viewed by European curators? Does the “Indian” artist who produces “Indian art” fascinate Western audiences by contributing new elements to Western artistic language? Or can an artist who is part of the international art world and liberated from any cultural and ethnic aspects be considered neo-exotic? Although these contradictory positions presented from the curatorial point of view are not fixed, they do need to be seen as embedded in the wider culture of curating. While it is certainly a noble objective on the part of professional curators new to the field of artistic production in India to avoid any cultural preoccupations that the art may have, it is by no means an easy thing to achieve.

What is Indian about the art in the exhibition? Seeking India My decision to begin with the notion of “Seeking India” is a reference to the title of the exhibition Indian Highway and to the idea that underpins the different layers of meaning it generated. A highway works as a metaphor for development, mobility, and power. In addition, it conjures up images of “speed” – “high speed” and “low speed”. Different speeds on a highway, as well as on the paths that run beside it, automatically connect to different temporalities, such as “contemporaneity” and “belonging”. All these references are immediately brought to mind in the title Indian Highway, a title which Hans Ulrich Obrist came up with at the very end of their research after the concept for the exhibition had been finalised and the artists selected (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Specifically, the metaphor of the “highway” itself can include many kinds of mobility, speed, and movement, as well as new technologies of different kinds (ibid.). Since the highway demonstrates the dynamism of Indian society, it also implies that there are people who are on as well as off the highway (ibid.). The curators’ intentions are clearly represented in the title, the curatorial concept, the exhibition format, and the overall topic of the exhibition, which may or may not be obvious to an outsider. Even more important for this discussion is the fact that titles obviously create expectations about what the exhibition is about, or in Kvaran’s words, “Great titles, they tend to give a certain kind of extra push to exhibitions!” (ibid.). Against this backdrop, it was crucial to understand more of what the curators themselves had learned through their research on Indian contemporary art and whether anything unexpected had affected their original plans. For example, Kvaran explained that in addition to India, they had originally planned to cover larger parts of South Asia, including neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Pakistan, but once they acknowledged that this would be too much, they decided to include these areas in the catalogue through additional sections at the end (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Furthermore, they hoped that different venues could create links to neighbouring cultures, such as the city of Lahore in Pakistan, for example, which had an art school that was very important and influential for the Indian contemporary art scene (ibid.). In Pakistan, as Virginia Whiles (2010) explores, miniature painting has become a central medium for contemporary artists to engage with the world and its realities of national and international political, historical, and cultural tension; this provides a contrast to India, where such interactions are left to the tourist industry. The “critical artistic modality striving to address contemporary predicaments” (Ifthikhar Dadi 2008, 203) practiced by Iftikhar Dadi, the art historian, artist, and curator, along

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with Elizabeth Dadi and others in Karachi during the 1990s, engaged “the vitality of the popular urban visualities” commenting “in their practices on the visual theatrics of violence, urban identity, and critique of nationalism” (ibid.). And, as Dadi explains, it is pertinent to situate the links between India and Pakistan in the field of art since “artists from both countries occasionally travelled and exhibited across borders in the 1970s and 1980s” (ibid.).6 In this context of mobility and travel, Pakistani contemporary art would certainly have provided an interesting link to the artistic voices presented in Indian Highway. As suggested by the title Indian Highway, the curators sought to showcase recent developments in Indian society as represented in contemporary art, which is also, of course, a participant in these developments. Thus, the curators created a particular framework through which the works would occasionally be seen. When looking at artists’ perspectives on “Indianness” in their own art, however, the gap between perceptions becomes evident; take, for example, the artist Kiran Subbaiah, whose contribution to the Indian Highway exhibition was the video Flight Rehearsals (2003).7 Subbaiah, a multimedia artist who expresses himself through a wide range of artistic forms, including photography, video, and online art, was trained in India as well as in Europe. He clearly considers himself to be a contemporary artist and explained in an interview with Girish Shahane, “I don’t think my work is not Indian. The Indianness in my work is like the Indianness in my accent. I’m not conscious of it, but it’s there. People who are not Indian tend to recognise something Indian in my work” (Shahane 2011). Subbaiah speaks of the ambiguous generation of “Indianness” on various levels in the interaction between curators and artists, including the attribution of “Indianness” and the artist’s resistance to and ultimate acceptance of but not resignation to the same. Of further interest is his experience with the international online artists group Net.art. This website has been used as a platform of resistance and as a liberalising space where an artist’s ethnic or cultural background does not play an important role in how their art is defined. Subbaiah’s solution is thus to treat “Indianness” as an “accent”, as he put it. Kvaran again noted that they “were not really thinking about the Chinese or the Indian accent or the Indianisity [Indianness] of the artworks” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Instead, it was the search for “new emerging, new dimension in art . . . in terms of aesthetics, in terms of the notion of art, in terms of materials and presentations” (ibid.). The curators were therefore consciously trying “not to have any kind of preconceived idea about the art scene” (ibid.). This reflects an important issue for the upcoming discussion but also turns out to have had an impact on the communication strategies at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. When Kvaran explained the different levels that he sees in the role of museums today – namely, being responsible for offering an experience that is new and entertaining, though not only in terms of the knowledge fabric – it is clear that communication strategies in the museum play a crucial role in attracting different groups of visitors. The desire to address the younger generation, in particular, made the internet an important communication tool for the Astrup Fearnley Museum, from which all information, including catalogues, interviews, and music could be uploaded. In this regard it became interesting to observe how visitors would understand art from India within this communicative framework. When I asked Kvaran whether he thought it would be necessary for visitors to have some prior knowledge of Indian culture in order to understand the artworks, he explained

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his understanding of knowledge production as happening through two different paths: first, from what you can read and see via your own knowledge, and second, from the additional background information provided by the museum or the context of the artwork.

The effective power of art To what degree can art mediate knowledge and produce emotional responses to India’s cultures and histories? In this section, a selection of artworks by artists Pors & Rao, Hema Upadhyay, Bharti Kher, Kiran Subbaiah, Bose Krishnamachari, and Subodh Gupta will illustrate different artistic practices and engagements with cultural products from India and their potential as relational art (Bourriaud 2002). For an anthropological analysis, Clifford Geertz would consider it important to talk about art not only in a technical and formal way – although people in the West and the modern age might find this is sufficient – but also to place art in the context of other expressions of human purpose and patterns of experience as they are sustained by religion, morality, science, and so on (Geertz 1976, 1474–1475). In his article “Art as a Cultural System”, Geertz suggests that “the definition of art in any society is never whole intra-aesthetic” (1976, 1475). In order to consider art in its local context, Geertz proposes a semiotic approach that allows one to see art objects according to their cultural significance and thus in their local context (ibid.). In his words, [Art] materialize[s] a way of experiencing; [it] bring[s] a particular cast of mind out into the world of objects, where men can look at it. The signs or sign elements – Matisse’s yellow, the Yoruba’s slash – that make up a semiotic system we want, for theoretical purposes, to call aesthetic are ideationally connected to the society in which they are found, not mechanically. (ibid., 1478)

By comparing the French artist Henri Matisse’s (1869–1954) use of colour with the wood-slash technique used by the West African Yoruba, Geertz explains that a theory of art must also be a theory of culture (1488) and claims that a semiotics of art should be an ethnography of the vehicles – signs and symbols – of meaning (1498). But can this argument be applied to contemporary art? In the case of Indian contemporary art and the realm of postproduction, “the artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives” (Bourriaud 2007, 19). Is it not the case then that the art is not restricted just to the local but, due to global circulation, is far more translocal and even transcultural? Produced for an international art market, it cannot signify a single cultural meaning. Is it not therefore appropriate to question the role of art as a cultural transmitter and to position it instead as a transcultural product that conveys various sets of knowledge and relations along aesthetic relations and cultural difference (Dohmen 2014)? In contrast to a “culturally restricted” semiotic understanding that does not fully embrace the global stance of difference in the field of contemporary art, a more practice-oriented approach has to include not only the artwork but also the artist and the viewer as agents with individual biographies and working contexts. When the anthropologist Alfred Gell responded to Geertz

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with his understanding of art not so much as a semiotic system but as a system of action, he explained “the ‘anthropology of art’ as the theoretical study of ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’” and suggested that “it has to proceed on the basis that, in relevant theoretical respects, art objects are the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents” (1998, 7). Because the objective should be “to account for the production and circulation of art objects as a function of this relational context” (1998, 11), he argues for art as a system of social relation – namely, action. This, from his perspective, “intended to change the world rather than, as Geertz would have it, encode symbolic propositions about it” (Gell 1998, 6). Since the action-centred approach to art is “preoccupied with the practical mediatory role of art objects in the social process, rather than with the interpretation of objects ‘as if’ they were texts” (ibid.), it can be stated that art serves due to its production and circulation as “vehicles of knowledge, as threads of thought that bind things and people via things to one another” (Küchler 2013, 25). This approach is an important means of conceptualising contemporary art objects as central to social-cultural processes and encounters in an exhibition space. In this regard, it is important to understand that in the first place, human agents like artists, curators, and other art experts, and visitors can express their agency when they use art objects to establish social relations. Furthermore, since many of the installations in the exhibition considered visitor participation, these social relations, I think, enable the encounters of convocation as discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote (2010). They are deeply transcultural in their substance, and they leave space for a shared aesthetic or visual language and for the agents’ ability to engage with the transformed materiality of the objects beyond a single semiotic meaning. In the relationship between circulation and meaning production, the idea that an artwork is “never completed” becomes crucial. In the context of a travelling exhibition, it is thus important to underline the laboratory effect in which permanent negotiation processes are inherent and encompass not only the artistic position or curatorial perspective, but also the different readings and interpretations of the art that emerge through each viewer. In light of this, at Astrup Fearnley Museum it seemed that Indian Highway and the different artworks in the exhibition space produced a symphony for the senses. It was not the exhibition display as such or the arrangement of the artworks, but rather an atmosphere of a specific kind created by the artworks that was important. This was also expressed by some of the visitors to the exhibition. “There was so much to see and to discover” was what a couple from Germany stated, adding that more than one visit was needed to see the entire exhibition. And indeed, many of the artworks – the video installations, the interactive works, and the paintings that were rich in detail – required time, careful observation, and, in many cases, participation. This in turn also allowed for visitor engagement with the exhibits that moved beyond relational aesthetics and towards participation (Bishop 2012). Observing the interaction with the artworks provided at the Astrup Fearnley Museum revealed that some artworks seemed to attract more visitors than others. One example is the work by Pors & Rao, Pygmies (2008), the intriguing technical aspects of which sparked a lot of reaction. At first glance, the assumed relationship between the black figures might be read as representative of India’s colonial history (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009); however, the installation was

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conceived as computer art in reference to India’s highly technological industry (ibid.). It consisted of electro-mechanical black figures that peep over the edges of twenty-five white panels and was erected in a single room to the right of the exhibition entry via the front glass door that visitors had to pass through in order to get to other parts of the exhibition on the first floor. The installation covered two walls of white empty panels, behind which the little figures were at times visible and hidden.8 When a person entered the room, these figures suddenly appeared and seemed to observe the viewer. While their appearance and disappearance were obviously related to movement sensed in front of the panels, what was interesting was that the figures moved differently, creating the illusion that they had distinct traits like shyness and curiosity. It was amusing to see visitors respond to and interact with them – some with surprise, some with curiosity. Others tried to figure out how the installation worked and attempted to play with these creatures and provoke a reaction with fast movements, blowing, or clapping. The enthusiasm for and fascination with technological advancement in art in India are related not only to the idea of development, but also to what Kvaran has said about the transmission or transformation of the Indian “element” in art. Before he mentioned the Pors & Rao installation, he argued that what they experienced was more “the ‘Indianness’ and the urgency of the transmission as being a dynamic and interesting element within the art. Something which takes the artwork a little bit further than just being an aesthetical well composed situation” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). If the transformation of the “Indian” is seen as a new feature of artistic production, then a participatory or sensorial experience in building up social interaction turned out to be central to this. In this sense, the artist can be conceived “less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations” (Bishop 2012, 2). Even though participation was not directed in all cases towards socially engaged art intended to manifest a “social turn”, it nonetheless perceived the viewer as having self-reflexive agency and goodwill towards globality (Juneja 2011, 286; Adajania 2010b). Sensorial experiences that include the awareness of cultural differences and location played a substantial role here. There was some validation for this in the interviews with museum visitors and exhibition guides at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. A German man and woman I spoke to, for instance, reacted to the exhibition with the comment that they were grateful not to have been born in countries like India. The woman mentioned her own migration experiences from Norway to Germany to explain her reaction. Art objects such as the work by Hema Upadhyay – 8 feet × 12 feet (2009) – had a particularly strong impact on this woman and her husband. Upadhyay’s installation is a container-size room whose inner walls are completely covered with little houses made out of collected material, such as small, coloured aluminium pieces. This leaves one with the impression of a slum in its physical sense and becomes even more intense as visitors are allowed to enter the confined installation that is open only on one side. The moment a group of five or so people is gathered inside the installation, the space is completely filled. More than once, I watched people immediately leave the installation as if they were fleeing from a sense of claustrophobia. The German couple also described – in addition to their fascination with the idea and their interest in the time-consuming handicraft work – a frightening feeling of constriction (2009).9 The installation evoked the idea of a dwelling and social life that is dominated by abject poverty in an urban slum. Even though

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the little huts and houses were nicely coloured and had many small details, such as antennas or satellite dishes, a consciousness of extreme poverty and lack of privacy permeated the installation, heightened by the crowded and chaotic mass of huts. While the artwork might correspond with a stereotypical notion of poor dwellers in Indian urban areas, it also communicated to the visitors the political view that the state does not care for its people or for their human rights. This is also how the German visitors I spoke to interpreted the work. At the same time, the piece generated self-reflection for these visitors on their own personal life in Europe as compared with the assumed general life conditions of people in countries like India or China, where the individual is not protected by the state. The moment contemporary art provokes such imaginings about “the Indian”, “the other” unfolds as an opposite according to which one reflects or re-defines one’s own identity – in other words, the object functions as a projection surface. Taking into account the notion of transculturality and critical transregionality, one must not only consider the “strategic and imaginative freedom . . . [sic] to link regions on the basis of elective affinities arising from common cultural predicaments, jointly faced crises, and shared choices of practice” (Hoskote 2008, 121). Instead, exhibitions and artworks, as outcomes of these transcultural practices, mobilise further transcultural entanglement at the moment of beholding. As a result, individuals engage not only with other realities and considerations of “Indian” represented in art, but also with their own personal positionality and understanding of cultural difference.

Bharti Kher Bharti Kher, who grew up and studied art in England, has lived and worked in Delhi since the 1990s. In her work, the artist uses specific Indian cultural elements and transforms them to serve global themes that are not restricted to Indian cultural contexts alone. One example is the bindi, a symbol in the Hindu tradition and public culture indicating, in a more spiritual sense, the third eye. In general, women in South Asia wear the bindi in the form of a drop on their forehead for decorative reasons but also to display their married status. Even though material objects like the bindi arise from a particular cultural system, the artist uses them in combination with various, not conventionally Indian forms and shapes and transforms the element into a global visual artistic language. For example, in An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007) (Plate 3.1), she uses green, red, and grey fabric bindi to cover a life-like heart of a whale made out of fiberglass, the latter perhaps suggesting a general global theme of sea pollution or species protection. As Nancy Adajania writes, Kher’s art spans “a range of media, including painting, sculpture, sculpture-installation, video, and photography” (2010a, 227) and is, according to the artist’s biography, “born of the intercultural experience of being a threshold figure, one who can come and go between cultures and yet never feels at home in either” (2010a, 228). In her hybrid animal-human figures (ibid.) and other works, she has explored the strangeness of a skin that grows scales at high noon; of bloodlines that abort or unpredictable genes that miscarry identity; of hybrid monsters, women who cannot help but be part-ape, part-wild cat, part-mare; of animals who pretend to be humans and humans arrested by an irresistible animality. (2010a, 226–228)

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Such transformations are as complex as the artist’s own biography and leave space for critical reflection on cultural meaning in the artistic language. Complex transcultural transformation processes are inherent in such practice and do not allow for an easy categorisation – certainly not that of “Indian”. However, as Kvaran explains, the bindi seems to him the essentially “Indian” element of the artwork, which is transformed and displaced in an original and surreal way so that it has “a mystical possibility of theme” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). What becomes clear in Kvaran’s discussion is that he is not interested in Indian art that appears in a highly abstracted form, and therefore, he did not visually connect with The Nemesis of the Nation (1993), another piece by Bharti Kher that was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London and was made out of different large-size bindis. In this work Adajania sees “a political allegory about the circularity of violence” (2010a, 231), which to Kvaran is too much of an abstraction of the cultural element of the bindi (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Thus, it seems that Kvaran’s selection of work was shaped by a search for originality in the Indian context that was not a repetition of Western abstract art but rather a transformative use of particular cultural elements, such as the transition and displacement of the bindi in relation to the whale’s heart. The bindi work and its symbolic abstraction has been transformed in Kher’s practice in various ways and developed “from mandala-like patterns injected with rogue bindis, to skies pricked with stars, to satellite images, to lands bleached by the sun or clogged by sludge” or are “conceptually like performance pieces, recording the single gesture of millions of women all over India every morning pasting bindis on their foreheads” (2010a, 231). This kind of artistic language as it bridges the gap between an Indian and a global context is what makes the exhibited artworks interesting. This refers in some way to what Adajania describes as “Kher’s ability to parody myth and convention, to deploy visual puns and earthy proverbs generously lathered in wit and scatology . . . visible even at this incipient phase of her practice” (2010a, 229). Adajania observes that Kher’s works “perform a wider philosophical interrogation of the human subject, problematizing the foundations of human identity and questioning the implied supremacy of humankind over other species”, and she concludes that “we may view animality, in her work, from an ethical, scientific, and anthropological perspective rather than a theological one” (2010a, 230). Besides Kher’s installations of monsters and paintings, including, for example, her humorous take on the Indian domestic space in her exhibition Private Softness of Skin shown at Bose Pacia Gallery in New York (2000), she has been working in gigantic formats and sizes (like the whale heart) which, as she explained in an interview with Nancy Adajania, fascinates her because it traverses everything else that has been “seen now, heard and made” (2010a, 237). I like to think of extreme ideas that stem from my own narratives, that challenge me in terms of production, process, and belief. I approach art-making quite specifically. Form and a visual aesthetic is where I start, but then the search for that sign which carries more than it should, is part of the challenge. Suddenly this enormous whale heart looks like a pair of floating bollocks and a carbuncle dragged from the bottom of the ocean. (ibid.)

But how do visitors process the transition of local knowledge into a global artistic language?

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Bose Krishnamachari In our conversation, Gunnar Kvaran addressed the work Ghost/Transmemoir (2007) by the Kerala-born and Mumbai-based artist and independent curator Bose Krishnamachari.10 The work Ghost/Transmemoir (2007) contained film footage of everyday life in Mumbai and video interviews with residents about their city installed in 108 used tiffin boxes that visitors could listen to through headphones. It comprises “two rows of dabbas, the steellunchboxes [sic] delivered to office workers and others in Mumbai by the famous dabbawallahs [lunch box couriers]” (Desai 2016, 108). But according to Kvaran, the work could be challenging for viewers, because if one did not know that everybody in Mumbai (and elsewhere in India) uses these boxes for their packed lunch, “you miss half of the piece” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Krishnamachari confronts the viewer in this large-scale multimedia installation through various video statements from inhabitants of Mumbai. These statements answer the question “What does Mumbai mean to you?” and, according to the description in the exhibition space, give voice to “their thoughts, celebrations, frustrations, religions and emotions”. “This installation reflects on the intimate workings of the city that functions as an organism, one which is pulsating with energy and life, but which is always hungry and all-consuming” (Lokhandwala 2010, 153). The conceptual connection between the title of the installation and the interviews in the tiffin boxes is that Mumbai, “according to Bose, is peopled with ghosts and faceless people made invisible by the system, for example the dabbawalas who deliver meals on time” (ibid.). As an archive of its own, the installation provides knowledge of the everyday and of local social groups on the micro level in an Indian cityscape that is in general invisible. With the transformation of daily objects into visual artistic language, the artist opens new spaces of interrogation and human relations. But Kvaran assumes that without some basic background information, visitors might have problems understanding the underlying story. Here he sees that the main responsibility of interaction lies with the museum, which is “preoccupied with the communication, that’s why we have mediators in the space, that’s why we have the . . . guides on Sundays, that’s why we have the catalogue, the telephone and everything” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009).

Subodh Gupta Subodh Gupta’s artistic practice is strongly influenced by his cultural background. Born in the Indian state of Bihar in 1964, Subodh Gupta calls himself a “Bihari” artist. He has been a professional artist since the 1980s, but it was only in the first decade of the current millennium that he became particularly successful in the international art scene. Gayatri Sinha, an art historian and critic, explains that Gupta’s usage of “symbols of pre-modern or low-tech India – neem twigs, cowdung pats, cycles and scooters cast in bronze – as well as huge, shiny stainless steel buckets and kitchen racks” speaks of “evolving aspirations in an India on the brink of its encounter with globalization” (Sinha 2008b, 2). Subodh Gupta works with different materials with a range of cultural meanings. For example, when he used cow dung in one of his first installations, My Mother and Me (1997), he not only drew upon memories from his childhood, in which cow dung held a deep cultural, ritualistic, and religious meaning, but

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he also reconstructed the idea of “home” through his artistic language. He explained in an interview that: When I was a child, my mother would send me out to get things for her pooja, including cow dung. I’d seen how it was covered and stored across India, and I used the memory of those cow dung structures in my work. The difference is that I created a hollowed out space so people could walk in. (Gupta in Paul 2011).

Gupta also works with other techniques, including painting, photography, and mega-installations with kitchen utensils. He uses materials that are connected with the collective memories of Indian society, and he also deals with themes that are universal while still being rooted to Indian village traditions and beliefs, such as the use of cow dung and the importance of food. His work, therefore, is a combination of local and global languages that everybody can engage with (Johnson and Poyourow 2012). Another example of the usage of material objects is Gupta’s large-scale installations made with kitchen utensils: for instance, Take Off Your Shoes and Wash Your Hands (2008), which was exhibited in the Indian Highway exhibition in Lyon, Rome, and Beijing. Gupta calls himself an idol thief “who steals from the drama of everyday life, from the kitchens, temples, streets, and other Indian realities that we may want to remember or erase” (ibid.). His major aim is to visualise real life with all its contradictions: [T]hose simple kitchen utensils are a visual paradox of the shiny attractive appearance on the surface and the emptiness inside; they show in a very accessible way the extremities of our time: the nothingness and the exuberance, and on a concrete level, the lack of the most essential ingredient of our life – food and the striking accumulation of hollow expressions of any kind. (Johnson and Poyourow 2012)

Artworks like those by Gupta represent a transition from everyday objects to artistic language and thus a particular engagement with the social and cultural situation in India and its interplay with the global. Gayatri Sinha confirms: If Gupta’s pots and plates don’t look like the conventional material of art, the questions that his art addresses nevertheless straddle important and recently-debated issues – questions of the local and global, of migration and hybridity, of low-tech versus high-tech. In fact, a recurring theme in his sculptures and paintings is the question of migration. (2008b)

It could even be argued that this is a “ready-made” in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. Indeed, Gupta’s main supporter in India, Peter Nagy, who runs the gallery Nature Morte, said in an interview: The work [by Gupta] references India and can be about India, but it still has to look hip and cool when it comes to New York or Paris. I know lots of artists [in India] who are making strong work, but their work doesn’t travel as successfully. Subodh is hitting all the right combinations of the local and

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the global. His work resonates with middle-class India but also references where he’s from, Bihar, one of the poorest regions of India. At the same time, the work participates in an international language that art audiences in New York or London can catch. (Nagy in Mooney 2007, 57)

This strong interplay between the global and the local resonates in Gupta’s transformation of personal relations or memories of his childhood and in his choice of material envisaging an identity predicated upon class, caste, migration, and consumption. However, there is a flip side to this as Zehra Jumabhoy, an art critic and art historian based in London, observes: If there was pressure on him [Gupta] to perform national stereotypes to build up recognition in global circles, there is just as much pressure not to be confined by them now. Two years ago, Gupta was applauded by the world’s press for his use of materials of supposedly “ethnic” significance – stainless steel, cow dung and brass. Lately, he has been chastised for an excessive use of these indicators. Where does the line between “Indian enough” and “international” lie? (Jumabhoy 2009)

There is a powerful tension emerging from the different temporalities and high-speed developments in the international art world that have a great influence on the success of postproduction art, and it appears here as a particular ethnification of objects, the commodification of culture, and the forms of identification in the field of contemporary art (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 140). And while for some artists the proclamation of ethnicity in their art practice illustrates a concrete strategy, it can present a dilemma for others. The anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff argued that “cultural identity, in the here-and-now, represents itself ever more as two things at once: The object of choice and self-construction, typically through the act of consumption, and the manifest product of biology, genetics, human essence” (2009, 1). Commodification of ethnicity like the postcolonial renaissance of Indianness (Ciotti 2012) is a particular strategy in the art world that goes hand in hand with the categorisation of art as, for example, “Indian”, in order to introduce new artistic practices to international institutes. However, as Gunnar Kvaran stated with regard to art production in America, China, or India – when thinking about the national identities, “it’s all about the relationship between the art and the art form and the local culture” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). The international curatorial search for “the most interesting and the most original of the Indian Contemporary Art” (ibid.) “feted Indian art; nevertheless the framing within the tropes of nation, region and even ethnicity became a consequence for country-specific shows” (Sinha 2010, 10).

Contemporary artists from India as “citizens of the world” While in Delhi in 2010, my conversations and interviews with people in the local art field presented insight into their notion of Indianness. I met several times with Meera Menezes, for example, who writes for art magazines, including Art India, and works as a curator. During our first conversation in her office, she explained the history of those who are regarded as the top contemporary Indian artists and their relation to India’s history, compared to modernist artists, for instance, of the Bengal School. Menezes noted that this generation of modern artists who felt

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an urgent need to emphasize this new state after India’s independence in 1947 were “a mixture of the West” (ibid.). But then again, the artists of her own generation, completely postcolonial and without colonial baggage, are “not interested in being seen as particularly Indian” (Meera Menezes, Delhi, 22 February 2010). Instead, understanding themselves “as citizens of the world” who had the chance to travel, they found that they had a lot in common with people abroad. We were very protected before liberalisation: we couldn’t travel so much, there were lots of restrictions . . . and we see ourselves as citizens of the world, willing to go anywhere and appropriate taking from different cultures what we want to. And not necessarily playing the Indian card. (Meera Menezes, Delhi, 22 February 2010)

The “citizen of the world” as an individual who is not burdened by colonial history might well describe the generation of contemporary artists who participated in Indian Highway. Menezes admits that “identity” still plays a role: “I cannot deny that. Identity has shaped everything that I see, the way I see, the way I do things. You know, but I don’t know whether I want to be labelled as such” (ibid.). In this regard, Menezes rejects not only the necessity, but also the legitimisation of being called “Indian”. To Gunnar Kvaran, the situation is rather clear. He forcefully explains that the generation of artists in the Indian Highway is “in fact the first generation of artists who are saying ‘We are working on the same level with the same promises as our colleagues in the Western world and in China’” (Gunnar Kvarar, Oslo, 24 July 2009). But his argument that there is a “new situation in India” with artists like Subodh Gupta, Amar Kanwar, and all the other artists in the show who “are not looking at the Western art and then coming up with their new kind of variation or version of what they have learned and seen” (ibid.) is a problematic lumping of artists together. The demands of the international art market have heavily influenced some artists, and this includes the role played by inconclusive (Jumabhoy 2009) survey exhibitions like Indian Highway. As mentioned earlier, Zehra Jumabhoy and other international curators insist that artists are “ambassadors” for what they call the “new art from India” (ibid.). And since many of the artists were actually either educated at Western art institutes, as we have seen in the case of Kiran Subbaiah, or live and work (even part-time) outside India, for the artists who are settled in international art circuits, the term “contemporary artist” is a more apt term to describe their educational and artistic situation. Others, like Raqs Media Collective, reflect on the curatorial discourse of otherness very critically when they ask “what happens to ‘Indian’ or ‘South Asian’ art when it is curated around the demands of a specifically ‘Occidental’ question?” (Raqs Media Collective 2006). Published in 2006, the Raqs Media Collective’s personal-seeming letter Once Again, To the Distant Observer, which is addressed to an anonymous reader and is posted on the collective’s homepage, suggests that there is a dissonant meaning production for Indian contemporary art in European exhibition spaces when the Indian prefix functions as a basis for invocating the alterity of an Indian other and providing at the same time its translatability. Their statement is filled with irony: We honour and acknowledge with pleasure your interest in us. Our unruly, unwieldy subcontinent is flattered with all your attention. Europe has looked at us often enough in the past, and then looked away, and then come back to look some more. And here you are once again – hovering, waiting,

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wanting to hold the gaze for a moment longer, anxious to understand what you consider to be our intensity, our loquaciousness, our excess, our austerity, our colours, our enigma, our complexity, our transparency, our soul. (ibid.)

The local and the national search for definitions has much to do with issues of identification and positioning in the context of a global contemporary situation, and the question of what the contemporary reality actually means is raised. Such engagement has to be seen in relation to the modern field of art, the postcolonial, and in relation to the manifold social fabrics and site specificity of urban metropolitan centres like Mumbai or Delhi, as well as the agricultural “heartlands” of India. In 2011, the art magazine Art & Deal (Delhi) asked the question “What Is Contemporary Indian Art/What Is Contemporary Art in India?” And while the editorial note reflected broadly that “Contemporary Indian art has become a brand” (2011, 16), it also shared observations on the fragmented realities and imaginations of the word “contemporary” and the word “India” (ibid.). This culminated in a shoring up of the existing hierarchies between “folk” and “contemporary” art created by the Western upper-middle classes, since the different meanings of the contemporary in Indian art and its diverse synonyms have likewise been inscribed into the frictions of India’s social fabric. In the same magazine issue, the cultural complexities that are read into the conceptual and metaphorical usage of “contemporary” and” India” are considered in a detailed discussion by the Bangalore-based art historian and critic H.A. Anil Kumar as “phantasmagoria” (2011, 22). Kumar formulates and hints at a linguistic issue, suggesting that “Contemporary in/of/about Indian art is a dialogue of being Indian in attitude through the eyes of an Indianised-European language, and the experience that the language demands henceforth” (2011, 21). It seems obvious to Kumar that at the centre of such phantasmagoria lies a profound disagreement when it comes to endorsing a clear picture of the meaning of contemporary Indian art (2011, 22). Drawing a connection with a linguistic and epistemological issue, this includes all kinds of cultural predicaments and historical sensitivities of inner and outer perspectives. In Kumar’s understanding one can sense an internal discourse permuting a national-focused discussion about contemporary Indian art as “basically the expectation of a presupposed ‘novel experience’ resulting from the contemplation of cultural appropriation, from what seems to be the aura of a compulsive geographical map (India)”(2011, 24). Kumar concludes that contemporary Indian art is “still Indian nationalist by heart!” (ibid.), and this serves therefore as a strong disclaimer when differentiating it from contemporary art from elsewhere and everywhere! (ibid.). At this point we enter the discourse at a conflictual yet stimulating moment. Fuelled by the international perspective on art in India, curators who are not specialised in India and are continually looking for originality and cultural authenticity shape their professional prestige and legitimacy by selecting and deciding which artists belong to the field of contemporary art. What does it mean, one might ask, for Indian society to have some artists celebrated worldwide for their Indianness when their art cannot be perceived by a large number of people in their own country because the state more or less ignores and neglects this sector of cultural production? It is only because international players can provide the institutional infrastructure and money to display art from elsewhere that a survey exhibition presents a challenge, as it can only underline the outsiders’ idea of what the Indian nation represents now. Kumar’s comments come to mind

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in reference to “internal” struggles in defining contemporary art, which is “always grounded on loose and drifting sand” and is not ‘national’ in the same way that modern Indian art is, grounded as it was in the period of political independence (Kumar 2011, 24). And here lies one of the main contradictions of projects like Indian Highway, which celebrates Indianness as the element which makes contemporary art from India so specific, even though the curators acknowledge “the urgency of the transmission as being a dynamic and interesting element within the art. Something which takes the artwork a little bit further than just being an aesthetical and artistically well composed situation” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Recalling Geeta Kapur’s argument about whether Maqbul Fida Husain can be considered a national artist, I wonder whether this is another attempt by the curators to “nationalise” contemporary art from India. In 2009, while still recovering from the global financial crisis, the situation of Indian contemporary art was still very buoyed by the international upswings of contemporary art as well as by the new nationalism within India. Indeed, this would reach a kind of apex in the first ever retrospective of the British-based and Mumbai-born artist Anish Kapoor at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, which was twinned with another show at a film studio in Mumbai in 2010. Both of these exhibitions triggered critical reflections on this “curious homecoming” (Hilty and Rose 2010). Despite the question that this show raised about whether or not India had its own influential artists, and if so “why . . . cherish a diasporic artist for the very first large show on contemporary art at the National Gallery of Modern Art?” the nationstate was still busy upholding the new forms nationalism that had been initiated by the economic liberalisation of the 1990s. In the public domain, the “Shining India program devised by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2003–4 in which an international tender for US $20 million was awarded to the advertising agency Grey Worldwide to create a ‘Shining’ India, primarily through Indian print and television channels” (Sinha 2008a, 160) was accompanied by the advertising programme “Incredible India”, which has promoted India since 2002 “as a land of beauty and abundance with touristic appeal in international media and print networks” (ibid.) (Figure 3.2). When the Delhi-based art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha argues that this rhetoric with its strong outreach creates a new visuality, a new economy, and even a new semiotics on the street, she also asks if this is “the moment for the ‘re-worlding’ of India that translates into a visually altered field” (Sinha 2008a, 161). Whereas Sinha engages at this point with the “imagistic in art” and a “new slew of pointers for inspiration and political engagement” (ibid.), she also recapitulates that since the 1990s, the “map of concerns has changed” also in the work of Indian artists (163). Despite a curatorial vision which avoids accentuating contemporary art practice in India as something special compared to other contemporary art, the loose usage of the word “Indian” reveals its power as a canonising category that combines a large diversity of art production under one label and in the light of neoliberal nationalism. The risk of the curatorial conceit of survey exhibitions, as Sarat Maharaj had stressed during the Indian Highway conference in London, is ever present. In this manner it remains less convincing when the curator Gunnar Kvaran recognises “the relationship between the art and the art form and the local culture. That kind of . . . dialogue and dynamics, which it produces” (Oslo, 24 July 2009). This is underscored when, in the same breath, he cites the success of China Power Station (2006–2007) as an impetus for other regional

Figure 3.2 Street View. Tourist Map, New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2014)

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initiatives and a factor in deciding “to do the Indian Highway and then we are thinking about the Middle East and then we are about preparing a new chapter, which will be Europe” (ibid.). In line with the earlier discussion, we can observe the limitations and pitfalls of this kind of contemporary geoaesthetic mapping (Bublatzky 2018, 318), especially when Kvaran explains that they were looking for something interesting that they could add to the notion of art and to their knowledge about contemporary art “in terms of aesthetics, in terms of the notion of art, in terms of materials and presentations” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). What we can learn from this is that the curators made the assumption about the cultural basis of art as an important aspect that influences art everywhere in the world, including art from China, America, India, Europe, and the Middle East. Their understanding is that this cultural contextualisation provides a similar “post-conceptual artistic situation” (ibid.) and distinguishes art practice from the “whole notion of globalisation [that] has taken over the art world” during the last ten years (ibid.). In other words, this position reflects, on the one hand, the notion of diversity within the context of the globalised world and, on the other, its ambiguous relation to homogenising tendencies that have in turn generated critique.

Critique of Indian Highway At the first venue in London, criticism of Indian Highway often centred around artists whose work was deemed to look “Indian enough” but was not really “good”. The journalist Charles Darwent, in particular, stated that the materiality of the objects used in the installations by Subodh Gupta and Bose Krishnamachari were representative of their “Indianness”: What makes Date by Date [by Subodh Gupta] different from these other works is its national specificity: this is Indian art because its subject and materials are Indian. Likewise, Bose Krishnamachari’s Ghost/Transmemoir differs from all the other screen-of-talking-monitor installations you’ll have seen, in that its screens are held in used tiffin tins, hang from hemp rope and speak Hindi. (Darwent 2008)

Darwent finds even clearer words to explain why this exhibition failed when he expresses his discomfort: To edit the entirety of India’s contemporary art down to 20 or so practitioners is to fall into the trap of imposing order on a thing that will just not have order imposed upon it. The result is that we come away from the Serpentine with the idea that Indian art is a pallid form of Western art, albeit with a mild curry flavour – a view so exquisitely patronising as to make you wince. If, after 61 years of independence, India’s artists are still preoccupied with colonial attitudes, then Indian Highway explains why. (ibid.)

This critique proposes that a show that claims to represent a foreign nation by a particular selection of artists must irrevocably fail when it tries to categorise art from that country. When the artists on display dominantly speak the language of Western contemporary art, in contrast to the curators’ endeavour to present India-specific art, expectations will be dashed. Instead of finding particularly Indian art, the situation turns into an occasion of exhibiting substandard Western art.

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In this regard, the curators, as the journalist argued, did a disservice to artists and visitors alike. The journalist’s awareness of the topic of mimicry by a former colonised people also catapults the discussion back into the realm of the senseless, since this is a topic that has been identified as overdone in early postcolonial debate. When asked, Gunnar Kvaran was sceptical of this kind of critique in London. He referred to the “different kind of culture of criticism in London” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009), a centre in an elitist art world, compared with the “progressive” museum in Oslo where such critiques were rather rare. In his opinion, the quality of London art critics is uneven, and there are only a very few that he would call “good” (ibid.). For instance, many would not review an entire project or read the catalogue, and because of this negligence, they were often not aware of the curatorial concept of the travelling exhibition, the new curatorial perspectives at each venue, or the “show within the show”, which were all crucial aspects of the Indian Highway project. As a sort of counter-perspective to Kvaran, I will turn once again to my research stay in Delhi in February 2010 and to the insights provided in conversation with two young curatorial assistants working, at the time, at the private Devi Art Foundation. One of the curators had seen the exhibition in London and not only confirmed the critical public opinion, but also expressed her own disappointment with the show. She had engaged intensively with Indian Highway while studying at Sotheby’s College of Art in London and was asked to review it. While sitting in the office at the Devi Art Foundation, leafing through the exhibition catalogue, she responded with some of her own ideas on the exhibition and how she had experienced it. In her opinion, the show “did not work” because it did not project the country, it did not talk about the history or even “why these artists were making this what they are making” (young curator, Delhi, 25 February 2010). She referred to the common criticism that, at the Serpentine especially, the show “was all put up wrong and it was cluttered, there was no space in the gallery to move around” (young curator, Delhi, 25 February 2010). She later described her experiences by describing how contentious the show seemed to her and how it provoked mixed feelings when she walked through it (ibid.). These feelings ranged from being overwhelmed by Amar Kanwar’s work, which she had written about, to feelings of confusion when confronted with Kiran Subbaiah, whose work she had not encountered before. In general, she had to ask herself what Indianness was and what she was expecting of India “because suddenly everything seemed so Western in the show” (ibid.). The curator’s impression, and even disappointment, that the artworks in the show appeared so Western is a very crucial reaction and observation. The exhibition made her question “Indianness” and reflect upon her own expectation of Indian art and what she “imagined India to produce” (ibid.). The particular selection of artists, artworks, and their artistic practices were confusing, particularly because many were new to her and were working with themes that were unfamiliar to her. This illustrates, as noted earlier, that the exhibition gave artists from India a visibility that they may not have had in their home country before. And it was even more problematic to her that a number of artworks and artists had never been shown in India, but only in Europe. Thus, her confusion and her opinion that the show was controversial also underscore the gap between the circulation and perception of Indian art in its national context and in an international one. In this sense, the exhibition with its

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thematic title and selection of artworks cannot be seen to represent India. Taken literally, many of the artworks do not even originate in India and were not made for an Indian audience and art market, but for a European one. She was very sensitive to this complex situation, not only from a personal but also from a professional point of view, and this perception became even clearer when she described her feelings of alienation with the performance by Nikhil Chopra, which she experienced as being “packaged in a quite Western context” and declared that “the entire idea of a performance just seemed like something I couldn’t relate to” (young curator, Delhi, 25 February 2010). Critical voices like these are crucial when discussing the exhibition as a space in which a particular meaning of art is created. That the exhibition caused her to reflect on “Indianness” in the context of Indian Highway and in contemporary art in general may, at least, be seen as a successful innovation. But the fact that her expectations that the exhibition would represent the country adequately were disappointed also have to be considered. Although it is important to consider the curatorial consciousness that one show could never tell the whole truth about Indian contemporary art (Gunner Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009), my conversation with the young curator makes it clear that a little bit more truth and information about contemporary art from India would have been essential for at least some of the visitors. It has also become clear that many of the expectations surrounding the exhibition were concretely triggered by its title and its aim of presenting a snapshot of the recent generation of Indian artists. This was a challenge that the young curator I spoke to could relate to in her own experience of setting up an exhibition on contemporary art from Pakistan where she faced exactly the same challenge of not confirming a preconceived notion of what Pakistani art would be (young curator, Delhi, 25 February 2010).

The “laboratory” effect Gunnar Kvaran explained that after The Uncertain States of America (2005) and China Power Station (2007) the curators realised the impossibility of a single exhibition on the entire contemporary art scene in India. Additionally, they established a new curatorial model in order to engage the multiplicity of the art within the exhibitionary structure. This is why they decided that the works in the show would change from London to Oslo and at the other venues “by the interference and the evaluation and the work of the local curators in each of the venues where it goes” (Gunner Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Thus, the plan was that local curators would add their own perspectives and touches to the exhibition by changing its narrative theme. This referred also to the process of transformation that largely occurred after the exhibition left the main organising institutes of the Serpentine Gallery and the Astrup Fearnley Museum and when the local curators developed their own subjectivity towards Indian contemporary art. In addition to this, Kvaran emphasised their concern with finding a certain kind of Indian dialogue with the exhibition (ibid.), one that they first envisioned by inviting Raqs Media Collective to the “show within the show” in London. In his view the collective provided another important dimension of Indian art when they noted “You forgot that there is a video/media dimension in Indian art that is neglected in your . . . selection” (ibid.). In Oslo they invited Bose Krishnamachari, who contributed an exhibition with artists from Mumbai in order to be “up-to-date on the Mumbai situation” (ibid.). For this additional

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exhibition, Bose Krishnamachari invited eight artists11 to his section entitled On the Road to the Next Milestone (Plate 4.3), where he addressed the highway as a kind of infrastructure. His curatorial note says: The national highway constitutes the lifeline of the country’s mobility. It does not exist in isolation. It connects with the cultural arteries of the country and contributes a significant amount to intellectual exchanges. The highways are fed by smaller roads from the interiors, villages, cities and metros that are as much a vehicle of support for the highway farers as they are to those who confine themselves to short distances. (cited in Nair 2010)

Unfortunately, the curatorial note was not available in the exhibition space, which also made it difficult for the visitor to understand that this section was an artist’s curated show. Kvaran also confessed his initial doubts with this selection of artists, but when they came into the exhibition with Krishnamachari, he became convinced that it would give richness to the show (Gunner Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). The curator Vidya Shivadas, whose writings I have referenced several times, is an expert on Indian art and is a part of the up-and-coming young art scene in Delhi. Shivadas belongs to “a new breed of art intellectual who has been propelled, by due diligence and good fortune, to the forefront of a maturing critical debate about the kind of art that is coming out of India right now” (Punj 2012). After studying fine art at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, followed by a short stop at the daily newspaper The Indian Express, Shivadas was appointed curator at the private art gallery Vadehra Gallery (established in 1987) in 2002, where she is responsible for the artistic and exhibition programme. In 2007, she worked in cooperation with the Vadehra Art Gallery (Figure 3.3) and the philanthropic and non-profit organisation Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). I met Vidya Shivadas for the first time in 2010 and then regularly over the next few years of my research. She generously shared with me her profound knowledge and insight into the vibrant field of art institutions in India, their relation to art practices, and her own critical expertise in curation and contemporary art in India. Vidya Shivadas also spoke about her own understanding of the Indian Highway exhibition. As one of the contact persons advising Julia-Peyton Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Gunnar Kvaran during their research visits to Delhi, she gained significant insight into the project. When we sat together in the bookshop of the Vadehra Art Gallery in Defence Colony in Delhi (Figure 3.4), Shivadas explained the entire concept of the “show within the show” from her point of view, describing it as a “laboratory”. She stated that Obrist’s whole idea of the exhibition was that of an open system that keeps on mutating and changing and in which the curator presents a starting point to unleash something with the input that comes in (Vidya Shivadas, Delhi, 22 February 2010). “It becomes a kind of de-centred, fragmented experience with institutions, with artists” with everyone who contributes to it (ibid.). In this sense she believes that the curators “don’t begin at the end of the process that is summing up all the knowledge and then presenting the show”. Instead, “they begin from the beginning and the exhibition itself is a laboratory and an open ended process, that . . . – like by the time it returns to India – will probably be a point, where all the knowledge sort of gets accumulated, presents something” (ibid.).

Figure 3.3 Vadehra Art Gallery. Defence Colony, New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Figure 3.4 Vadehra Art Gallery. Bookstore, Defence Colony, New Delhi.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

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The idea of the “exhibition as a laboratory” thus sees the exhibition as an experimental space in which new dialogues are created between curators, artists, and visitors. Understanding the exhibition as an open system hints at an understanding of the space as democratic, one in which not just a single voice, that of the curator, tells a true story, but also where there is a polyphony, as noted by Hans Ulrich Obrist. In this context, the concept of having different curatorial teams that set up the exhibition at each new venue is another factor that contributes to the notion of the exhibition as a laboratory. The promoting of the laboratory paradigm as a curatorial modus operandi is a “direct reaction to the type of art produced in the 1990s: Work that is open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be “work-in-progress” rather than a completed object” (Bishop 2004, 52). The “laboratory effect” was an admission on the part of the main curators about not beginning with a clear definition of Indian contemporary art and representing final knowledge about artistic practice in India. Despite all the critique of the “Westernised view”, the curatorial endeavour as an innovation to break common norms of perceiving non-Western art is worth noting. These thoughts were conflated in Gunnar Kvaran’s enthusiasm when he outlined the challenges of curating the exhibition, as well as the new possibilities. He admitted that it could have been easy “to pick out some Indian artists and say here is Indian contemporary art” (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009), but “it’s interesting that the curatorial model can also have a semiological transmission” (ibid.). The chosen module of the exhibition as a laboratory, with its travelling format, changes in the exhibited artists and artworks, and the “show within the show” reveals the curators’ reflectivity when they admit the impossibility of doing justice to the complexity of contemporary art production in India. By opening the format and sending the show to eight or nine places, they hoped to have in the end something that they could explain as their presentation of contemporary Indian art (ibid.). Thus, the curators saw their role as initiators and dialogue partners with the different institutions and the different artists who made their selections, indicating “their thoughts and evaluation of the artistic situation in India” (ibid.). To conclude this chapter, the conversation with Gunnar Kvaran and the insight he provided on the processes of curating Indian Highway was an important turning point that allowed me to better understand that their strategy and aim were to “get a quite important and interesting view on what was happening in India and where it was happening” (ibid.).

Notes 1 On 29 September 2012, the museum moved to a new building designed by the star Italian architect Renzo Piano at the Oslo Strandpromenade. 2 In Oslo, the catalogue was the same as in London. It was available in the museum shop at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in addition to an online catalogue and smaller booklets about Indian Highway. 3 For photographs documenting the performance, see Nikhil Chopra’s website: www.nikhilchopra.net/ home/?paged=3 (accessed 18 January 2019). 4 Beside the sofas that were placed in the middle of the room, bookshelves with art catalogues and other art books lined the glass wall towards Dronningens gate, and at the left side of the entrance, artworks for sale, including Subodh Gupta’s Twins (2008) (price £2,500), Dayanita Singh’s C-print Dream Villa II (2008) (price £143,750), and a digital print by Nalini Malani, entitled After T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (2008) (price £150), were displayed.

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5 An art historian by training, Gunnar Kvaran received his doctorate from the University of Provence in 1986. Subsequently, he became director of the Ásmundur Sveinsson Sculpture Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland (1983–1989), the Reykjavik Museum of Art (1989–1997), and the Bergen Museum of Art (1997–2001). During this time, he curated/commissioned the Icelandic Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia (1984, 1986, 1988, 1990) and worked as a lecturer, curator, and chairman in museums, at conferences, and at associations in the international art world. 6 See other writings on Pakistani art by, for example, Iftikhar Dadi (2010), Salima Hashmi (2015), and Simone Wille (2017), as well as countless other well-known artists such as Bani Abidi, Sajjad Ahmed, Naiza Khan, and Rashid Rana and many international exhibitions on modern and contemporary Pakistani art. 7 See a photograph showing a scene of the video by Kiran Subbaiah in the Indian Highway catalogue (Madden and Phillips 2008, 115). 8 For photographs of the installation, see the website of Pors & Rao: www.porsandrao.com/work/?workid=21 (accessed 11 January 2019). 9 The names of the German couple were not used for reasons of data protection. 10 For an image, see https://waysofcurating.withgoogle.com/exhibition/indian-highway-fearnley (accessed 19 February 2019). 11 The artists were Anant Joshi, Avinash Veeraraghavan, Prajakta Potnis, Riyas Komu, Shilpa Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, Sumedh Rajendran, and Vivek Vilasini.

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Paul, Satarupa, “Rethinking the Home, via Art.” The Sunday Guardian, October 13, 2011. www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/rethinking-the-home-via-art. Punj, Rajesh, “Role of the Curator in Maturing Indian Art Scene: Interview Vidya Shivadas.” Art Radar Asia (blog). January 4, 2012. http://artradarjournal.com/2012/01/04/role-of-the-curator-in-maturingart-scene-interview-vidya-shivadas/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Raqs Media Collective, Once Again, To the Distant Observer. 2006. https://www.raqsmediacollective.net/ images/pdf/3568e0a5-3180-4c82-9f2a-5028fe5e202a.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019). Robinson, Jenny, Ordinary Cities. Transferred to digital pr. Questioning Cities Series. London: Routledge, 2010. Shahane, Girish, “Being AntiKiran.” Art India, 2011. www.artindiamag.com/quarter01_01_11/interviewGirishShahane01_01_11.html. Shivadas, Vidya, Vadehra Art Gallery, Bookstore, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 22, 2010. Sinha, Gayatri, “Cartographic Necessities: Contemporary Practices and the Making of a Brave New World.” In Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation, edited by Shaheen Merali, 160–172. London: Saqi Books, 2008a. ———, “On His Biotic Metal Train Installation Artist Subodh Gupta, a Railway Guard’s Son, Outsells a Husain in Foreign Art Marts.” March 17, 2008b. www.outlookindia.com/magazine/pwa_story_ first/236977 (accessed February 19, 2019). ———, “Introduction: New Persuasions in Contemporary Indian Art.” In Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 8–24. Mumbai: Radhika Sabavala, 2010. Whiles, Virginia, Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Wille, Simone, Modern Art in Pakistan: History, Tradition, Place. London: Routledge, 2017. Young female curator, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 25, 2010.

4 “There might be an Indian background, but the theme is global” HEART Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning 2010

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ndian Highway was the first exhibition of Indian contemporary art in Denmark and was promoted as a “groundbreaking exhibition reflecting how the Western art market is in the process of being replaced by a global art market” (HEART Museum 2010). Even though the curatorial note partly addressed the same topics as the earlier ones in London and Oslo, visitors were also introduced to the political and social commitment of the artists. This curatorial capture had an important impact and led to the discussion of the exhibition as a transcultural contact zone. Before I travelled to Denmark, I conducted a field trip to Delhi in 2010 (see Chapter 3). In Delhi I became acquainted with members of the local art community. I met curator Vidya Shivadas from Vadehra Gallery, the art writer and curator Meera Menezes from the magazine Art India, Shukla Sawant from the School of the Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), and the gallery owner Peter Nagy, who runs Nature Morte. The insights I gained into the local art scene in Delhi, the galleries, the public and private museums, and the localities of some of the artists’ studios, taken together, supported an impression of the “art infrastructure” in India as being very fragmented. There was no particular area or “creative sector” where most of the institutes or galleries were located. Some areas had only just begun to become “art areas”, including Hauz Khaz and Lado Sarai, former “urban villages” with few paved roads and small shops but low rents (at that time) where, in the last few years, many new galleries have opened. Established galleries like the Vadehra Art Gallery are located in Defence Colony, a residential area; national institutes and museums, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Indira National Centre for the Arts, and the National Museum, are situated near the national monument, India Gate. Recently established private foundations of contemporary art, such as the Kiran Nadar Museum and the Devi Art Foundation, are located in the newer areas of the city like the Select City Walk Mall in Saket, near which the International Artists’ Association Khoj also has its offices in Khirki, and in new urban sectors like Gurgaon in the southeastern area of Delhi. In addition to visits to the local art infrastructure and the major art institutes, interviews and meetings with members of the local art scene in Delhi allowed me to gain a better understanding of the nature of the art scene in Delhi as well as the critiques of and opinions on Indian Highway. In this chapter, the anthropological researcher (namely, myself) is situated as an agent in the exhibition space who actively contributes to practices of translating artworks and transmitting

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a certain kind of knowledge. In Herning, an invitation to attend and contribute to a talk and a tour of the exhibition provided another mode of ethnographic research that included collaboration, participant observation, and group conversations with visitors. Accordingly, the quality of the exhibition space as a contact zone and a place not only where visitors engage with the exhibition and the art objects, but also where experts and researchers interact with local agents such as the curators, assistants, journalists, artists, visitors, and art objects is emphasised. What do these interactions look like when they define a field of cultural production across cultural and geographical borders? How do they contribute to translational practices and meaning production? To properly discuss these questions, it is important to take the specific site of the museum into consideration and to draw attention to the spatial and cultural border crossings that visitors pass through when they arrive at a museum, enter the exhibition space, and engage with art through looking. The conversations and interviews I conducted with various people in the exhibition space provided further insight into its background. These included practical aspects such as organising such an exhibition, as well as how this relates to the way local agents – the curator – experience the process of curating, selecting, and arranging artworks. In the second part of this chapter, I will illustrate how these experiences influence the curator’s personal opinion and engagement with the art and the exhibition. Though this does not always correspond with the official curatorial capture, the notions that “art can move” and can have “emotional effectiveness” can turn into central ideas. This assumption relates to curatorial and personal experience, not only in the exhibition space, but also in the preparation phase. Stinna Toft is one of the few local curators of Indian Highway who travelled with the main curatorial board to India for curatorial research. When exploring the assumption that the curatorial presentation of artistic practice influences the shape of Indian Highway at its different venues, I will ask how curatorial subjectivity has an impact on the processes of meaning production with regard to the art objects. But first, I will begin by introducing the exhibition as a transcultural contact zone.

Arrival at HEART Museum When the curator, Stinna Toft, invited me for the opening as well as for a talk about the ethnographic project on Indian Highway in the museum’s auditorium, followed by a guided exhibition tour with visitors afterwards, I turned from a researcher into a participant observer. The empirical insights into the exhibition site, the curatorial conceits, the predicaments of organising an exhibition on Indian contemporary art in Denmark, as well as the perceptions of the visitors offered an opportunity to reconsider the museum and the exhibition as a contact zone. Building the argument of the museum as a transcultural contact zone implies that it is not just the curators, but also the institutional concerns, that have an impact on the decision-making processes in selecting artists and artworks and the information strategies for the exhibition space. This raised the following question: How does one approach an exhibition as a space where knowledge is mediated? Together with an ethnographic description of the HEART Museum in Denmark as the hosting institute, the major aim here will be to refer again to the relation between space and art. Can an exhibition be considered a contact zone between visitors and art? Is it useful to conceptualise art alongside “transculturality” and “translocality”?

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Earlier, I mentioned the curatorial capture of addressing the art objects according to the artists’ political and social commitments. This raised certain questions: What does art communicate to the beholder? And does art translate social and cultural knowledge? These questions, which were discussed in conversations with Stinna Toft, the Danish journalist, a young female staff member, and other visitors, have contributed to the interpretation of the museum as a cultural contact zone. While investigating an exhibition in which Indian artworks present significant objects of engagement and observing as a participant observer its interrelations with the museum space, the artworks and the visitor reactions turned out to be of major interest for this chapter. And since “museums negotiate a nexus between cultural production and consumption, and between expert and lay knowledge” (MacDonald and Fyfe 1996, 4), the following discussion also envisages that the inner part of the museum is not unrelated to the outside environment that visitors pass through before entering a museum and a specific exhibition. Travellers who have been to India and know that the traffic in the cities can be exhausting, and at times even dangerous, might recognise the experience of haste and anxiety when attempting to cross a highway in an Indian city. Cars are speeding in every direction, and several attempts are needed to cross safely to the other side of the road. For the uninitiated, the traffic looks like complete chaos: wild sounds and smells, cars, auto-rickshaws, buses, bikes, pedestrians, cows, and dogs, all moving and trying to make their way in different directions. Urban India’s noisy and hectic street scene has few equals, and Herning, the small town in the Danish Central Jutland region which is home to the HEART Museum, is certainly not one of them. This region, mostly known for its knitwear industries and as a centre for trade fairs, was selected as the national industrial heritage site in 2012,1 a reflection of its important role in the regional economy as well as the local art scene. Since its inauguration in 1977, the art museum was located at the shirt factory Angli, which was built by local industrialist and art collector Aage Damgaard in 1939. Damgaard’s fascination with art was also the reason he engaged artists to come to his Angli factory building. With the aim of demonstrating that art could conquer social space, Damgaard forged close relations between local business people and artists. This cooperation led to the foundation of the Biennale Socle du Monde (since 2002), which is organised by the HEART Museum in collaboration with members of the local business community. In 2009, the museum moved to a new building designed by the American architect Steven Holl, located in Birk, a business area in Herning where the Angli factory has been based since the 1960s. The HEART Museum has an impressive collection of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s works, which he donated after two stays at the Angli factory in the early 1960s; the museum, of course, also contains Aage Damgaard’s own impressive collection of twentieth-century art. The new museum at Birk Centerpark in Herning is a flat structure built of white concrete with a curved roof of interwoven parts which come together to form a dynamic shape that is reminiscent of an abstracted T-shirt. Birk Centerpark, a business area, is portioned off from the rest of Herning city. It takes a long walk or a trip by bus or car to get there; once you arrive, there is not much to see aside from a sculpture park grouped around some buildings. It is a flat, windy area consisting at first glance of empty streets, big grassy spaces, and a large sandy parking space opposite the street that leads to the HEART Museum. Although the museum building stands out because of its

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Figure 4.1 HEART Museum of Contemporary Art. Birk Centerpark in Herning.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

architecture and bright whiteness, it also seems out of place, and it presents a deep contrast with other lively cultural areas around the world that contain museums or shops and are frequented by art lovers and parents with strollers. The notion of “wideness” and “emptiness” might not be unusual for Denmark, which is often characterised by its wide and lonely landscapes. However, the unexciting and “deserted” environment around the museum at Birk Centerpark formed a stark contrast to the exhibition and its subject (Figure 4.1). The only sign announcing the exhibition on that day was a small poster in bright pink and yellow colours – from the publicity material of Indian Highway – which was put up on the streetlamp nearby. As the pictures show, there were no walk-in visitors who dropped in as they passed by; instead visitors came specifically and specially for the exhibition, and most of them were already members of the museum club. On the evening of the opening, however, many more people attended, including the initiating curators, the Indian ambassador to Denmark, art collectors and promoters, journalists, and two of the participating artists, Anita Dube and Bose Krishnamachari.

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Visitors reach the entrance of the museum by following a sandy path from the street. There is no direction signage to the museum, and no information is provided about the architecture of the building or the exhibition on display. Entering the building, visitors are confronted with a large foyer designed in a classical “white cube” manner with white walls (Plate 4.1). The foyer, with its information desk and small museum shop (left of the Indian Highway title) leads off into several exhibition rooms. Opposite the information desk, a room is used for temporary exhibitions that include objects from the permanent collection. To the right of this room is an auditorium for talks, performances, and film shows; here, the new “show within the show” curated by Shilpa Gupta was on display. To the left of the information desk, the main exhibition hall was accessible via an automatic sliding door flanked by Dayanita Singh’s large-format photograph Dream Villa 11–2007 (2008), depicting an urban landscape plunged into bluish darkness and intercepted by a cross of lit-up streets. Through the fascinating play of light, the shapes and lights materialise as the epitome of the highway, transforming the ordinary unknown city from an erratic, chaotic space into a mysterious one. With this photograph on the left, and the introductory text to Indian Highway containing some general explanations of the institutional origin on the right, visitors were welcomed into a large hall (Plate 4.2). In contrast to the earlier show in Oslo, the artworks exhibited in the main exhibition hall included a number of new artists: Jayashree Chakravarty’s Untitled 1 (The Evolving Space) (2009); Anita Dube’s Ah (a Sigh) (2008); Jagannath Panda’s God and Goat (2007); new works by Subodh Gupta, including Curry (2005); and Sudarshan Shetty’s Untitled (Double Cow from the Show Love) (2006). Turning to the right at the main entrance, a second exhibition room was accessible. From this section, another door led back to the hallway and from there onwards to two rooms which were reserved for the special curatorial module of Indian Highway, the “show within the show”. One room curated by Bose Krishnamachari and entitled On the Road to the Next Milestone (Plate 4.3) was also exhibited at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. It included works by the artists Anant Joshi and Sumedh Rajendran, along with Riyas Komu’s large-scale sculptures, Left Leg Series (2008), which were made out of concrete, steel, and salvaged teak from Kerala. There were also works by Prajakta Potnis, Sudarshan Shetty, Avinash Veeraraghavan, and Vivek Vilasini, whose photo collage Between One Shore and Several Others (Just What Is It . . . after Richard Hamilton) (2008) was included (Plate 4.4). In addition to this, Stinna Toft invited the artist Shilpa Gupta to curate a new section. Gupta’s section featured video works by Nikhil Chopra, Baptist Coelho, Sunil Gupta, Tushar Joag, Sonia Khurana, Nalini Malani, Kiran Subbaiah, and Vivan Sundaram, which were screened in the auditorium hall. Besides the exhibition rooms, the museum contained a reading and media lounge with exhibition catalogues and publications, as well as some video works that were part of the Indian Highway exhibition. At times visitors seemed rather unprepared; some even hesitated to enter the hall, waiting at the entrance as if they had to become used to the orchestra of sight and sounds filling the space, since the milky glass door did not allow one to perceive a preliminary picture. Of course, not all the visitors felt such disorientation, but the reaction marks a specific moment, almost like the liminal phase of transition mentioned by the anthropologist Victor Turner (1977) that marks a

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crossing from one cultural space to another. To better illustrate the importance of this “transitional” moment, I have gone to some lengths to describe the spatial locality of the museum. In doing so, I wish to emphasise the meaning of moments of engagement within the exhibition space that go beyond the notion of a system of visual representations (Hall 1997) in which reading and interpreting cultural signs encourage strategies of imagining and identifying an “other”. Instead, and as some of the artists critically deal with themes inherent to Indian culture which are at the same time interlinked with more global themes, the exhibitionary complex facilitates an intense and critical engagement, transcending an imaged “pure Indian” locality and society. In this sense, a double form of the critical transregionality (Adajania and Hoskote 2010) emerges: first, in the form of artistic engagement, and second, as the experience of seeing the art in the exhibition space. Having said this, it is not just the artists who are significant agents in such cultural translation processes, but also the curators and visitors as beholders of the exhibition concept and the exhibited artworks. The space in which Indian Highway was exhibited at HEART, as well as in all the other venues, forms the kind of transcultural contact zone that Rhiannon Mason has argued “are public spaces in which definitions of cultures and their values may be actively contested and debated. Museums materialize values and throw the processes of meaning-making into sharp relief” (2006, 18). Referring to semiotic studies by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1974), Manson argues that meaning-making depends on a shared understanding of a given signifying system that is socially constructed (ibid.). Investigating how art from India is exhibited in a range of Western museums and galleries helps to elaborate on meanings woven around and “told” by an exhibition. As Stinna Toft stated, it is a major curatorial task to contextualise the displayed objects as much as possible in order to allow the visitors access to the art.

The museum as a (trans)cultural contact zone and the role of transculturality At this point, it seems important for the discussion to differentiate between the intersections of the art world as the macro level of global circulation, the moment and locality of artistic production, and the exhibition space in the museum and its locality as the micro level of cultural production. In order to define Indian Highway as a field where these various forms of social relations and cultural imaginations cumulate, I intend to employ the concept of the “museum as the contact zone” as first postulated by James Clifford (1997) in a discussion of the function of museums in twentieth-century Western society and the interactive nature of the relationships and entanglements that arise between various communities, stakeholders, and institutions. Contact zones “are places of hybrid possibilities and political negotiation, sites of exclusion and struggle” (Clifford 1997, 212–213), where the “contact” situation rests on the assumption on the nature of objects as “travellers, crossers – some strongly ‘diasporic’ with powerful, still very meaningful, ties elsewhere” (213) and on museums that “[w]ith different political valences, . . . express the interests of nation-states, of local and tribal communities, of transnational capital” (ibid.). In this respect, Clifford defines institutions and circulating objects as constitutive to a complex field of encounter and passage, created by different groups that meet, negotiate, and express their

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knowledge, interests, belonging, and cultural identities. When museums are perceived as sites of “local/global contact zones, sites of identity-making and transculturation, of containment and excess, these institutions epitomize the ambiguous future of ‘cultural’ difference” (219). In this sense, “a contact perspective views all culture-collecting strategies as responses to particular histories of dominance, hierarchy, resistance, and mobilisation” (213), but also as sites for contested cultural appropriation (211). In its contemporary art setting, Indian Highway is a survey exhibition that lays claim to regional or national representation but is also envisaged as a subject of discussion and an attempt at “political correctness”, and any interpretations to the contrary were unintended. However, a “contact situation” in the exhibition is still a subject worth considering: the entire range of practices from artistic work to curatorial research, selection, interpretation, and presentation, as well as the visitors’ seeing, experiencing, and perceiving the artworks, cumulate in the context of the exhibition space and its understanding of a “contact zone”. Different historical, political, and local as well as institutional settings make the “contact” even more complex. Lastly, and most important, is an understanding of “culture” and how different people define their own “culture” and that of others in relation to the artworks. Extending an approach that builds upon Clifford’s notion of “contested cultural appropriation” with regard to contemporary non-Western art would allow, instead of emphasising, clear definable cultural differences and the negotiation of belonging and identification of commonalities across cultural and geographical borders. In the exhibition space at HEART and during a guided tour conducted together with curator Stinna Toft, I observed the visitors not as passive consumers of information and exhibits. Instead, communication about the specific artworks in the exhibition space turned out to be a dynamic exchange of multiple viewpoints on the works and their materials, techniques, and meaning. The group consisted of Stinna Toft, five visitors, and myself. One of the first art objects we discussed was the installation Darkroom (2006) (Plate 4.5) by Sheela Gowda (b. 1957), an installation artist who combines everyday materials with abstract forms that establish references to society. When travelling along highways in Southern or Northern India, one can see whole families working and living in the streets, where they use similar barrels not only to heat asphalt but also to build temporary dwellings along the highways. In Darkroom Gowda constructed a “temple”-like installation made out of the barrels used by roadmen all over India. Visitors in the exhibition space were invited to crawl inside this installation and to enter its complete darkness, to experience the space as it fills with warmth and a metallic smell. Once the eyes adapted to the dark, a dim light emerged inside, produced by the little holes in the ceiling allowing natural light to penetrate the darkness, which looked like stars. Discovering these little stars immediately creates an atmosphere that contrasts and supports the ambivalent and striking nature of the installation. The materiality of the barrels transformed the spaces inhabited by street workers in India into an almost sacral space in the museum. The installation by Gowda is of a special quality because its visual aesthetic form did not so much transform the “Incredible India” of popular imagination, but rather brought attention to the local reality of social groups who exist at the margins of the “Shining India” that is so often portrayed in public media and travel advertisements. The materiality of the art object sparked a sudden recognition of a different reality.

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The transformation of the metal drums refers to the lack of dignity and human rights allowed to the marginalised groups in India that drive the rapid development of India’s economy with their manpower without ever receiving any support, security, or rights. Regarding the materiality of the metal drums in this installation, which are used for street construction as well as for the temporal dwellings of the migrant workers and their families, Ed Potton writes: The resourceful practice of making houses out of tar dr\ums is common in India, while the external architecture was inspired by the mock-classical columns of the British-built bungalows in which [Sheela] Gowda lived as a child, when her father worked for the Indian Service in the state of Karnataka. The piece is designed to contrast the material with the eternal, says Gowda. The cramped antechamber is “the reverse of what a house does for you. A house accommodates your frame, your needs, but here it’s the material that’s dictating to you.” This area is contrasted with the celestial space of the second room, “where putting holes into the same material opens up an expanse, where there’s no measure. It’s beyond material”. (Potton 2009)

In the exhibition space, the metal floor sags from the body weight of the person who crawls inside and makes some unexpected noises. The darkness inside is filled with the cold metal and the strong smell, and in the second room, the installation roof is broken up by the light which has filtered through the little holes – evoking feelings of sublimation and sacredness. In the conversation that ensued about Gowda’s installation, the different impression Darkroom made when viewed from the outside and the feeling it generated when inside were highlighted. Particularly addressed was the contradiction between the original usage of the material and the atmosphere created here and how the artist had managed to traverse the meaning of the drums by installing them in a specific way. A young man made an interesting comment when he argued that we in the West use a particular system or language to approach artworks. He explained that with this language and our history or ideas of “race”, “We only see the art as from a window, from outside. As we never really get the whole meaning, it can only be diverse. Therefore, it would not be possible to see the art as an Indian might see because the signs are different” (young male participant on the guided tour, Herning, 3 June 2010). This reference to the different and ever-changing reading of cultural signs alongside the emphasis on the Western external eye that observes from the outside forms an interesting link to Raqs Media Collective and its letter Once Again, To the Distant Observer (2006) and to my earlier discussion on encounters of convocation. There is an understanding that different knowledge systems as represented by language or interpretation of cultural signs convoke in an exhibition space and at the site of a particular artwork and are deeply transcultural in their substance because they leave space for a shared aesthetic or visual language and for the agents’ ability to engage in the laboratory exhibition space with the transformed materiality of the objects beyond a single semiotic meaning (see Chapter 3). In this short episode, we can observe that various practices of transformation and translation are at stake in reference to different localities and cultural knowledge. Alongside the notion of an “outside” and an “inside”, the global and the local, translocality provides a framework for study of the transgression of spatial and temporal borders and the creation of new zones of intersection and transformation. In the forward to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography

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by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), the cultural anthropologist Kim Fortun comments that the form of culture in the contemporary world is always in a state of “becoming, catalysing, amassing new properties” (1986, xv). Moreover, the “continual morphing of culture has intensified” (ibid.). By the late twentieth century, Fortun observed that “with electronically intensified circulation of both form and context, globally, locally, and between, culture comes together in noisy spaces, spaces buzzing with stressors” (ibid.). Indeed, one might argue that our experience of this morphing situation has accelerated in recent times. Focusing on translocal transgression, I wonder whether the exhibition Indian Highway confronts people with the challenge of defining their own culture as well as that of others or whether it is the opposite: that contemporary art exhibitions like Indian Highway help to articulate the changing dynamics of cultural processes that accompany and/or emerge from “translocal” practices, which go beyond the idea of “morphing cultures”. Instead, by conceptualising and analysing cultures as “a continual figuring-out process, aware that their worlds have ‘outrun the pedagogies in which they were trained’ (Fischer 2003, 9)” (Fortun 1986, xv), processes of transculturality contradict this image of a hybrid, shared culture. Instead, they describe a permanent negotiation and realising of cultural belonging in the global world. The urgency for a permanent negotiation is expressed in Kim Fortun’s note where she points to the feeling that people are running out of adequate learned tools and that culture is always ahead (Fortun 1986, xv). Thus, it is a challenge for practitioners in the field to “think” of contemporary art as a transcultural concern and to consider contemporary art production in India as well as its international exhibiting as possible sites for such articulations and encounters. When the group moved on to observe other artworks in the exhibition space at HEART, we approached N.S. Harsha’s large-scale acrylic painting Come Give Us a Speech (2008). The visitors discovered that many of the little figures the artist had included occurred in a repetitive manner in the large group of people sitting on plastic chairs. Many of the figures were dressed in Indian clothes, but some were more identifiable as non-Indians, like the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the comic book hero Batman. N.S. Harsha, an “artist from Mysore”, graduated from art school in Baroda/Vadodara in 1995. “As an antidote to the symbolic refinement of the big urban centres” the artist “conjures up the idea of a place where the spirit of naïve existence holds sway with the quiet lobbying of grass-roots wisdom amidst the backwaters of folklore and superstition” (Pereira 2010, 212). In his painting, he executes an aesthetic style of “simplicity of line, an agrestic style, artful naïvete, and popular address” (ibid.). N.S. Harsha often works on banners or scrolls; this is reflected by Come Give Us a Speech, which consists of six canvases which are knit together. The canvases depict about 2,000 figures that are painted all sitting on the same plastic chairs to face an unknown audience. These mostly Indian figures, are mixed in with other figures and depicted with wit and parody. His large-scale canvases depict details of Indian life and contemporary conditions. In the museum space, trying to find further familiar figures caused some amusement among the visitors, especially against the backdrop of the title Come Give Us a Speech, which actually addresses the viewer in front of the painting. In the following room, we stopped at another spatial installation, Date by Date (2008), by Subodh Gupta (Plate 4.6). This installation, which was specially commissioned for the Indian Highway

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exhibition, presents an office room with shelves that are overflowing with old files and folders, old-fashioned typing machines sit on desks which are chained to office chairs, and packed lunch boxes lie on the floor. The installation (re)creates the dusty and sleepy atmosphere of a “typical” government office in India. The group discussed the diverse meanings of this installation at length. I referred to an interpretation from visitors in Oslo who explained that this installation might represent a very stereotypical picture of an old-fashioned India where everything stagnates and nothing seems to progress. Stinna Toft expressed a different view: to her, the installation became an ironic answer to the entire exhibition theme – the “highway” – which in India is a signifier for rapid development and modernisation. By contrast, everything is frozen here, and Toft suggested that this was “quite humorous and funny because you’re saying ‘The furniture is being tied up to each other, and look like they are imploding from the inner side’”, so to her, “the artist is having a certain critique of the theme of the exhibition Indian Highway” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 3 June 2010). Interestingly, nobody considered the possibility that the artist was adopting and enacting a self-stereotyping attitude with this obvious reference to an Indian bureaucracy that is radically in opposition to the paradigm of “Shining India” and which is often criticised for its inability to make art from a specific region accessible to international audiences. At this point, the conversation turned once again to the question of the specific expectations a person might bring to such an exhibition. This emphasises that more reflection on the understanding of a museum as a contact zone is needed and can be utilised to analyse an exhibition visit as a cultural interaction. Of course, it is not just curators and artists, but also the visitors and audiences who bring their own histories, experiences, expectations, knowledge, and emotions to the exhibition space, and they must be given a significant role in the discussion. According to these individual perspectives, artworks are experienced differently, and the meaning of an artwork changes or is completed in relation to its beholder, as we have seen with the mentioned examples. As this relates to the idea of the laboratory, there is a political dimension to this encounter, and this is why there are different kinds of contact according to the interests of museums and the nature of their collections and objects (Clifford 1997, 212). Also, institutional settings today dominantly influence the form of “contact” and the interaction and formation of views around an exhibition like Indian Highway. But, after all, the artist is still the producer of the objects that we are addressing in such discussions of transcultural contacts and interaction in translocal settings. Here I have taken inspiration from the Mumbai-based art writer and curator Ranjit Hoskote and his wife, Nancy Adajania, and their understanding of “critical transregionality”. Hoskote, whom I met in Heidelberg in July 2010, noted when looking at contemporary Indian art that there is a certain kind of internal logic of production which relates to the existing opportunities available nowadays in the networks and travel practices (Ranjit Hoskote, Heidelberg, 19 July 2010). From a larger point of view, there is also an outside view of this “interlocking of transcultural practices with regionally anchored ones” (ibid.). In explaining the notion of transculturality, this relates to what Hoskote and his wife, Nancy Adajania, call the critical transregionality of “those artists who do not work from nationally anchored positions” (ibid.). Here he means those “cultural producers, who travel elsewhere, become complicit in other kinds of situations and crises and then produce work that comes from certain ethical engagements, rather than geographical ones” (ibid.); in other words, one has to consider where the location of cultural

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production is and what it implies. In this context Hoskote continues that “even the idea of the ‘Indian’” is problematic to him, beyond existing marketing reasons for institutions and survey exhibitions (ibid.). Nevertheless, he notes that he is not “very preoccupied with the idea that these are Indian artists. So, you are looking at two things: there’s the ghost of the survey – of a national survey exhibition – and then there are the actual positions, which somehow exceed that rubric completely” (Ranjit Hoskote, Heidelberg, 19 July 2010). When Hoskote touches upon the location of cultural production, he does not argue for cultural practices that lead to “hybrid” cultures, as Homi Bhabha suggested in the 1990s, nor does he endorse a morphing of formerly distinct cultural identities. Rather, Hoskote approaches the idea of new, contemporary forms of cultural engagement as discussed earlier. At the same time, he strongly questions the notion of the national as cultural vault, and he questions identification of the “Indian” in the work of those artists who experience different ethnic engagements. When he expresses his critical view on the way survey exhibitions formulate a national attribute to the contemporary art from the non-West (see also Hoskote 2012), he underlines the need for more awareness of the actual artistic positions. To highlight some of the challenges this suggestion implies, I refer in the following to one of the last art installations that we approached on the tour at HEART – 8 feet × 12 feet (2009) by Hema Upadhyay (b. 1972, d. 2015). The work 8 feet × 12 feet, as described earlier, is a container that is open on one side with walls entirely covered by miniature huts and houses, creating a slum landscape made out of recycled material. Here again, the visitor is asked to go inside the container to observe all the little details. I explained to the group that a visitor had told me in Oslo that she felt lucky not to be born in such an environment – one without any space or privacy. This statement provoked a young woman to counter that this reaction would probably be more typical of someone from, say, Germany than of slum-dwellers themselves. People who live in such a slum might not have any idea about “our” sense of space and privacy, and “they do not know that there is something else” (young female participant on the guided tour, Herning, 3 June 2010). Such a clear line dividing “poor and the rich people” is not always convincing. People can always imagine better ways of living, either by observing those around them or from images in media such as television and movies. They are certainly not “unworldly”. The young woman’s intention was clearly to underline the very specific point of view that each person brings when looking at such an environment and the fact that one’s perspective is influenced by whether one is a member of a social group living in a slum or is an outsider. Towards the end of the tour, it was Toft who brought up again the notion of cultural translation: “I think it is interesting to talk about cultural translation, as a cultural project, because there is a lot of translation going on between the art piece and the receiver” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 3 June 2010). Later in the conversation, Toft proceeded to point out that globalisation creates challenges of cultural belonging for an individual but that in the context of contemporary art the tension between global issues and cultural identity is also observable to her. This is also reflected in the contemporary art scene (ibid.), and she refers to an urgency in thinking anew about one’s own cultural belonging and identification in a world of globalisation. As a result, Toft suggested that she appreciates talking about art that might signify, partly at least, a particular cultural origin,

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and in her eyes, the art objects in Indian Highway are helpful anchorages with which to rethink one’s own cultural origin. Stinna Toft’s statement, the multiple perspectives that were exchanged during the guided tour, and also my presence as an anthropologist had triggered a specific kind of dynamic entanglement in the exhibition space. Rhiannon Mason critically replied to James Clifford’s notion of the museum as a cultural contact zone by saying that “the museum functions more as a permeable space of transcultural encounter than as a tightly bounded institution disseminating knowledge to its visitors” (Mason 2006, 25). She argues that “viewed in this light, the term ‘museum’ is understood as a much more flexible and expansive way of describing a whole range of relations and activities which surround the valuation, collection, and display of cultures and histories” (ibid.). And even though Indian Highway as a travelling exhibition demonstrates in concrete form how an exhibition can change its meaning according to different institutional contexts and produce all kinds of relations, interpretations, and transcultural encounters, this perspective cannot neglect that the concept of the travelling exhibition does not provide curatorial liberty and creativity. Instead it has clear limitations, restrictions, and power relations. As Robin Boast (2011) argues “the contact zone [is] an asymmetric space where the periphery comes to win some small, momentary, and strategic advantage, but where the centre ultimately gains” (2011, 66). He explains asymmetries as an integral part of the institutional landscape because they are “determined by our funding regimes, by our proscribed professional practices, and in museums, by the very roles that we fulfil – collecting, documenting, and displaying” (ibid.). The institutional landscape in which Indian Highway travels is not without its asymmetries. This becomes obvious in the apparent differences between participating institutions, the role they play in the art world, and their financial possibilities. Also, some hierarchies exist between curators according to varying levels of professional expertise. A contact perspective, according to Clifford, “argues for the local/global specificity of struggles and choices concerning inclusion, integrity, dialogue, translation, quality, and control. And it argues for a distribution of resources (media attention and public and private funding) that recognizes diverse audiences and multiplies centred histories of encounter” (1997, 214). This local/ global specificity of negotiation is integral to the processes by which the exhibition Indian Highway changes its face according to different curatorial perspectives and localities. However, such negotiation would not become a significant element between curators and artists. Even though the curatorial model of the “show within the show” envisaged an open dialogue between curators and artists, it, too, became a space where the control and dominance, particularly of the main curators and organisers of the exhibition, became observable. At this point, I agree with Boast, who foregrounds the authoritarian institutional function of the museum which acts as a site of accumulation or as a gatekeeper (Boast 2011, 67) when he argues that conceptually “the contact zone is a site in and for the centre . . . the museum as contact zone is and continues to be used instrumentally as a means of masking far more fundamental asymmetries, appropriations, and biases” (ibid.). Along a reinvention of a centre-periphery module, the format of a travelling exhibition like Indian Highway produced its own hierarchies between different places since, due to the circulation of an increasing “collection” of Indian art, its financial dimension grew as well,

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which caused some of the smaller museums to drop out due to the high costs. But can this be an adequate counter-reaction? At least the different forms of contacts were encouraged with varied kinds of dialogues and cultural translations. The one and a half hours of discussion during the guided tour exemplify this; however, even though diverse audiences envisage multiple histories, whether imagined or not, of their own or of the “other”, it cannot be denied that the route that Indian Highway took was largely restricted to Europe. And since it has not travelled to India, it still presents an essential site for the centre (Boast 2011, 67). The notion of a transcultural contact zone does not imply a solution for asymmetries or for the problem of the museum as an authoritarian institute. However, its authority is not a given but is instead constituted by partaking individuals such as the new global curator. When the audience is then also understood as active and not passive, institutional power no longer appears absolute. Furthermore, even if an exhibition programme includes smaller talks, such as mine, or larger conferences, such as the one about Indian Highway, it does not adequately reflect situations where knowledge and cultural interpretation are provided but are contested and discussed. In the same way that the search for new curatorial formats to present international non-Western art is a discursive practice, the audience also creates the ways in which they engage with the art. Ranjit Hoskote mentions this when he argues for “transcultural experiences as the only certain basis of contemporary artistic practice . . . and the corresponding stance of ‘critical transregionality’” (Hoskote 2008, 193). His related notion that the contemporary artist requests and allows responsible and responsive encounters (ibid.) is thus true for members of all kinds of societies as well. Looking upon contemporary art in an exhibition context like Indian Highway can trigger these transcultural experiences, as became clear in the discussions shared during the guided tour. Following this argument, the dividing line between the different groups – artists, curators, and audiences – becomes blurred and merges under the category of cultural producers. The transcultural fabric is constituted by the different symbolic significations that various agents read into Indian Highway. The European curators see Indian Highway as the result of collaborations with other institutions and curators and the culmination of a reciprocal exchange with the artists. They did not seek to create “a view on India from outside, but a meeting of my view on India and an inside view of the country”, as Hans Ulrich Obrist explains; however, voices in India continue to critique many international curators for their superficial research on contemporary art. This critique shows that survey shows like Indian Highway still have the power, even if it is a ghost power, to use Ranjit Hoskote’s words, to reduce and narrow a dynamic and varied field of art production through curatorial inclusion and exclusion. The power that curators wield, to decide who is going to be an internationally prestigious artist and who will not, illustrates the negotiation of new subjectivities within the Indian contemporary art field and the diverse meanings ascribed to it. Thus, art is “not simply an expression of a universal or even culturally specific aesthetics, but [is] . . . situated in the mediation of complex intercultural and interpersonal political circumstances” (Myers 2004, 204). But instead of assuming clearly defined cultural positions as inherent to the “intercultural”, transculturality emerges as a more appropriate tool with which to analyse the complexity of an exhibition

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such as Indian Highway. Here it seems appropriate to reference Nicholas Mirzoeff, who defined “transculture” as a [V]iolent collision of an extant culture with a new or different culture that reshapes both into a hybrid transculture that is itself then subject to transculturation [and that] highlights those places where the carefully defined borders of identity become confused and overlapping, a task that requires new histories, new ideas, and new means of representation. (2002, 477)

Thus, the exploration of the cultural complexities on the micro level of contact and engagement receives more ground during a discussion of what curator Stinna Toft meant with the sentence “Art can, you know, open up”. Using Toft’s statement, this study shall help identify, in more detail, the challenges and wishes, as well as the predicaments, of representing art from India to Western audiences, as I believe that the “predicaments” of cultural translation are an integral part of transculturality.

“Art can, you know, open up – in a way, it will move people . . . ” When the curators of Indian Highway travelled to India to research the local art scene, the journey was planned well in advance, not only in terms of logistics (accommodation and the most efficient route), but also regarding the institutes and exhibitions to be visited and the artists and art experts to meet. As I learned from my conversations with Gunnar Kvaran and Stinna Toft, a curatorial journey often works with a detailed travel plan, and local assistance is very important, since time and financial considerations mean that the journeys have to fit into institutional budgets and programmes. In the case of Indian Highway, not all of the involved curators travelled to India. The main curatorial team, which included Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Gunnar Kvaran, as well as the curator Stinna Toft at HEART, conducted research trips that were organised separately. In Delhi, Gunnar Kvaran, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Julia Peyton-Jones, for example, were guided by Delhi-based curator Vidya Shivadas from Vadehra Gallery; in Mumbai, they were met by the independent curator and art writer Niyatee Shinde, who established the creative arts company TumeriEarth in Mumbai in 2002, as well as the art dealer and gallery owner Priya Jhaveri (Gallery Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai); while in Bangalore, they met with curator Suman Gopinath from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA, Bangalore). Their Indian contacts assisted the European curators in organising appointments with artists and transporting the artworks that were commissioned and to be exhibited at Indian Highway. This kind of local support demonstrates the integral role that collaborative practices play in the contemporary art world, even though local experts often do not influence the final artist selection. Stinna Toft also appreciated the support rendered to her during her research trip to India. She was accompanied by the Danish art promoter Preben Gondolf, a private art collector and former diplomat at the Danish Embassy in Delhi. Gondolf, whom I also met at the opening of Indian Highway in Herning, runs the non-profit website Indiskkunst2 and largely promotes Indian contemporary art in Scandinavia. The curators of the later venues of Indian Highway, who did not travel to India for personal research, had the opportunity to share the material that the main curatorial team had collected in the form of several hundred files of artist portfolios in India.

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Curators gain very specific access in the course of research trips to local art scenes or to visit archives. They find their gatekeepers who provide them with particular information and contacts. The subjectivity that each of the curators develops towards local art practices is therefore strongly influenced by their professional networks. In addition, travelling is always an individual experience. Several circumstances such as the available time and local assistance in terms of transport and accommodation, as well as meetings with curators, gallery owners, art writers, promoters, and collectors, create an intensive and often very tightly structured environment with a clearly defined access to the local art scene. Stinna Toft and also Gunnar Kvaran described a demanding schedule which left little time to acclimatise or deal with unexpected situations like traffic jams or sickness. And even though people with a heavy professional travel load, like curators, politicians, and diplomats, appear tough and invulnerable, they do have their own personal sensitivities. If plans for a longer research stay in India have to be changed into a number of short research trips of three or four days, this influences how the curators see the locality. Also, practicable incidents can certainly restrict the curator’s ability to build closer relations within the host society, and in the worst case, a tight schedule can go quickly awry because of unpredictable conditions like the permanent traffic during Delhi’s rush hours, as Stinna Toft experienced. The conversations with Stinna Toft in Herning helped to estimate the way in which personal relations and perspectives on India, along with its contemporary art, influence its forms of presentation as well as its boundaries. Toft’s statement that “art can move” and her comments on the “emotional effectiveness” of the art is a reference to Michael Brenson, who argued for the ability of the new curator “to articulate, the ability of art to touch and mobilize people and encourage debates about spirituality, creativity, identity, and the nation. The texture and tone of the curator’s voice, the voices it welcomes or excludes, and the shape of the conversation it sets in motion are essential to the texture and perception of contemporary art” (Brenson 1998, 16). From this, the following questions emerge: How did her personal experiences in India relate to her understanding of the art as well as her curatorial strategies? What kind of limitations occur, not only in terms of curating the exhibition, but also in organising guided tours? How does the curator envisage her role when organising a show on Indian contemporary art? For a deepened discussion on these matters, the curatorial position will be juxtaposed with the local perspectives of art experts, including gallery owners, curators, art writers, and artists in Delhi. During my own research visit to the India Art Summit in Delhi in 2011, a conversation with the gallery owner Abhay Maskara (Gallery Maskara, Mumbai) provided many crucial ideas. Maskara, who represented his gallery at the art fair, very directly criticised international curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist as “jet-set curators” who “jump on the plane, spend a few days, [and] jump back” (Abhay Maskara, Delhi, 23 January 2011). With this comment, he wanted to highlight the feeling, also shared by other local agents, that the world has a very limited idea of what contemporary art from India today is about. He reflected on the role of the curator and his or her responsibility to effect a careful curation in terms of selection and the inclusion and exclusion of artists and objects when setting up a show such as Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery in London (Abhay Maskara, Delhi, 23 January 2011). This is a statement to the world about what Indian art is, but when it is only possible “to jump on the plane, spend a few days, and jump back. What have I really had

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the time to do but meet some of the artists, who have been in previous biennales and triennials and auction houses?” (ibid.). He asserted the need to also consider “artists who are working on the margins of the market, who are not in the auctions, who are not in the biennales but who do fantastic work” (ibid.). These artists are marginalised because the influential organisations miss out on doing the research on the ground. According to Maskara, “Yes, it is important to reflect, you know, the Hussains and the Dodiyas and the Guptas and the Kallats. They are all important, yes. But then move beyond, move beyond the usual suspects – and that gives art energy but also takes energy” (ibid.). This critique gives a sense of how international curators and thematic shows like Indian Highway are perceived in local art scenes. And again, the time and speed with which curators move between and within different art worlds play a crucial role in this, as these short interactions can only allow a superficial understanding of what is happening locally. The title of this subchapter “Art can, you know, open up – in a way, it will move people” is a reference to words spoken by Stinna Toft, who sees in art the power to stimulate engagement or critical reflection, and it can be read in many ways. Although it is a topic that was not directly addressed by her, it also links to one of the major theses for this book: namely, practices of translocality. The contemporary art world generates different kinds of movements and mobilities: of artists and their artworks between local art scenes and international circuits, by international curators to local art scenes, but also by visitors to exhibitions that show art from foreign regions. In this picture of permanent physical movement and transition of space in all kinds of directions and at all speeds, geographical and cultural boundaries become blurred, and this has, as Maskara expressed, significant consequences. This is when, for example, the mobility of curators restricts the possibility of intense research and causes only superficial or mainstream representations of a much richer field of contemporary art from India. The concentrated short trips were not always easy or preferable for the curators themselves. The curatorial team from the Serpentine Gallery and Astrup Fearnley Museum, for example, had to split its research trip to India into shorter stays because local circumstances had become too stressful. Stinna Toft expressed some ambivalence about her curatorial trip, partly because this was not her first journey to India. She described the research journey as follows: Well, compared to this first travel, you know, which was more being a part of India, you know, as a backpacker. Then coming as a foreign curator you’ll be driving in an air-conditioned van, you have a chauffeur driving you from place to place . . . it’s a totally different point of view you get of India, I think. And so, I think I like the first visit much more. (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010)

Toft was referring to her journey through South and East Asia at the age of eighteen, which she had done in cooperation with a Danish Foundation before going to university to study art history, and later culture and aesthetics, with a focus on culture and visual arts, including film, music, and dance. Her journeys were thus very different and changed her point of view, as she said when describing the air-conditioned atmosphere of her second visit. Toft also mentioned that she liked the first visit more because she felt more connected to the cities and the people (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). In contrast, it was a very different experience “when you are traveling

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ten days and . . . you have a programme” and “you don’t have the time to just sense and be there” (ibid.). But as she explains, this trip was also very important for her since it provided her with a background to understand the situation of the art. And to talk to the artists, I met Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher also, and it gave me a broader insight into being included in an exhibition like this. And also, I met artists that [sic] was not included by Gunnar [Kvaran] and Hans Ulrich [Obrist] and Julia [Peyton-Jones] and talked to them. (ibid.)

Her description demonstrates a sensitivity towards a world in Indian society that exists, related or not, alongside the “art world”. This is, of course, Toft’s subjective perspective on contemporary art from India, one which is closely related to her general interest in art and culture, but also to her personal relationship to India. At the subsequent venues of the exhibition, local curators of Indian Highway were not commonly expected to travel to India to research the local art scene, and therefore, many did not have the chance to gather their own insights into the Indian art world. Instead, subsequent curators preferred (perhaps because they did not have the opportunity) to do their research on contemporary art from India either in Europe and/or with the support and experiences of the main curators.

Planning and curating the exhibition Stinna Toft had already cooperated with institutes for the exhibition The Uncertain States of America in 2007, together with Gunnar Kvaran, Daniel Birnbaum, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. As she had already had the idea of doing an exhibition on India and its contemporary art, she first finished her research trip to India and then joined a general meeting organised in London by the main curators Gunnar Kvaran, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Julia Peyton-Jones with regard to the opening of Indian Highway in 2008. Other European art institutes attended as well, including those from Iceland, Rome, and Prague. After the meeting, Toft received research material from the main curators and went to see the exhibition in Oslo, where she also met Gunnar Kvaran to talk about further procedures. She then started her “own research and talked to galleries and collectors, visited Nicolai Frahm [a Danish art consultant and collector based in London3] who is one of the collectors” who lent a lot of works by Bose Krishnamachari and Subodh Gupta (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). The complexity of planning this exhibition, including the process of selecting and bringing together artworks from the various former venues as well as installing them in the exhibition space, also illustrates the full extent of this kind of project as well as the concrete network of cooperation partners that operates in the background. It became understandable from this that each of the curators working on this show had their own personal approach to the exhibition, which became, for instance, visible in the different local themes contributed at the different venues. At HEART, Stinna Toft appeared – with her academic background in art history and the study of aesthetics and culture – to be very sensitive to topics related to culture and art. For instance, she talked about how some of the artists reacted to the invitation to participate in Indian Highway. Although Gunnar Kvaran had stressed that the artists had been very enthusiastic about

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joining an exhibition organised in London, Stinna Toft’s experience provided another perspective. While talking about her conversation with the artist Bharti Kher, she mentioned that the artist had been reflecting quite openly on her reasons for joining a group exhibition like this one. In Toft’s words: “You know, as Bharti Kher said to me . . . ‘Well, we agree [to participate], because it will get our work out in the world. But of course, we would like a solo show much more and so’. That’s the same for Danish artists, I think” (ibid.). She continued, “But it’s OK to bring focus on a region. But of course the artists would like to be just on their own. So, there’s always this difference between having a solo show and a group show” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). In addition to her insights into the ambivalent attitude that some of the artists might have had about being part of this group show, Toft also mentioned critical reactions from some of the artists about being included in an exhibition presenting “Indian art” (ibid.). This was not the first time that the problematic curatorial statement or the impact that participation in the survey show with a regional focus might have had on the general perception of the artists appeared over the course of this study. The artist Bharti Kher formulated her position in an interview with Nancy Adajania, who asked the artist if “the dilemma of not being English enough or Indian enough [can] act as a productive stimulation?” (2010, 238). In her answer, Kher noted that she considers “being ‘in-between’ at some time to be privileged. You have the best of both worlds and then at times you are nowhere. Neither here nor there. It is not something that I worry too much about” (ibid.). Back in Delhi, conversations and interviews with experts in the art field often touched upon these kinds of issues. For example, when I met the art writer Meera Menezes in 2010, we talked about the American Delhi-based curator Peter Nagy, and Menezes explained: Peter [Nagy] is one of the few gallerists who really positioned Indian art as mainstream art. He tries to show and integrate Indian artists into the mainstream because otherwise it tends to “ghettoize” or label the art – which is what he doesn’t want to do. As I said, a lot of my artist friends don’t want to be seen that way. They want to be seen first and foremost as artists! And accepted in the international arena without having to be necessarily seen as Indian. And I think Peter [Nagy] does that – he exhibits them on this international platform and really tries to integrate them, you know. (Meera Menezes, Delhi, 23 February 2010)

Peter Nagy, who came to Delhi in the 1990s, is a trained artist and was an artistic practitioner in the United States in the 1980s. In India, he reopened the art gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi, which he had originally founded with the artist Alan Belcher in Manhattan, New York, in the early 1980s. Since his arrival in Delhi, he has established his gallery and opened two more branches of Nature Morte: one in Berlin and the other one at the Gurgaon Oberoi in the urban sector Gurgaon, near Delhi (both of which have since closed). Due to his vast experience, Nagy has a profound knowledge about the developments in the Indian art scene. He represents some of the most renowned international contemporary artists from India, such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anita Dube, Mithu Sen, Dayanita Singh, Raqs Media Collective, and many of the artists who were also featured in the Indian Highway show. This is also why Toft got in touch with Nagy and was able to borrow the work by Anita Dube, Ah (Sigh) (2008), from his gallery – it had just arrived in Nature Morte in Berlin during that time.

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I had spoken to Peter Nagy in his gallery just before I met Meera Menezes in Delhi in 2010, and in our conversation, I could discern what she was trying to tell me about his point of view on the contemporary art scene in India and beyond. He was critical of the notion of globalisation and the role of Indian art, and went on to express his understanding of the on-going relations between Indian artists and European curators. He also gave his opinion about the difficulties he sees in packaging contemporary art in India under the category of “Indian” in the context of the globalising world. Since “Indian contemporary art is an extremely complicated subject” comprising many different types, he asked “how Indian do you expect Indian contemporary art to be? I mean, how many references to the local as opposed to the global are you looking for?” (Peter Nagy, Delhi, 22 February 2010). And furthermore, “How much foundation or apparent foundation or visible evidence do you want to connect to traditional culture and ethnics, sort of signifiers?” (ibid.). Nagy’s understanding of this impulse as “a very problematic thing” is similar to Stinna Toft and Meera Menezes, who are also sensitive to the impact of a regional focus on contemporary art. By drawing upon the different artists he is working with in India and the wide field of artists with their different materials, themes, and techniques, ranging from abstract painting to social political video documentary, he noted that some of these are “more Indian than others” (ibid.). But he also asked if there is a similar interest in “asking for Germanness in . . . contemporary art?” (ibid.). And while acknowledging that “all art has something to do with the place it was made or the culture the artist comes from”, he also observed that people are interested in “art to perform more in that way when they’re going to these relatively new cultures that are part of the globalised art world” (ibid.). And since “contemporary art is a Western-based language and a form that comes from Western Europe and the United States”, move around the world and you’ll find that “some of the artists will be very rooted in tradition or subject matters or more historical things, where other artists don’t give a shit about it” (ibid.). Nagy raises the fundamental question of how one can judge the references in the art with respect to the cultural background framing it and whether it is necessary to review each individual case anew to judge whether the artwork can legitimately fall under the category of “Indian”. To him, it is of more importance to go beyond overall and generalising categories. Instead, as he points out, “I just always fight for taking artists as individuals and even, you know, even individual artists can have a very wide range of types of work within their particular practice” (Peter Nagy, Delhi, 22 February 2010). And yet, the ambiguity in this situation is compelling because he sees the fact that “curators come from all over the world to put together these Indian shows for prestigious institutions like the Serpentine, and [the] Pompidou Centre’s working on one” (ibid.). But “at the same time, they are quite bored by it all. Because they are like: ‘Ah, another India show!’ Because they fear, the people aren’t really looking at the work itself and what the content of the work is” (ibid.). It is in this sense “more like: ‘Oh, India is the trendy place, let’s go to India.’ That’s sad of course”. Nevertheless, Nagy thought that “Hans Ulrich Obrist put together an unusual show, compared to the others. Because a lot of these Indian shows have been very much the same: The same group of ten or twelve artists with a few minor [differences]” (ibid.). As Abhay Maskara and, earlier, Sarat Maharaj have emphasised, the artistic production in India is very diverse. Some of the artists’ works are very much rooted in their cultural setting; however, there are many others for whom this does not apply. Nagy was also referring to the meaning that

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such survey exhibitions create on the international level and the rather short-sighted interest of single institutes and curators who organise a show on India because it is new, instead of focusing on some other ambitious project. Stinna Toft, as a newcomer in the Indian art scene and a curator for a show on Indian art, also realised the dilemma some artists might face in India. She explained, “If you talk to the artists, they will say: I’m an individual voice. I’m not just talking about Indian problems . . . it’s a global, a global art”. She also noted that she was very aware of being a “white person, a white curator, coming from the Western world on visiting Indian artists” and “also with the history of the colonial history and what is it you’re seeing” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). But although she was very conscious of her position as a Western curator, she also felt inspired by the challenge of curating a regional exhibition in the global art world’s present situation and “to give [sic] interest on this cultural bridge” and its diverse practices (ibid.). She sees a change in how art history is being constructed, which is a more international way of seeing art that is made all over the world (ibid.): “Actually, it is quite ridiculous in some ways, that’s the way it’s always been. It’s just how we see the world that has changed” (ibid.). Referring to a conversation with a Danish journalist, who asked Toft whether putting together an exhibition like this on a specific country or culture provided good insight into the culture or made you forget about the art. Toft’s reply, as she explained to me, was a critical comment of its own. She answered that when they organised Certain States of America, no one asked her “Why are you just selecting American artists?” (ibid.). She assumed that this was because American and European art is a naturalised part of the art world status quo, but when looking at other parts of the world, and possibly due to postcolonial debates, “an ‘ism’ [such as in Indianism or Indianness] is always exclusive in some way or the other” (ibid.). From this, it becomes clear that the challenges Indian Highway might face include, for instance, the already-discussed aspects of cultural translation, which are often based on items that convey Indianness or India. This was also the point that the journalist wanted to make: when I met him for a conversation, he formulated his criticism of the exhibition again. His impression was that the exhibition-makers had focused too much on the cultural, the Indian context, and on a specific interpretation of the artworks. Instead, he suggested, it would have been more appropriate to communicate a more global perspective, providing texts on the walls that did not interpret but leave space for the artwork and for the visitor and his or her own interpretation, instead of narrowing everything down to the Indian aspect inherent to the exhibition title. Thus, his call for more open communication and leaving space for individual readings of an artwork touches upon the aspects of art and cultural translation in the art museum (Journalist, Herning, 13 March 2010). However, there were also opposing opinions. For instance, one young staff member at the HEART Museum, when we talked about her understanding of Bharti Kher’s whale heart and the connection to India (HEART Museum, Herning, 14 March 2010), drew rather a connection between the whale, textile production, and the exploitation of workers in India. This was certainly related to her own background as a fashion design student, and she employed her knowledge about and interest in the textile industry when interpreting this artwork. Whereas the young woman formed her own view on this artwork and was not influenced by the provided description

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on the exhibition wall, the entire situation hints at the challenges of setting up an exhibition. The question of how to mediate knowledge and decide on specific ways of representing art from India for a European audience – through services like guided tours, online catalogues, and audio guides – are inscribed into this process. In this sense, Stinna Toft made a considerable effort and gave extensive consideration to making this exhibition possible at HEART. Although we have spoken quite extensively and critically about the role of the curator in the process of translating artworks and their cultural background to European audiences, Toft also notably expressed her motivation for doing an exhibition like Indian Highway as driven by “being part of this cultural translation” (ibid.). She thinks that it’s paradigmatic in the sense that the “art world is changing now in a global context” and that instead of doing an art show on China with a focus on ancient times and from a more anthropological perspective, it is now “more equal” (ibid.). There are still difficulties in explaining it to the audience, however, “and it’s really out in the open: You don’t know if they will just go and be looking for the exotic Indianness, the Indian touch of the artworks, or they will look at the single artwork as a piece of art that is going in many directions” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). This conversation took place when Stinna Toft and I met in the museum’s restaurant after her guided tour for members of the HEART club just one day after the exhibition had opened. I had joined the tour, but as it was in Danish, I asked her to translate her explanation of the whale heart in the artwork An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007) by Bharti Kher. She explained that the audience needed an explanation for each artwork or they would look at something but not get its meaning (ibid.). In the case of Kher’s work “you have this turn here, that: OK, the bindi here is from India. And this will give you an understanding of the cultural situation in India, and so I think the discussion will bring you in another direction” (ibid.). Toft also focused on the theme that “might be global; the heart of the whale is a global theme, the survival of the whales is a global theme, not something specific Indian, but then you have the bindi” (ibid.). “Or you will have the wood carver tradition, and I think it makes a lot more sense also to focus on that, when you are explaining the artworks. Because then you will get an understanding of this culture these artworks are coming from, which is much longer, more deep, more delicate, than the Danish culture at that time” (ibid.). She went on to explain that she told them “about the bindis being used by Indian women both as a sign if they are married and as a sign of the third eye”. But she also made a connection with the ecological situation between humans and nature, between the survival of the whales and humankind and pollution (ibid.). “It’s an issue that goes for every one of us in the world. So, I’m really much focusing on taking [sic] that there might be an Indian background, but the theme is global. The theme of identity is global and gender, politics” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). Here, the aspect of a critical transregionality, as Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote have defined it for cultural producers such as artists and curators, becomes evident. It is not only that the artist Bharti Kher exemplifies critical engagement in her artwork, but also that Toft, as the curator, observes this engagement and explains it to the visitors in the exhibition space.

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In this way, she also allows the audience to interact with the artwork from a similar understanding. Thus, it is not simply a form of cultural translation from one culture to another that can be observed, say, from an Indian to a Danish culture, but also something that needs to be understood in its entire complexity as a transcultural entanglement, beginning with the artistic engagement, to the interpretation and explanation of the artwork in the exhibition space in, for example, Denmark. Stinna Toft also referred to the specific audience of club members and their expectations in a guided tour: “It was the first tour today, and you need to understand that this club of our museum is the average age is quite high, and this means a lot, I think, in how people perceive a show like this” (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). Toft pointed out that visitors’ age plays an important role in a museum’s decisions about the services the general public might need. In general, institutions and curators do have to consider the age of their visitors when conceptualising exhibitions and deciding on the overall communication and media concept. I remembered another conversation I had with Gunnar Kvaran in Oslo, where he talked about their efforts to attract a younger audience to their institute, and in this case, the Indian Highway exhibition. In Oslo, they decided to use an audio guide that would be available via mobile phone. At the same time, the Indian Highway bag, which was distributed as a giveaway for customers at the museum shop, was also an innovative feature. Aside from this, the overall advantage of the Astrup Fearnley Museum is certainly that it is a private museum, and it has the freedom to offer free entrance to visitors below the age of eighteen (Gunnar Kvaran, Oslo, 24 July 2009). Therefore, not surprisingly, the financial budget also influences specific efforts. Generally speaking, exhibitions like this one are expensive projects. The entire process of hosting an exhibition is designed around contracts, fees, insurance, staff, and so on. Even in order to host a show like Indian Highway, the institute has to pay certain fees. And thus, in most cases, museums like the HEART Museum in Herning, as long as they are not private institutes, are forced to apply for extra funding provided by national funds and communal sponsors. Since the museum had to pay a fee for hosting the exhibition as well as for borrowing particular artworks from galleries or other institutions in Europe, such costs go beyond the general budget the government provides to run the museum. Particularly during the global financial crisis, national funds lacked sufficient capital, a fact that made them far more selective. As Stinna Toft pointed out, they would rather turn towards more classical exhibitions such as, for instance, on old Danish painters. In response to my question about why she did not include particular artworks that she had formerly decided on, Toft mentioned the transport and high costs of shipping any artworks from India to Denmark. She “needed to find works that were already in Europe”, and she found that much of the Indian art was, in fact, already in Europe (ibid.). This also explained why she did not find much art in the artists’ studios when she travelled to India – it was already in circulation (ibid.). The fact is that the availability and affordability of including certain artworks in an exhibition, particularly with large-scale installations or paintings, pose many challenges for the curator: many of the artworks from countries outside Europe or America, and India as well, are presented at international shows and are therefore already in circulation. On the one hand, this is an advantage because transporting an artwork from India to an institute in Europe is, in

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most cases, not achievable. The costs for transport by ship, taxes, and insurance are often simply too high for art institutions to cover. In this case, existing and permanently growing networks of auctions, collectors, and galleries, as well as biennials and events, are an important support structure. It is only via these channels that either commissioned artworks are produced – at least partly outside the country an artist might be from – or money is provided to buy artworks and transport them to Europe or the United States. On the other hand, the availability of artworks is not always assured since the number of contemporary artworks from India, for example, is not very extensive; here again, I refer mostly to large-scale installations, sculptures, and paintings. In other words, only a selected number of artworks really circulate, and a curator might have to make several attempts to contact collectors or galleries to receive these for a show. Stinna Toft also told me about some of the compromises she had to make when she was conceptualising the Indian Highway exhibition, as some of her favourite art pieces had already been booked for other art events in Europe. When I asked Toft about the criteria she used to select new artists, I was also interested if particular elements related to India had been important factors in her eyes. Toft described the quality of the artworks with “emotional effectiveness” and their ability to provoke the sentiments of a viewer (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). She questioned whether the power to touch the viewers’ sentiments could be seen as a specific nature unique to Indian art. This strongly reminded me of the exhibition in Oslo and the reactions of the visitors I had spoken to. In addition, Toft also reflected on information strategies in the museum and how much one should learn in an art exhibition about the cultural background of the artist (Stinna Toft, Herning, 14 March 2010). She argued that since we live in an intercultural society, the experiences in the show will give you something that allows you to meet other people differently (ibid.), in particular when the media focuses so much on conflicts (ibid.): “So, this is, I think, what makes art so strong, for example, Amar Kanwar . . . Art can, you know, open up – in a way, it will move people. And when you get the explanation, you understand culture more deeply, I think” (ibid.) Toft’s comments form the closing of this chapter on the Indian Highway exhibition at the HEART Museum. This discussion of artistic and curatorial practices that allow for deeper engagement with the world and with art has pointed out that art can be used to understand cultures more deeply – with an essential contribution by Stinna Toft – and that the background might be Indian, but the themes are global.

Notes 1 See the article on “Textile Town Herning” as part of the listing of “25 Fantastic Industries” on the Kulturarv website: www.kulturarv.dk/1001fortaellinger/en_GB/textile-town-herning (accessed 18 January 2019). 2 See the Indiskkunst website: www.indiskkunst.dk/ (accessed 25 January 2019). 3 In April 2013, the collector Nicolai Frahm, together with Frank Cohen, opened the Dairy Art Centre in London. See www.dairyartcentre.org.uk (accessed 25 January 2019).

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References Adajania, Nancy, “Bharti Kher: Of Monsters, Misfits, and the Biggest Heart in the World.” In Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 226–240. Mumbai: Radhika Sabavala, 2010. Adajania, Nancy, and Ranjit Hoskote, “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies.” Independent Curators International Research. 2010. http://curatorsintl.org/journal/notes_towards_a_lexicon_of_urgencies. (accessed June 3, 2019) Boast, Robin, “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited.” Museum Anthropology 34, no. 1 (2011): 56–70. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1379.2010.01107.x/full. Brenson, Michael, “The Curator’s Moment.” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (1998): 16–27. Clifford, James, “Museums as Contact Zones.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by James Clifford, 188–219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; [Experiments in Contemporary Anthropology]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Dadi, Ifthikhar, “Investigating Tradition, Interrogating the Popular.” In Indian Highway: The Catalogue, edited by Kathleen Madden and Sam Philips, 202–203. London: Koenig Books Ltd., 2008. Fischer, Michael, M. J. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Fortun, Kim, “Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, vi–xxii. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Hall, Stuart, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997. HEART Museum, “Introduction Indian Highway.” Wall text. Herning, 2010. Hoskote, Ranjit, “Signposting the Indian Highway.” In Indian Highway – the Catalogue, edited by Kathleen Madden and Sam Philips, 190–193. London: Koenig Books Ltd, 2008. ———, Heidelberg University, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, July 19, 2010. ———, “Kaleidoscopic Propositions: The Evolving Contexts of Contemporary Indian Art.” In India: Art Now, edited by Christian Gether. India Today. Ostfildern and Ishøj: Hatje Cantz and Arken Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Journalist, HEART Museum, Herning, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 13, 2010. Kvaran, Gunnar, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, July 24, 2009. MacDonald, Sharon, and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. 1. publ. Sociological Review Monographs. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Maskara, Abhay, Art Summit, New Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky and Christiane Brosius, January 23, 2011. Mason, Rhiannon, “Culture Theory and Museum Studies.” In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, 1. publ., 17–31. Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies, 12. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Menezes, Meera, Office Art India, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 23, 2010. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed., The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed., repr. London: Routledge, 2002. Myers, Fred R., “Social Agency and the Cultural Value(s) of the Art Object.” Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 203–211. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183504044373. Nagy, Peter, Nature Morte, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 22, 2010. Pereira, Sharmini, “N. S. Harsha: The Making of Good Things.” In Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 212–225. Mumbai: Radhika Sabavala, 2010. Potton, Ed, “Sheela Gowda Welcomes Us into Her World via a Darkroom.” The Times, January 3, 2009. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sheela-gowda-welcomes-us-into-her-world-via-a-darkroom-ctjcqmsn2jj.

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Raqs Media Collective, Once Again, To the Distant Observer. 2006. https://www.raqsmediacollective.net/ images/pdf/3568e0a5-3180-4c82-9f2a-5028fe5e202a.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019). Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskins. London: Fontana, 1974. Toft, Stinna, HEART Museum, Herning, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 14, 2010. ———, Joint guided tour at HEART Museum, Herning, June 3, 2010. Turner, Victor W., The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1977. Young female participant on the guided tour, HEART Museum, Herning, 3 June 2010. Young female staff member, HEART Museum, Herning, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 14, 2010. Young male participant on the guided tour, HEART Museum, Herning, 3 June 2010.

Plate 2.1 Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (detail) 2008 Video, featuring fiberglass sculptures. Dimensions

variable. Copyright Raqs Media Collective. Source: Photograph at HEART Museum Herning, copyright Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 2.2 Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (detail) 2008 Video, featuring fiberglass sculptures. Dimensions

variable. Copyright Raqs Media Collective. Source: Photograph at HEART Museum, Herning, copyright Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 2.3 Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (detail) 2008 Video, featuring fiberglass sculptures. Dimensions variable. Copyright Raqs Media Collective. Source: Photograph at HEART Museum Herning, Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 3.1 An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007) by Bharti Kher. Bindis on fiberglass 173 × 300 × 116 cm; Come Give Us a Speech (2008) by N.S. Harsha; Curry (2005) by Subodh Gupta. Stainless steel utensils. Source: Photograph at HEART Museum, Herning, copyright Cathrine Bublatzky (2010).

Plate 4.1 Dream Ville II – 2007 (2008) C-Print by Dayanita Singh. Entrance to the Indian

Highway Exhibition, HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 4.2 Exhibition view, Indian Highway, HEART Museum, Herning. Artworks: An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007) by Bharti Kher, Come Give Us a Speech (2008) by N.S. Harsha, Tales of Good and Evil (2008) by Nalini Malani. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 4.3 Exhibition view, On the Road to the Next Milestone, “show within the show”

curated by Bose Krishnamachari. Art object: Left Leg Series (2008) by Riyas Komu. HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 4.4 Exhibition view, On the Road to the Next Milestone, “show within the show”

curated by Bose Krishnamachari. Art object middle: Untitled (from Love) (2006) by Sudarshan Shetty; in the back: Between One Shore and Several Others (Just What Is It . . . After Richard Hamilton) (2008) by Vivek Vilasini. HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 4.5 Darkroom (2006) by Sheela Gowda. Tar drums, tar drum sheets, asphalt, and mirrors. 238.8 × 259.1 × 304.8 cm. HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 4.6 Date by Date (2008) by Subodh Gupta. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 5.1 Strands (2011) by N.S. Harsha (detail), Mural on MAXXI museum, forecourt, Rome. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2012)

Plate 5.2 Strands (2011) by N.S. Harsha (detail), Mural on MAXXI museum, forecourt, Rome. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2012)

Plate 5.3 The Shroud (2007) by Ravi Agarwal, C-print, Size 152 cm × 92 cm. Source: Photograph provided by Ravi Agarwal.

Plate 6.1 I Love My India (2003) by Tejal Shah, DVD, HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Video Still Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 6.2 I Love My India (2003) by Tejal Shah, DVD, HEART Museum, Herning. Source: Photograph Video Still Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

Plate 6.3 I Love My India (2003) by Tejal Shah, DVD, HEART Museum, Herning.

Source: Photograph Video Still Cathrine Bublatzky (2010)

5 Transcultural dissonances in the contemporary art world Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, Rome 2012

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t the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, Indian Highway underwent a significant shift. The urban context of the exhibition in Rome was not loaded with the same kind of historical baggage as in London. Instead, the MAXXI institute formed a situation that Hal Foster calls an art-architecture complex (2011), a term which is here employed to also discuss the impact that the architecture of the museum had on the exhibition and its exhibitionary value. The press release for Indian Highway in Rome, which emphasised an Indian “miracle” and spoke of reviving “India Shining” and of the dizzying speed of development in the country, made clear that the economic and commercial situation of twenty-first-century India would be foregrounded in the Italian perception of Indian Highway.1 Moreover, looking at the exhibition and India through a nationalising lens, the curatorial perspective at MAXXI tried to emphasise the cultural similarities between India and Italy. This section will illustrate these dynamics and how the prestigious project of the MAXXI museum, a national marker of Rome and Italy, supported and ultimately integrated Indian Highway into a nationalising narrative.

MAXXI and the art-architecture complex One main consequence of the emphasis on the art-architecture complex was that the exhibition and the art objects vanished behind “master narratives”. At the previous venues, many of the curatorial efforts had focused on “de-nationalising” Indian contemporary art in one way or another. In Rome, Indian Highway took a turn in the other direction, and the exhibition lost much of its heralded “speed” and innovative power in generating new curatorial forms and establishing connections with contemporary developments in India. Critical reflection within the Delhi art community on the European perception of Indian contemporary art increased after the Indian art shows in Europe, including Indian Highway in Lyon, Paris-Bombay-Delhi in Paris, and the Indian Pavilion in Venice in 2011 (see Chapter 7). And just as the artist Jitish Kallat and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist had foreseen, the era of the survey shows seemed to come to an end in 2011. This was followed by disillusion in 2012 as the euphoria surrounding Indian artists in international survey shows ebbed away. This disillusionment spread to local art communities like Delhi where the voices criticising these shows became louder. Survey shows were seen to stereotype Indian art by attempting to approach it from a national point of view.

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Earlier, I suggested that there were different speeds of movements in various parts of the art world, and the year 2012 represented a striking moment for this kind of transcultural and translocal dissonance. In this year, the gap between meaning production in the Rome version of Indian Highway on the one hand and the growing public discussions and critiques in Delhi about European survey shows like Paris-Bombay-Delhi on the other reached a new climax that also became part of my conversations with local artists and curators. In this section, I will discuss some of these moments of “transcultural dissonances” with reference to my fieldwork in Rome and Delhi and in relation to my conversations with curators and artists. In order to test my assumption that transcultural and critical translocal practices in the art world act as a means of engaging with different localities, histories, and cultural crises, the different temporalities and resulting dissonances of these practices need to be elaborated on in order to investigate the cultural processes and their results. Situations where agents act in regard to but not in direct contact with each other, need to be studied over a longer period of time, as envisaged in this ethnographic research on Indian Highway. Here, I see the discipline of anthropology as having a particular responsibility to investigate the dissonances between different localities and agents in order to understand larger processes of translation and representation as “transcultural practice”. In the first part of this section, I will introduce the local setting of the MAXXI museum while paying special attention to the museum building as a prestigious art-architectural project in Rome. The Italian venue for Indian Highway exemplifies a moment in the interrelation between Europe and India that was shaped by fundamental discrepancies between European and Indian perceptions of Indian contemporary art shows. Thus, after introducing MAXXI, I will take a closer look at the locality in Rome, and in the second part, I will focus on the art scene in Delhi and the criticism of the European reception. Using this local context as another launching point for my discussion, I will reinforce my argument that “transcultural” and “translocal” practices do not implicate the participation of different localities and agents in the same global cultural processes, even though they are engaged with each other. Empirical data from another panel discussion at the India Art Fair Speakers’ Forum (2012), as well as conversations with the curators Meera Menezes and Vidya Shivadas and the artists Ravi Agarwal and Shuddhabrata Sengupta/Raqs Media Collective, will help to emphasise that these practices encourage a stronger, entangled, but not homogenised global situation. They will indicate, in other words, that the disposition of participating agents to displace themselves into different “interpretative schemes” in the contemporary art world encompasses both an “everyday transculturalism” and a “strategic transculturalism” (Pütz 2008, 525). “[T]he ability to operate and orientate oneself reflexively in different symbolic structures [demonstrates that] [c]ultural interpretative schemes can therefore be understood as a repertoire that keeps several options of action ready, to which the individuals may have reflexive access” (ibid.). The MAXXI museum is a prestigious building. Since it is celebrated as a spectacular site, and a star architect, Zaha Hadid, is associated with it, the architecture certainly plays an important role in the perception of the exhibitions it hosts. Rome, like any other city of this size, consists of different neighbourhoods and sectors that attract and compete for different

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kinds of publics who are living in and walking through the city. Located in the northeast of Rome, and in an area of the city that is known as the base camp for the former Olympic games (1960), the museum is set apart from the usual tourist zones. In this setting, the MAXXI museum offers a fascinating, but also contested, site for politicians, visitors, urban planners, and public media. Under the management of a foundation created by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, and under the supervision of the international architect Zaha Hadid, the MAXXI museum received national and also international acclaim as the first Italian national institution of its kind devoted to contemporary creativity. This celebration seemed to find even more momentum in 2010 when Zaha Hadid received the prestigious Stirling Prize for architecture, for her MAXXI project.2 Although the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome was conceived as a glamorous architectonical project of futurist modernity and the sign of new urban development in the city, it also came under heavy criticism. Built on a former military site, close to large, old-fashioned housing blocks and Pierluigi Nervis’ Palazetto dello Sport, the museum was not located in an established “art district” alongside other museums or galleries. This slight removal from major cultural thoroughfares was also mirrored at the previous Indian Highway venues in Oslo and Herning. However, the architecture of MAXXI, which combines steel, concrete, and glass into a lighted labyrinth with various floors and exhibition spaces for modern and contemporary art, stands out in comparison with those other institutes, as it offers visitors the freedom to stroll, like a flaneur, through the dynamic spatiality. The reception of this new building was not all positive, however; it was also criticised for its extravagance and for being an art object in itself, one that would disregard and overshadow the art displayed inside. Ellis Woodman, for example, commented in The Telegraph (2010) that the MAXXI would be a “stunning building but a terrible gallery” (ibid.). With regard to the museum’s collection, the exorbitant cost, and its inconvenient distance from the main tourist sites in Rome, Woodman noted, “Frankly, I can’t think that I have ever encountered a gallery that addresses its nominal function with such seeming cynicism” (Woodman 2010). This nominal function can be identified as what the museum and performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls a “performing museology”. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defined performing museology as something which “makes the museum perform itself by making the museum qua museum visible to the visitor” (2000, 10); in other words, the museum unfolds as a catalyst in its own right. This seems to have found literal expression in the MAXXI museum in Rome in the context of Indian Highway, as I will demonstrate by taking a closer look at the building and its spatial orientation. The museum creates multi-levelled serpentine exhibition spaces interconnected by bridges and floors that are flooded with natural light through the glass roof. It mainly consists of an auditorium, a library, educational spaces, a gallery for temporary exhibitions, and a café. In addition to the permanent collection – the “MAXXI Art” collection with more than 300 objects, including works by Anish Kapoor, Mario Merz, and Gerhard Richter – the museum hosts “MAXXI Architecture” with archives on Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, and Pierluigi Nervi, as well as contemporary architects like Toyo Ito and Giancarlo de Carlo.3

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On its first anniversary, the MAXXI received extremely enthusiastic praise. In the words of Pio Baldi, the director of the MAXXI Foundation, [s]uccess should be measured on the basis of an ability to interact within the urban, national and international context and on the achievement of the objectives indicated in the museum’s mission statement. From this point of view it can be said that MAXXI has created within the city a special social and cultural campus that is popular, active and lively, that it is reinforcing the national network of the contemporary by making the innovative idioms of creativity available to all and that lastly MAXXI has created its own network of contacts and exchanges with the world’s leading museums. (Baldi 2011)4

The acclaim, along with MAXXI’s numerous international collaborations, demonstrated that the museum was being celebrated as an educational institution that was representative of the Italian nation, a mission that was also common to nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums.5 More importantly, the museum was, according to Maurice Roche (2002), constructed with the intention of locating Rome within national and international art circles and interconnecting with the world’s other leading museums. But on the micro level, with regard to the urban landscape of Rome, MAXXI’s director, Pio Baldi, saw the museum as creating a hyperspace. This, in the words of Aihwa Ong, gives the impression that “the spectacle has come to mediate the relationship between people by inducing in them the false feeling of an imaginary commonality in apparently shared spectatorship” (Ong 2011, 213). Arriving on foot from the bus station Flaminia/Reni in the north of Rome to the museum, one passes through a large sliding gate to enter the museum forecourt from a side entrance.6 Opposite the museum, the square is framed by a building housing the cafeteria and bookstore. A futuristic facade protruding high above the ground quickly comes into sight, intensifying the contrast between the architectural museum design and the surrounding buildings of the neighbourhood (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). In a map of the area, the museum is a rather foreign, dislocated element. Just as the museum creates an urban enclave with an exceptional mission, one that had undeniable impact on perceptions of Indian Highway, Rome itself in the form of the spectacular MAXXI hyperbuilding – also the national museum for contemporary art – reflects a political desire for world recognition. Moreover, the “commingling” of contemporary culture and economics that “underlies not only the prominence of museums but also the refashioning of such institutions to serve an ‘experience economy’” (Foster 2011, IX) establishes a revelatory nexus between institutional engagements with contemporary art from other regions. The asserted idea of global interconnectivity and similarity unfolds as ambivalent when the capitalist subsumes the cultural into the economic (XII). The observation that commerce and art are shaping each other is undeniable, especially when the curatorial endeavour employs the “hyperspace” of MAXXI to display Indian Highway as another hyperspace, thus combining art with architecture.

Figure 5.1 National Museum of Twenty-First Century Arts, MAXXI. Rome.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2012)

Figure 5.2 National Museum of Twenty-First Century Arts, MAXXI. Rome.

Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2012)

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A 360-degree portrait of the Indian subcontinent – nationalising Indian art Giulia Ferracci, who curated Indian Highway in cooperation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carlos Basualdos, the chief curator at MAXXI, attempted to emphasise the similarities between Italy and India. Projecting transnational interconnectivities and solidarities appears to have been another strategy of “being global”, and in this context, it interweaved the Italian nation, as represented by the urban, institutional, and architectural setting, with the art from India. Thus, at MAXXI, Indian Highway underwent a shift in which the art was nationalised on the global stage. The exhibition portrayed Italy as a powerful nation that has a supposed shared history and imagined companionship with India. The plan was to use a rhetorical curatorial gesture comparing current day India with Italy in the 1950s and 60s and to draw important parallels between the economic growth, technological development, and social transformations of the two nations. Apart from the fact that Indo-Roman relations fall more or less along diplomatic and bilateral trade lines and do not include any exceptional dimension, the comparison between India and Italy in different moments of time acted as a material signifier of hierarchical relation. On the other hand, presenting Indian contemporary art as a sort of mirror of an Italian society some decades back creates a kind of utopian outlook. This notion of a utopia was intensified by the fact that, although Italian art and other documents were not included in the exhibition itself, the visitor was able to connect Indian Highway with other exhibitions on Italian art at MAXXI. As a result, the envisaged “partnership” cannot be seen as more than an illusory attempt to avoid highlighting cultural difference. In this sense it was misleading and similar in thrust to the attempts to create dialogues between Indian and French artists that would be utilised at the Centre Pompidou exhibition, Paris-Delhi-Bombay (2011), or the theme of “shared exoticisms” at the former venue of Indian Highway in Lyon in 2011 (see Chapter 7). Although the exhibitions were initiated with good intentions, such curatorial ventures end up strongly emphasising art as a national symbol at a time when the nation is still an important signifier in local self-perception. This became even more obvious in Rome, where contemporary Indian art was seen as a representation of the “‘360-Degree Portrait’ of India and Its ‘Miracle’”. However, a closer look at the exhibition format at MAXXI reveals that the comparison between Italy and India remained a highly abstract one. Although it was clearly meant to avoid any kind of exoticisation or establishment of “cultural differences”, as the curator Giulia Ferracci explained to me, nevertheless, the way the exhibition was organised and the information was provided did not immediately make connections between the Indian art objects, the exhibited Italian art in other parts of the museum, and the rhetorical exhibition concept for Indian Highway: Early in the day, when I took the photographs of MAXXI, the square in front of the museum was still relatively empty. And while I walked across the square towards the entrance, several garlands with painted faces, already a bit washed out, became visible on the floor (Plates 5.1 and 5.2). Nearby, a text board provided information about this site-specific art project by the Indian artist N.S. Harsha, entitled Strands (2011). The artist, so the information said, was famous for his variety of work, ranging from miniature paintings to comics to large-scale works. At the Singapore

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Biennale, he had conceptualised another large-scale work, Cosmic Orphans, which was shown at the Sri Krishna Temple. In Rome, Strands (2011) consisted of over 500 faces painted in acrylic on the floor. Above the art description, the exhibition title Indian Highway was mentioned. However, other than this, there were no signs outside the building to inform visitors about current exhibitions. The entrance hall of the museum is high tech and hyper modern in atmosphere. The walls and ceilings are entirely made of neutral concrete. A semi-circular reception counter was prominently placed in the middle of the foyer, where flyers, catalogues, and a guestbook were also kept. On the wall above and behind the reception counter, a digital display showed, at short intervals, announcements about the exhibition programme at MAXXI. It mentioned that Indian Highway would be shown from 22 September 2011 to 29 January 2012, but since the information switched at very short intervals, and only the exhibition title and dates were provided, there was some difficulty in figuring out which exhibitions were currently on display. In this sense, MAXXI was very different from the art institutes that hosted Indian Highway in London, Oslo, and Herning. And even though the museums in Oslo and Herning had, like the MAXXI institute, their own collections on display, they are, of course, much smaller in size. The institutes in Oslo and Herning create an atmosphere in which exhibitions and objects have enough space “to speak” and where visitors have the freedom to engage with the art objects. At MAXXI, the situation is different. Because of its size and the large number of visitors, the museum hosts various exhibitions in parallel, and the atmosphere is busy and noisy. Another aspect that set MAXXI apart from the other venues is its architecture. The building designed by the star architect Zaha Hadid is an attraction in its own right and one that many visitors came expressly to see.7 Photographs of the museum’s interior on the internet illustrate two major aspects – first, the high quality of design and aesthetics, and second, the absence of artworks. The dialectics between the architecture and its function as a museum for contemporary art emphasise the tension between the two. As mentioned earlier, this prompted some criticisms of the MAXXI project. In her article entitled “Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Art Gallery in Rome: Stunning Building, Terrible Gallery” (2010), Ellis Woodman remarked on the dysfunction of the museum as a “terrible gallery” (ibid.) and highlighted a conceptual problem that is immediately observable when walking in the space – namely, the invisibility of the art objects. Ellis Woodman noted that the decision to appoint Zaha Hadid to build the museum “was surely motivated less by the aim of building the best art gallery than by that of rejuvenating this most ancient of cities’ public image” (ibid.). Woodman raised the following question: “The space’s consistently epic scale and wildly curvaceous geometry is certainly spectacular, but what kind of art can possibly benefit from being shown in such conditions?” (ibid.). There is something undeniably harsh in Woodman’s suggestion that art can only occupy a decorative role in this gallery; however, the architectural design and the atmosphere within the museum space only emphasise the impression that the building is an architectonical art object in its own right, along the lines conceptualised by Hal Foster as the art-architecture complex (2011). Indeed, one critique of Foster’s approach but also the representation of the Indian Highway exhibition is that it remains unclear in which way the museum (and the exhibition) relate to the “city, the public life, of the street or of any of the things that

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surround the buildings [s]he looks at” (Long 2012). With its dynamic futuristic architecture and lateral opening of the building onto the space in front of it, one can instead also observe “an interpenetration of interior and exterior, an intensification of ‘figure’ and ‘environment’ alike” (Foster 2011, 82). With its matrix of designed views (83) fixed in concrete, the tension with the interior, at this time partly filled with highly dynamic art from contemporary India, sometimes looked as though it was burning. And this impression was intensified when contrasted with the immediate vicinity and neighbourhood of the museum, Flaminio, which with its three- to four-storey apartment buildings and other cultural institutes, had been turned into an up-and-coming creative hot-spot and an important cultural centre for the city. This is a development that is not foreseeable in, for example, Herning, where the HEART Museum presents a similar architectural project but is located in a more deserted area. That the museum itself was given the status of an art object again suggests the notion of “performing museology” – that is, to treat museums as an art practice. This is one way to understand how the museum can function as a medium and how an exhibition can act as an interface or catalyst for this (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2000, 12). While Kirshenblatt-Gimblett opposes an institutional approach where museums, in a rather classical tradition, are understood as neutrally performing an informing museology (2000, 11), she also refers to museums that address visitors in different ways. With the advent of participatory exhibitions where visitors are not only customers and consumers but also producers who join in the creation of an exhibition project, the museum becomes a distinctive medium in the process (ibid.). However, at MAXXI, visitors were not invited to contribute or participate, but only to engage with the exhibits of Indian Highway by viewing them. And although the curatorial model might have envisaged the exhibition as a sort of “interface”, namely between Italian and Indian culture, this aim formed a strong contrast to the exhibition space, as I will argue next. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the MAXXI museum was also described as a “catalyst” by the architect, and Hadid’s partner, Patrik Schumacher (2010), who argued “for the architecture’s capacity to construct spaces that achieve higher densities of communication and event participation through strategies of continuous differentiation, deep layering, and simultaneity” (ibid.). With regard to MAXXI and other art museums of the twenty-first century, Schumacher sees a dissolving line between contemporary art and architecture: The creative has replaced the sacred. In principle any political, social, economic, moral, cultural or technological question can be brought forward for public exposition, reflection as well as critical and creative exploration within the domain of contemporary art. Nothing is off-limits. Art is also the domain where new technologies and media of communication are first explored. It is the zone of incubation for all ideas – including architectural ideas – that need space to develop before facing the performance pressures of the real world. The architectural frame – the museum – should thus be a catalyst and incubator with respect to experimental modes of public exhibition, collective communication, and social gathering. (Schumacher 2010)

Indeed, for Indian Highway, MAXXI functioned as a catalyst and incubator that generated a different curatorial perspective compared to the earlier venues of the exhibition. This understanding of the museum as a catalyst in the city space reminds me again of the notion of the “creative city”

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and “creative industries”. However, aside from the creative politics behind the architecture of MAXXI, I was also interested in engaging with the “readability” of curatorial perspectives on Indian Highway. For this, it became important to gain more information from the curators’ site and to arrange a meeting with co-curator Giulia Ferracci.

Meeting the curator Giulia Ferracci While I was waiting for Giulia Ferracci in the museum’s lobby in early January 2012, the space seemed to take on the atmosphere of a lively social gathering – it was very busy in the museum halls, and groups of people were queuing at the ticket desk. The atmosphere was very active and noisy and thus dissimilar to the ambience at the earlier venues. A brief visit to the small museum shop allowed me to view the new edition of the Indian Highway catalogue. The cover featured a detail from the triptych Baggage Claim (2010) by Jitish Kallat, which refers to Mumbai and the mediation of life and death in this metropolis; however, the catalogue was only available in Italian. At the information desk, one could pick up a plan of the museum, but no further information was available on Indian Highway besides a paper folder in pink (the exhibition colour), which was provided at a stand-up display placed inconspicuously some metres away from the information desk. Later, when I accompanied Giulia Ferracci to the exhibition space, she explained that some of the artworks in Indian Highway were further explained in a text that could be found in the pink paper folder. When Giulia Ferracci arrived in the foyer to welcome me, I was delighted to receive from her a copy of the new edition of the exhibition catalogue about Indian Highway at MAXXI. Our time was limited, however, so we went to the café bar for a quick conversation and then later for a brief walk through the exhibition. At the café bar, Giulia Ferracci explained the overall curatorial concept of Indian Highway at the MAXXI and that the exhibition and artists had been essentially divided into three “macro” areas, as the homepage also explained.8 The first theme, “Craft and Contemporary Tradition”, included artists such as Nalini Malani, N.S. Harsha, Bharti Kher, and Maqbool Fida Husain. On the homepage, I later read that this part of the exhibition explored the revisiting of ancient forms of expression from Indian culture, such as miniatures, ceramics, and ink paintings. With regard to this, Ferracci mentioned the artist Maqbool Fida Husain, who had passed away in June 2011. As her research for the exhibition had begun with this important painter, she explained that they had decided to dedicate the exhibition to him, which is also mentioned in the exhibition catalogue (Giulia Ferracci, Rome, 3 February 2012). The second theme dealt with the movement of people from rural to urban areas and with the developing city and the state of India. Ferracci said that she had paid particular attention to this section, as it was meant to strongly resemble Italy’s growth in the late 1950s (ibid.). In an interview with the online magazine artdaily, Anna Mattirolo, the director of MAXXI Art, also touched on this theme: Indian Highway at MAXXI . . . departs from the idea of the highway as a linking element for the migratory flows from the periphery to the city and testifies to the growing global centrality of the Indian civilisation, from an artistic point of view too, from the 1990s through to the present day. (artdaily 2012)

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On the homepage, this second theme was called “Exploding Metropolises”, in which urban expansion, chaos, and the abandonment of rural areas were examined. Here, artists such as Sheela Gowda, Bose Krishnamachari, Jitish Kallat, Dayanita Singh, Valay Shende, and Hema Upadhyay were included. Giulia Ferracci talked about her impression that Western cultures were declining and that countries like India would probably be in leading positions over the next twenty years; she wanted to stress that these changes were due to rapid economic growth. Giulia Ferracci continued with her explanation of the last theme of the exhibition on history and identity. Again, for more detailed information, I was referred to the website, which suggested that this part on “Indian Identity and Histories” investigated political, social, and religious themes such as the war between India and Pakistan, religious struggles, and the transience of national borders. The artists included in this section were Ayisha Abraham, Abhishek Hazra, Amar Kanwar, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Raqs Media Collective, Tejal Shah, and the Desire Collective Machine. Referring to this section, Giulia Ferracci particularly mentioned Shilpa Gupta and Amar Kanwar because they had added new works. In answer to my question about how she had chosen these themes, she told me that she did not want the exhibition to be too “folkloric” or exotic but wanted to point out similarities between India and Italy (Giulia Ferracci, Rome, 3 January 2012). The curators did not include any Italian artists in order to bring this artistic position into a dialogue, but Ferracci explained that some of the Indian artists had particularly inspired her ideas in this direction: for example, Sumakshi Singh (ibid.). Singh presented a site-specific installation entitled Circumferences Forming (2011).9 The work was motivated by her residency in Assisi, where she had adapted the notion of the Gothic basilica to recreate a corridor section in the exhibition space as an archway. Altogether, four site-specific installations were included in the exhibition. In addition to N.S. Harsha’s and Sumakshi Singh’s work, an installation by the Desire Machine Collective (Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya) Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted (2009–2010) was also on display. It was a sound-specific installation with sounds recorded in Law Kyntang Holy Forest – this was switched off during my visit to MAXXI. The “show within the show” curated by Amar Kanwar had also already been dismantled at the time of my visit due to construction works in that part of the museum. After my return from Rome, I once again consulted the museum’s homepage but found very little information about Amar Kanwar’s section, The News. The exhibit featured a selection of three extracts of news footage: the first was filmed in the early 1930s and showed glimpses of protests against British rule in India; the second (from 2004) documented Manipuri activists attacked by the police for demanding the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a law that gave the army the right to search, arrest, and even kill with impunity (across the northeast of India) since 1958; and the third clip, shot in 2011, showed the people of Jagatsinghapur District, Orissa, protesting against the police attempt to forcibly enter their villages to acquire land for the South Korean Steel Company POSCO (MAXXI).10 The News was launched on 2 October 2011, in memory of the birth anniversary of M. K. Gandhi, but no curatorial note by Amar Kanwar was made available. Likewise, in the exhibition space, no information was provided after its removal; it was as if the “show within the show” as a platform for curator-artist exchange was increasingly fading in importance since its first inauguration at the Serpentine Gallery. This was particularly unfortunate since the missing reference also signalled a dismissal of the appreciation

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for the project and for the artist Amar Kanwar who has “contributed far-reaching projects at the conjunction of political ecology and visual culture that propose further vantage points on the clash over development in India” (Demos 2016, 169). In contrast to this depreciation of the “show within the show”, another element of the accompanying cultural programme was made more prominent. Three multimedia stations were set up to screen previews of the video musical Nineteen Mantra before it was staged in the auditorium Parco della Musica and then in Milan in January 2012. This choreographed video musical, which recounted the impetus of myth and its transportation into the contemporary through mantras, had been planned for MAXXI Art and produced by Fondazione Musica per Roma and the MAXXI Foundation in cooperation with Teatro alla Scala Academy.11 Furthermore, as Ferracci explained, the three stations also represented the three positions of the sun during the day – the sunrise, the sunset, as well as midday – and she recommended that I watch the videos. In this context, she explained that in line with MAXXI’s vision, she wanted to elaborate on the theme through the works and not through captions, since she felt that they had been included too extensively in Paris. Ferracci said that she did not see her curatorial role as that of a teacher who explained India to the public, and she felt that this was the position taken by the exhibition Paris-Bombay-Delhi in Paris. She also mentioned that the Paris show ran counter to her own ideas when I asked about her understanding of the folkloristic and “exotic”. The Lyon venue of Indian Highway was also, in her eyes, “exoticising”, mainly due to the fact that the works had been grouped too close to each other (Giulia Ferracci, Rome, 3 January 2012). During the first part of our conversation, I asked her about her curatorial research strategies, and she remarked that she had not travelled to India but had visited several exhibitions in Europe to see Indian contemporary artists. The venues she had visited included the Serpentine Gallery, Tate Modern, the Guggenheim in Berlin, and the Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; furthermore, she had seen Indian Highway in Lyon and had also visited the exhibition in Paris. This comparative curatorial research into various exhibition formats is different from the often-proclaimed “curatorial fieldwork” that was carried out in the localities of the artists. This does not mean, however, that this curatorial approach rules out any interaction between curator and artists; indeed, as Giulia Ferracci remarked, this curatorial format allowed her to ask the artists for concrete ideas about the presentation of their works in the MAXXI exhibition space (Giulia Ferracci, Rome, 3 January 2012). Nevertheless, she decided to group the art objects and, as she explained, tried to bring the more “folkloristic” works together. By utilising the three major themes mentioned previously, it was possible to split up the works and avoid an all-embracing exoticisation and stereotyping of Indian art that emphasised cultural difference. When I expressed further interest in the idea of art as Indian, she agreed, adding that art can be seen very differently and that she would be interested in the artist’s dialogue with people from other localities (ibid.). She did not elaborate on this in more detail but suggested a brief look at the exhibition.

Joint walk through the exhibition at MAXXI While Giulia Ferracci was showing me around the exhibition, we paused in front of the installation by Subodh Gupta, Date by Date, which Giulia Ferracci remarked was an installation that

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was a “reminder of Italy”. The curatorial aim behind Indian Highway at MAXXI was to emphasise the cultural similarities between India’s present situation and Italy’s past, an approach which still cements the two countries together in an imagined nationalistic representation. There were further problems with this curatorial capture, particularly based on the information communicated in the exhibition space. For example, what kind of audience did the curators imagine would have the relevant knowledge about historic Italy and its social complexities and past urban life in order to grasp the comparison? As there were neither any Italian artworks nor any documentation placed in the exhibition, even this might have run the risk of creating fixed boundaries between Indian and Italian culture. Furthermore, the different time periods under discussion – contemporary India and Italy’s past – provoke a dissonance and asymmetry that risks exoticising India, since one might be led to conclude that India is far behind Italy on the road to development. And since a comparison between the different nations was not the topic of any of the exhibited artworks, the curatorial perspective on the distinction between them seemed to sharpen the nation as a bounded category. In short, the display at MAXXI did not appear to invite dialogue or even to perceive India as an equal player. On entering the main exhibition hall, we passed a large-scale installation, Widow (2004) by Anish Kapoor. I was astonished to see the artist’s work at MAXXI and wondered whether it was part of the Indian Highway show. Giulia Ferracci explained that this work was part of the MAXXI collection. Widow was shown together with the previously mentioned installation by the Desire Machine Collective, Trespassers Will (Not) Be Prosecuted (2011), which consisted of several black loudspeakers hanging from the ceiling.12 Accompanied by voices, laughter, and the sounds of other visitors, Giulia Ferracci and I climbed a steel-grating staircase up to the open, high-walled room on the first floor.13 Reaching this second exhibition level, Giulia Ferracci introduced me to the first media station playing 99 Mantras. This marked the beginning of our joint walk through the exhibition. We went to the first level where an art installation was displayed, a true-to-scale truck made out of reflecting metal bowls by Valay Shende entitled Transit (2010). This was part of the section that had been organised around the theme of the city and the movement from rural areas to the city, as Ferracci explained. To its right, a glass front provided a view of another showroom. On the left, a ramp led up to a further level. While we were entering the next level via the ramp, I mentioned that there were a large number of visitors that day. I asked if guided tours in English were also provided, and later I learned that the museum offered audio guides that I would return to use on another day. Giulia Ferracci and I walked along the stretched ramp towards the second level, and another large-scale installation along the left wall became visible – the monumental shelf with kitchen utensils, Take Off Your Shoes and Wash Your Hands (2008) by Subodh Gupta, which seemed to fit quite well into the curved wall, even though I remembered it as being straight at earlier venues. When I saw it for the first time at the HEART Museum in Herning, the installation consisted of only one section and was entitled Curry (2005). This installation, similar to the work Dream Villa 11–2007 (2008) by Dayanita Singh, is a good example of the changes artworks undergo while circulating through various institutes. In this case, the changes were apparent in both size and title.

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I wondered about the architecture of the museum and the challenges it must have posed for the exhibition. Much later, in 2014, I met one of the assistant curators in Delhi, and she confirmed this observation when she spoke about the huge challenges the space had raised in general, in particular for the installation of Indian Highway. Another insight the assistant curator shared was about the installation of Hema Bhuta’s Growing (2009) at MAXXI. The work was made out of a large number of incense sticks that art students helped to unpack from the small boxes and to bind together. This installation was not an easy venture because the sticks produced a very strong smell that could be detected outside on the street. Giulia Ferracci had also mentioned this, but at the time of our conversation, the smell was barely detectable. This made it very difficult to recognise the sticks at first sight – a good example of the inconstancy of the sensorial experience of art. In our joint walk, Ferracci also addressed another installation hanging from the ceiling. This impressive work, Untitled (2010), by the Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta, was a new addition to Indian Highway. A large hanging installation made out of 185 long skewers, it formed a spectacular view for the visitors who walked underneath and looked up at the sharp objects dangling above them. Other works were located on the same level as Subodh Gupta’s shelf, including the photographs of Prajakata Potnis, Still Life (2009), which depicted food stored in a freezer for a long time and slowly rotting. Together with those of Subodh Gupta and Shilpa Gupta, these works seemed to focus on food, both the lack and the abundance of it, according to the curator. With Date by Date (2008) by Subodh Gupta, which represented India’s slow bureaucracy, we entered the “identity and history” part of the exhibition. Here my joint walk with the curator ended. At this point, Ferracci briefly introduced me to the rest of the exhibition before leaving for other appointments. In the following section, I will focus in more detail on Subodh Gupta’s Date by Date (Plate 4.6).

Memory, materiality, emotions – Date by Date (2008) This work had been part of the exhibition in previous venues and was the subject of particular discussion for visitors at the HEART Museum, Herning. Here at MAXXI, it marked one entrance to the “Identity and History” section. Thus, I was very interested to hear Giulia Ferracci’s opinion about this installation. With its slow bureaucracy, she explained, it reminded her of Italy and helped her to understand a bit more about India (Giulia Ferracci, Rome, 3 January 2012). Compared to what I had gleaned from conversations with visitors in Herning, this was a new perspective on Date by Date. In Herning the visitors had interpreted the installation as an ironic artistic statement on a developing country where such undeveloped sectors and areas existed in parallel with high-speed modernisation. During an interview at the time of the opening of Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery (London, 2008), the artist commented on his work, “On the Indian highway . . . you drive in four lanes and then you go into one lane and there is a jam or an accident or a demonstration and you are faced with a bottleneck. Our offices are the same” (Gupta quoted in Graham-Dixon 2008). Even though this statement was not made available to visitors in the exhibition, it encapsulated the ideas that visitors or curators had about it. In this sense the work is a convincing example of how the materiality and ready-made objects of an art installation – with its used chairs, files, typing machines, and shelves – recreate what Nicolas Bourriaud has termed relational aesthetics and the production of social relation in relation to an

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artwork (see also Chapter 3), especially in the sensorial experience of visitors who walk through the imagined office space and notice all the details and even smell the materiality of the objects. Most of the reactions I recorded seemed to have come from a stereotypical impression of India as a backward country or seemed to have tapped into the idea that there is a large discrepancy between modernisation and old-fashioned workflows. This seemed particularly true in the context of survey exhibitions which “often offer easily digestible nuggets of Indian-ness. Is this why Subodh Gupta’s bartans, Kher’s bindi-skinned beasts and Kallat’s fiberglass bones are so coveted?” (Jumabhoy 2012, 80). At MAXXI, it turned out to be part of the curatorial capture to draw parallels to similar conditions within another – European – society. Such transformation across local, cultural, and temporal borders refers very explicitly to the art-culture system and the museum as a cultural contact zone and allows us to argue for both the art objects and a museum/exhibitionary setting as a site of exchange and constant translation given the socio-cultural background, knowledge, and memories of the beholder. At the same time, as envisaged by curator Giulia Ferracci, memory once again is closely connected to mobility, materiality, and emotions. Marus̆ka Svas̆ek investigates this mobility and emotional interaction in terms of “transit”, but she refers to “transition” as the changes that occur in the perceived value or meaning of an object: for instance the crucifix as an object that operates in several contexts like pilgrimages or art. She also notes that “transition identifies transit-related changes in the meaning, value and emotional efficacy of objects and images opposed simply to changes in their location or ownership” (2012, 3). To advance her argument, Svas̆ek uses the term “transformation” to refer to “transit-related changes in human subjects, specifically in terms of their status, identity formation and emotional subjectivity” (5). The suggested interaction between moments of transits, meaning change, and individual identity transformation allows for a promising perspective on the Indian Highway space at MAXXI and a critical reflection on the curatorial concept of evoking similarities between India and Italy. Since many of MAXXI’s visitors come as tourists to Rome, the experience of travelling can cause specific changes based on their situated identities. Touristic engagement with specific sites evokes practices of gazing, producing, and consuming, which play an important role in experiencing foreign localities while memories and relationships between the self and the other also become equally important.14 As an important site for tourists, many visitors come just to see the famous architecture of the building. In this context, the curatorial intention of displaying contemporary art from India as a cross-cultural mediator to demonstrate similarities with Italy’s past appears to be continuing hierarchical relations and imaginations between Western and non-Western societies. And even though the art objects underwent a transition and evoked emotional reactions and memories, this scenario might be different compared to Svasek’s example of pilgrims and crucifixes. I also considered moments of transit, transition, and transformation as affective moves in the context of an exhibition space, as mentioned in my discussion of the concept of the “effective power” of the exhibits in the context of my own experiences at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo (see Chapter 3). Here at MAXXI, however, I applied the implicated relation between materiality and emotions to the concept of a transcultural contact zone and in contrast to the idea of the cultural contact zone (Clifford 1997). In Chapter 4, I argued that transcultural processes

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do not per se support “cultural difference” as a fixed status between the “self” and the “other”. Instead, “transculturality” helps to concretely reflect on practices of translation “that take on board ideas about its limits and dead-ends, its impossibilities, the notion of the untranslatable” (Maharaj 1994, 30). Such moments can generate identification processes in which cultural similarities play a significant role and help one relate to possible shared memories and histories, even though the similarities can also seem to be imagined in a more emphatic sense. Marus̆ka Svas̆ek’s arguments, applied in my discussion on Indian Highway at MAXXI, allow one to add that emotions also have a significant impact on the moments of “translation” and “transformation” experienced by the beholder (including curators and visitors in the same group of agents) and can turn them into significant moments in the transcultural contact. Since Svas̆ek focuses more on individuals or larger social groups than on cultures, the transcultural contact zone allows us to address the level of cultural engagement theoretically, as the curator Giulia Ferracci considered it with her curation of Indian Highway. However, there are also some analytical challenges that arise when one looks into the exhibition space and the actual organisation of the artworks.

Criticising the European perception of Indian contemporary art When I went alone to the exhibition after my meeting with Giulia Ferracci, I was curious about MAXXI’s approach to the institutional task of informing visitors about the exhibition theme. In addition to a small introduction text on the exhibition wall, which was very similar to the online text and contained a brief description of the curatorial concept as well as the major themes of this exhibition, an audio guide was also provided to visitors. In order to take stock of what information was being provided, I used the audio guide. It offered basic information about some of the artworks; however, not all the artworks were included, and instead of dividing the information according to the different exhibitions running in parallel at MAXXI, the guide addressed all the different shows in a row, without any information about the particular curatorial concepts. It would have also been interesting to investigate the results in a more quantitative way, in terms of visitors’ reaction and what they learned about the art. According to my observation, visitors often looked around in astonishment as if they were trying to orientate themselves when entering the exhibition space through one of the three entrances. Only one entrance to Indian Highway was explicitly marked with glass doors; the others were more or less open and were not easy to recognise at first glance. The interrelation between the city, the museum, and the exhibition clearly offered a new perspective. Thus, MAXXI had a different type of visitor who was expecting to see the National Museum of Contemporary Art in the Italian capital. This not only meant that there were a large number of international tourists, but also that there were many visitors from other parts of Italy who has made their way to this location. According to some of the visitors that I spoke to, the architecture of the museum was often of more interest than the exhibitions on display, and many of them were not even aware that there was an Indian art exhibition at MAXXI. In this sense, the museum, its exhibitions, and its singular art installations created a zone in which dynamic and very diverse landscapes of interpretation, experience, and memory unfolded. This is not to say that it worked as a memoryscape (Phillips and Reyes 2011), in

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which a collective memory on either India or Italy is evoked or remembered. In this sense, it is also questionable how a contemporary art exhibition on Indian art could bring to mind the similarities between India and Italy. Moreover, the curatorial focus in Rome reminds one of the sociological categories that also played a structuring role in Paris and at the earlier Lyon Biennale (see Chapter 7). At MAXXI, the overall aim of the show was to present a 360-degree portrait of India and its “miracle”. And certainly the idea of a 360-degree overview of India and its miracles defines the exhibition not only as national, but also as a spectacle. This impression is due to the nature of the museum as a national gallery and, more importantly, as a hyperbuilding. But as the Indian Highway organisers actually sought to avoid or to go beyond a stereotypical representation of India in contrast to the exhibition Paris-Bombay-Delhi in Paris (2011), the “Italian edition” of Indian Highway reflects a precarious turn. At this point, the discursive curatorial endeavour seemed to have lost its aspiration, and for its last venue in China in 2012, the show would experience its last essential shift. In fact, a kind of arbitrary ambiguity unfolded in the Indian Highway narrative after Lyon, where the exhibition was approached from the perspective of “sharing exoticisms” (see Chapter 7). These dynamics and contradictions unfolding along the journey of Indian Highway ran parallel to the mounting criticism in India. However, the identification of an action-reaction system between the criticism and the exhibitions remains blurred because there was no synchronism connecting the criticism to particular venues of Indian Highway, and reactions in India did not normally refer specifically to Indian Highway but to several art events in Europe. This fuzziness appears therefore as integral to processes of transcultural and translocal entanglement – there is a clear relatedness, but it is often indirect, and it is selective. In 2012, especially, there was a growing dissonance between the different edges within the global contemporary art world: an increase in the criticism of European shows, and also an increase in academic debates in India, could be observed. The dominant discourse of the MAXXI museum as a national institute, its hyper and spectacular architecture, and its locality overwhelmed the art exhibited inside. This is one aspect of dissonance in the context of the Rome venue of Indian Highway – the vanishing of contemporary Indian art behind the prestige of the exhibition Indian Highway, but also behind the prestige that the MAXXI museum itself represents for Rome.

The difficult “readability” of the exhibition It seems clear that the expressive power of the exhibition project seemed to have gotten lost along the way. The curatorial elements that were emphasised so often in the “show within the show” and the related idea of a reciprocal dialogue with the artists were upstaged at the MAXXI. And since the push to underline cultural differences was avoided, the glamour and allure of Indian Highway slowly disappeared. The reasons supporting this impression are manifold and are partly connected to general developments in contemporary art from India and its visibility in Europe, as well as the length of time that Indian Highway had already been travelling. But the vanishing strength of the exhibition was certainly also related to diminishing curatorial engagements with the local art scenes in India. Whereas curators from London, Oslo, and Herning had undertaken research trips to India, this engagement declined in the following venues

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and was replaced by curatorial research at other exhibitions of Indian art in Europe and closer network activities with curator colleagues. The decreasing connection with India supported in a way the deepening gap between perspectives on how to display contemporary art from India internationally. The dynamics of coming closer and creating distance therefore underscored the existing global dissonances as reactions in India remained neglected and ignored by curatorial perspectives in Europe. After I had seen Indian Highway in Rome, I was keen to learn more about the changing self-perception in the local art community in Delhi and about the increased criticism, not directed at Indian Highway in particular, but at a general European way of looking at Indian art. I will focus here on the dissonances in perception, as I observed them, during my research stay in Delhi in April 2012. It is natural that curators at a national museum might not curate a larger number of exhibitions about one particular region; organising only one show does not usually justify travelling to India for extensive research, particularly when a curator works in a museum where many exhibitions and activities run in parallel. Meeting artists during shows in Europe, away from their main art community, is something different – it is not just the curator, but also the artist, who is out of their context, and a fundamental disconnectivity is implicated that limits the possibilities of intense exchange. It is here that I see a major difference between curatorial and ethnographic research. While reading transcripts of interviews the European curators had conducted with Indian artists as an integral part of their extensive research on the local art scene, a discomfort arose within me. With some of the preparatory interviews conducted for Indian Highway, I quickly realised that the aim was mainly to find out the position of the artist within Western art. This was easily recognisable because of the curators’ attempts to find parallels with Western artistic practices and their desire to find the most influential artists in the local art scene. It was as if the curators had a checklist of requirements that the artists had to fulfil in order to be included in the show. The way in which the interviews were conducted clearly indicated that they had a distanced interest in the artist or their work. A similar impression emerged from the Khoj marathon with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Delhi in 2011. The marathon is an important example of the different qualities of engagement when curators talk about transcultural practices and when Indian art experts like Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote point out the kind of engagement required for artistic practices. With their notion of critical transregionality and transculturality, they address a profound engagement by artists with other contexts. If they work on themes across cultural and geographical borders, the artists do this consciously and, as a result, create entangled histories. The practices of the curators of international survey shows are not the same. Their preferences are different and are certainly driven by economic and market-related interests since they want to find the most interesting art, from their Western point of view, which will be legitimised by their own professionalism. In this regard, it is doubtful that artists and curators can really contribute to a shared and universal idea of what it means to be “global” or “contemporary”. The same is true for researchers like me, and it is not a given that my intentions in investigating such dissonances will always meet acceptance or approval.

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Ravi Agarwal In spring 2012, I travelled to Delhi for a talk on art and anthropology at a conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University. As an anthropologist whose work is based on confident and trusting relations with interlocutors, the presentation of my first arguments related to on-going research before a scientific public, which included many artists and curators, culminated in a challenging incident for my own research. One of the Indian Highway artists who accepted my invitation to the talk was the photographer, curator, and environmentalist Ravi Agarwal, who had participated in the Indian Highway exhibition from the beginning and was represented at the MAXXI museum by (among other works) Shroud (2007) (Plate 5.3). Ravi Agarwal (b. 1958) lives and works in New Delhi as an artist, environmental activist, writer, and curator. In his practice, he deals with the effects of global, political, capitalist, and ecological change on the individual in its local situation, employing what he calls “personal ecology”. The work Shroud, which shows the photographer wrapped in a white pall standing on the bank of the river Yanuma in several images taken at different times of the day, is an experimental self-portrait. Like Alien Waters, it deals with the course of life and death and the complex network of relations between humans, the city, and the river Yamuna (Bublatzky 2018, 123–124). Nancy Adajania explains: His work is a good example of how an artist can aestheticise the political and politicise the aesthetic in the same gesture, one without the other would make an inadequate impact. This predicament is expressed in his set of performance photographs from the series > Immersion/Emergence < where he appears covered in a shroud on the banks of a river. (Adajania, 2008)15

I met Ravi Agarwal for the first time in Delhi in 2011. At that time, Agarwal had been working on an exhibition project called Yamuna-Elbe, a public art project about the two rivers, the Yamuna in Delhi and the Elbe in Hamburg (Germany). He had jointly organised the project with two curators from Hamburg with the intention of supporting the movement in favour of creating sustainable rivers in both cities.16 Ravi Agarwal belongs to those practitioners who engage not only in the field of art but in many areas, and he pursues his photographic practice in tandem with environmental activism.17 His training as an engineer functions as the basis for his manifold visual and environmental practices, which unfold in writing, video, performance, and public art, as well as in his curatorial and environmental activism. In a roundtable discussion with the art historian, critic, and founding director of the Centre for Creative Ecologies,18 T.J. Demos, and the independent filmmaker Sanjay Kak, Ravi Agarwal explained how he addresses through his work the environmental emergencies in India which emerge from the privatisation of environmental resources and the conversion of agricultural land to industrial sectors, causing an increasing demand on energy and water that dramatically affects groundwater, river systems, and human displacements (Demos 2009, 153–154). Engaging with the global impacts on local ecologies and economies, Agarwal created projects on the Yamuna River in Delhi [After the Flood (2011); Alien Waters (2004–2006)], and on the farming of marigolds [Have You Seen the Flowers on the River (2007)], and in the documentation of labour in Gujarat [Down and Out: Labouring under Global

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Capitalism (1997–2000)] (Demos 2009, 156). According to Agarwal’s contribution, T.J. Demos observes in another publication that Distinct from both gallery-bound art, with its often minimal contact to political reality, and policy-making realism, with its lack of speculative invention, Agarwal’s model is one of hybrid engagement: art offers ambitious conceptual possibility and the NGO develops political-judicial regulations. (Demos 2016, 180–181)

This model of combining NGO and artistic photographic practice becomes most evident in the Yanuma Manifesto edited by Ravi Agarwal together with Till Krause (2013), which includes contributions by Ravi Agarwal, Atul Bhalla, Sheba Chhachhi, Till Krause, Raqs Media Collective, and Vivan Sundaram. This manifesto demonstrates the important potential of public art to fill the non-policy vacuum that emerges from governmental non-regulation and non-protection of India’s water system. Because I had various conversations with Ravi Agarwal at his studio in New Delhi, his home, and even in Germany, I was pleased to see him among the panel visitors. However, my talk and the discussion that followed during the conference resulted in a heated debate some days later, one that was very different from the topics that he relates to in his work. When we met in his studio, located in Shahpur Jat, Agarwal was very direct in his indignation about the permanent debate on “Indian art” or “art from India” that I had referred to and even propelled in my presentation. He asked, “What makes me Indian? My passport? The exhibition?” To him, the Indian Highway show, for example, was not per se a problematic show because it was read into Western art history (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 5 April 2012). Instead, he pointed out the confusion about all these categories of “Indian” or “global” while the nation-state remains integral to the creation of identity. From this nation-state that is “subscribing to a Western modernity”, he argued, he takes “justice” (ibid.). So, in his view, the state goes back to the Western nation-state, but “strives towards the Indian society” (ibid.). From this perspective, how does one define Indian? (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 5 April 2012). Agarwal made a strong personal comment, and I also realised that we were talking about a debate that was not his own, but one created by others, perhaps including myself. It bothered him that the debate circled around something that was considered a given: namely, the strong relation between Western and Indian ideas and entangled histories. It was therefore also important for him to emphasise that just because a curator talks about Indian art, he or she is not necessarily forming it (ibid.). But as a political person, the curator contributes to certain discourses, to a conversation that is not formed by the art world (ibid.). Agarwal was not only speaking as an artist, but also referring to his own experiences of curatorial practice. In a conversation we had in his studio a year earlier in 2011, he argued strongly that encountering art from India and other regions could mean creating a format that allows for an easily digestible access to other cultures, particularly from the perspective of a curator who is unfamiliar with the country and its people. This he sees as an important encounter, even though it is a quick one where you follow, like a guidebook of encounter, certain rules (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 27 February 2011). This does not make it irrelevant or untrue, but it shapes a starting point: “Maybe the only way you digest it

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easily in a sense, because you have to. And then the next step is, you stay longer and you stay longer, then you discover more things” (ibid.). Art can represent culture in a digestible way; this argument also reminded me of what the curator in Herning, Stinna Toft, had said: that art can move people, make them think, interpret, compare. But in Rome, the aim had been not to present cultural differences but rather cultural similarities. Ravi Agarwal underlined that the encounter with Indian art in a survey exhibition like Indian Highway was not “untrue” since it provided one possible representation of Indian art today (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 27 February 2011). Although “it is a curatorial choice of ‘not this, not that’. But they do represent some idea of Indian art from a Western art perspective” (ibid.). In following up his position and in reference to continuing survey exhibitions on Indian contemporary art that “cement a nation’s claims and unravel those of its competitors” (2013, 33), Zehra Jumabhoy, who demands that the Indian art world fight for the responsibility to control its own art history (42), brings in another important viewpoint. Who is actually talking for whom? And does the desire to effect globality (Okwui Enwezor) not also mean assuming certain responsibilities? Indeed, it was Okwui Enwezor who invited Ravi Agarwal to documenta XI in 2002, an experience that would prove to be an international breakthrough for the artist. As Agarwal explained, this moment sharpened his perspective on the art world because Okwui Enwezor and documenta XI created an important social and political moment that shook the art world and the idea of the artist, even in India (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 27 February 2011). Ravi Agarwal faced incomprehension from the local art community in Delhi at being asked to attend documenta XI. He told me that, as an outsider to the art world, people could not understand why he (together with Amar Kanwar and Raqs Media Collective), with the documentary photography he was doing at that time, was considered an artist (ibid.). He was called a “folk artist” as he remembered in our conversation. He also recalled Okwui Enwezor saying in a meeting, “Look . . . anybody’s here is the highest skill, is the highest form of art. So don’t think you are ever compromised on . . . what the form is in this. It is just you [who] decide[s] to make the choice and who is it in that form” (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 27 February 2011). Thus, the idea was not that “we have taken people because they have chosen social issues. It is because they also represent very high forms of aesthetics” (ibid.). And here Agarwal also saw the confusion in the art world in acknowledging artists and works that are deeply embedded in social practices and that do not present a fixed status, but a changing phenomenon (ibid.). Since his participation in documenta XI, Ravi Agarwal has been invited to many international exhibitions, group shows, and biennales all over the world.19 He feels personally affected by the discussion on “art from India” or “Indian art” shows, which became part of a much larger discourse that was not of relevance to him but still affected him. However, if there were many people who appreciated Okwui Enwezor’s and others’ attempts to “change” the art world, some were still doubtful that the art world of 2012 had been sufficiently liberated from Eurocentric domination. In India, the Speakers’ Forum at the India Art Fair in Delhi became an important platform for public debates between European and Indian art experts. In a conversation, Meera Menezes drew my attention to a discussion during the Speakers’ Forum panel “European Reception of Contemporary Indian Art” at the India Art Fair (2012), during which she asked the invited

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Paris-Delhi-Bombay curator Sophie Duplaix (Paris) about her reaction to the critique the show received (Meera Menezes, Delhi, 25 March 2012) (see also Chapter 7). Duplaix answered, “I am not quite sure about the reception in India of this show has been exactly as you say – I think for the French public it was something to discover completely” (2012). This reluctance to engage with local practitioners surprised more than Meera Menezes. In the discussion on transculturality in the field of art, it was not only the forms of interconnectivity between participating parties that became important, but maybe even more striking was the maintenance of existing gaps as a form of dissonance. Duplaix was also criticised by another commentator, the London-based art historian, critic, and curator Virginia Whiles, for having taken an “Orientalist approach” in this show when she noted critically: I am afraid that the critique on your show was not simply in India, it was across Europe and I would go so far speaking my . . . neck up saying that it was a colonialist show with an Orientalist perspective and I would ask why you have not spoken today about the necessity of interruption dialogue that was the topic [for] you? The dialogue between artists who have never been to India, there was no dialogue; there was no space to the artists’ works. (Whiles 2012).

Sophie Duplaix rejected this complaint of an Orientalist approach. And with her question, “What would be meant with colonialism and orientalism?” she apparently not only expressed a lack of competence in dealing with such critique, but also seemed to be lacking any self-reflexivity about her role as a curator. This open confrontation demonstrates the urgent need for deeper exchanges between existing and contrasting ideologies to address tensions that cannot be neglected any longer in the art world. In this context it is a clear disadvantage that European exhibitions of contemporary Indian art, such as Indian Highway, are only shown in Europe where critical engagement remains difficult. In this sense, the Speakers’ Forum of the India Art Fair and academic conferences allow important, but limited, exchange and public debates in India, where the art critique is “Entangled with the market, [and] this kind of writing might be seen as an extended form of marketing. It may have some uses, but cannot take the space of critical and independent work” (Singh 2017, 43). Sadly, these public debates in India do not necessarily influence curatorial practices in Europe or encourage change.

Some problems with the survey format – in conversation with Shuddhabrata Sengupta The discussion thus far has shown that there is a problem in the format of survey shows with a national focus, particularly in view of their power to write art history. This was clearly stated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist, writer, and member of the artistic collective Raqs Media Collective, in one of our meetings. Raqs Media Collective, based in New Delhi, combines research with historical and philosophical inquiries in their contemporary artistic practice. I met Shuddhabrata Sengupta in their studio in 2012, where Sengupta suggested that survey exhibitions create a false art history (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012). He admits that although they all participate in these shows and are keen to be invited, accepting some and rejecting others, it is

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clear that even if “within the national framework the curatorial stance tries to do something maybe interesting, innovated . . . we know and the curators know and everybody knows that the idea of a survey shows in its national terms is already always a failure” (ibid.). A similar critical stand point was also taken up by Ranjit Hoskote in a catalogue article for the art show India: Art Now, which was inaugurated at the Danish museum ARKEN in August 2012. Hoskote critically approaches the nation: “as a construct inextricably bound with the apparatus of a state, it has increasingly articulated itself as an entity that is repressive of diverse political aspirations” (2012, 54). Since “it has come to be identified with the conservative project of an official culture and a conception of citizenship that is premised on conscription into such an official culture” (ibid.), it would limit “itself by attempting to define and convey a particular representation of a nation” (ibid.). However, Hoskote also identifies a productive and refreshing potential in the survey format when it achieves an interrogation of viewing practices in the exhibition as they follow mechanisms to construct conceptions of “alterity or supposedly irreducible otherness of other societies” (ibid., 9). Could such interrogation be achieved with Indian Highway in Rome and the curatorial attempt to emphasise cultural similarities between Italian and Indian societies? To Sengupta this approach indicated the problem of the underlying assumption of absolute opposites (such as Italian and Indian culture) and the need to emphasise similarities in order to solve them (ibid.). I was curious about Sengupta’s ideas about how this situation could be resolved. He replied: We should look at practice – we should look at what are the questions that people are asking – sometimes it has to do with location and sometimes they have to do with location and other things. Sometimes it doesn’t have to do with location. Which is what we do in any other field of human inquiry and practice. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

And along with looking practices, he also sees the limitation in the format of the survey show of non-European cultures because it is a “symptom of the extreme intellectual weakness of the curatorial framework of the contemporary art in Europe. In order to see something as contemporary art in another culture, it has to be seen in national terms because they don’t have any other categories to classify” (ibid.). The need to apply a national paradigm when exhibiting contemporary art from another culture is a critical reflection on museums that even today, in the twenty-first century, cannot shake off their historically established agenda of “collecting and ordering” the world. It is also a critical reflection on how the museum might function as a contact zone: it still plays the role of an institution for the centre that acts as a site of accumulation and authority. In this sense, the format of the survey show with its regional and national focus is still seen as the appropriate way to exhibit art from unfamiliar parts of the world. Sengupta continued his line of argument: Art history is still looking for the ability to create validity and formations and validities of great geniuses and so on. And it is linked to the production of value in the art institutional system and the market. So, the criteria [of] what is valuable for the museum or . . . for transaction is automatically the certification done by the art historian. And nobody in their right mind [can] expect the historian to do this. I mean it’s the task maybe of critics to create these discussions around on quality and taste. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

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When Sengupta questions the art-historical process of canonisation and its interrelation with the production of value and the market, he supports the observation of a conservative system by Ranjit Hoskote which “has also corroded existing structures: that of the somewhat sedate position of the Indian art critic” whom Gayatri Sinha identifies as being “constructed through a newspaper review column, and other institutions or media based fields of discourse” (Sinha 2010, 14). I asked whether Raqs’s multiple contemporary art practices presented a challenge to these attempts at canonisation. He explained that they are indeed more committed to following their curiosities and interests than to developing and maintaining a consistent signature or style or set of issues (ibid.). It’s to follow our questions and desires which lead into many different directions. Which then creates a body of work that speaks in many voices and in many different kinds of visual as well as conceptual registers. So, the discipline of art history is actually geared to the opposite directory. It is the training of art historians by and large is to recognise consistencies in style; is to see the evolution of an artistic signature; is to make a distinction between one body of work and another. (ibid.)

Sengupta assured me that many people in the fields of art history and criticism are certainly aware of the difficulties that their disciplines have imposed upon them (ibid.). And just as they are aware, so, too, are the artists. This was also one of the reasons, so he explained, why Raqs Media Collective attempts to establish on-going dialogues with people who think and write about these issues and added, “I mean you are one of them” (ibid.). In addition, when he explained that many people ask these questions, which also illustrates a change in the entire discourse, he underlined the establishment of two-way traffic as artist practices also relate to these questions (ibid.). This perspective can be considered crucial since it opposes the understanding thus far of the creation of dissonance integral to curatorial practices and the contemporary art world. However, Sengupta’s explanation of resonance opens up other directions of discourse. In the conversation with Ravi Agarwal, I recognised my own role in this in resorting to academic “stereotyping” practices such as asking questions like “What does ‘Indian’ mean?” Obviously, I was looking for critical engagements with the European perspective on local contemporary art production and its representation. Instead of dissonances and misunderstanding, Sengupta brought to the fore yet another essential interaction between the observing scholar, curator, or critic and the practicing artist. This interaction is related and sometimes mutually dependent. This exemplifies another quality of transcultural entanglements, one which prompted me to also ask if art has the capacity for cultural translation. Sengupta’s reply was that it depends on the audience and the public response to the art, but in general it can be stated that art can translate in the same way as it can lose something (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012). There seems to be a demand for survey shows that explain the context of work that travels from far away to Europe (ibid.). And even though it is possible to read a work of art without a cultural translation filter, survey shows often raise, due to an assumed encounter with “the other” or an alien or a non-shared history, the demand for a readily processed narrative of the work (ibid.).

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Similar to Ravi Agarwal, Shuddhabrata Sengupta considers that they as individuals have grown up in India but under the heavy influence of European language, history, philosophy, and culture. And although his argument refers to a shared history, Sengupta also emphasises the effort and work involved in learning and in acquiring this knowledge, which did not come as a package. Great personal effort is required to gain cultural knowledge of European societies. His very simple proposition is that since the rest of the world has had to learn European culture and modernity so far, “European culture can also repay that favour by learning other cultures” (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012). This position corresponds with what Raqs Media Collective described in the previously mentioned letter Once again, To the Distant Observer (2006), and thereby, he concedes, this cannot be achieved in a single exhibition, but might need several hundred years of generative continuous engagement (ibid.). The most important part of his argument is a claim, not for exchange or dialogue as the European curators imagine it, but for European cultures to engage with and learn and understand other cultures. His position is fundamental because it demonstrates once again the existence of various notions on how one should approach and deal with other cultures, which partly follows Hoskote’s suggestion to “think in terms of a national survey as a form of interrogation and inquiry, built around questions rather than answers” (2012, 56). As this demonstrates, there is an urgent push for European cultures to make the effort to step out of their usual habits and engage “the other”. Even though an exchange on “eye level” is enacted, this is based on the assumption that there is a “fundamentally different other” who has the ability to access European cultures. Therefore, the accusations raised against European curators – of employing subconscious Orientalist approaches – appears harsh but also comprehensible. Too often, survey shows run the risk of imposing accents that are not relevant to the artists, even though the curators commit to staying in communication with the artists they meet at other European venues. This does not allow for an adequate exchange. In this sense, Virginia Whiles was right to ask Sophie Duplaix why they had not considered a joint curatorship with an Indian curator to generate a dialogue for Bombay-Delhi-Paris on the curatorial level instead of artificially imposing it on the artists. Although such confrontational curatorial practices uphold cultural distance, collaborative practices like the “show within the show” cannot be considered a solution. A serious hindrance certainly lies in the limitations of the disciplines, anthropology included. In this chapter, I have stressed an analytical perspective of resonances – as suggested by Raqs Media Collective – instead of focusing on dissonances alone as these would reinvent and maintain the polarisation between “India” and “Europe”. Interestingly, the understanding of relational synergies had also been envisaged for Indian Highway at MAXXI in Rome. Here, curator Giulia Ferracci tried to stress cultural similarities between today’s India and the Italy of the 1950s. However, as argued by the artist Ravi Agarwal, this rather abstracted form of thinking relationality still leads to a contradictory result which again emphasises the category “Indian”. Inherent to all the different positions described in this chapter seems a particular insecurity, a fear of not being looked at in the right way. This idea can perhaps also be considered for the next and final venue of the Indian Highway exhibition in Beijing, China, where an unexpected politicisation of Indian contemporary art took place, eliciting objections from the Indian state and resulting in an act of censorship.

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Notes 1 See Indian Highway on the MAXXI website: www.fondazionemaxxi.it/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ INDIANHIGHWAY_ita_en.pdf (accessed 4 November 2018). 2 See Jonathon Glancey’s article, “Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi was the right choice for the Stirling Prize” in The Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/04/zaha-hadid-maxxi-stirling-prize (accessed 4 November 2018). 3 See the mission statement on the MAXXI website: www.maxxi.art/en/chi-siamo/(accessed 21 January 2019). 4 See the announcement on the MAXXI website on the occasion of “MAXXI’s First Birthday”: www. fondazionemaxxi.it/content/attach/schede/2011.05.28_MAXXI_1YEAR.pdf (accessed 21 January 2019). 5 See, among others, Sharon J. Macdonald together with Gordon Fyfe (1996, 2002, 2011); Irit Rogoff and Daniel J. Sherman (1994). 6 For photographs of the museum, see the website of Patrik Schumacher: www.patrikschumacher.com/ Texts/The%20Meaning%20of%20MAXXI.html (accessed 25 October 2018). 7 For photographs showing the interior design of MAXXI, see Patrik Schumacher’s website: www. patrikschumacher.com/Texts/The%20Meaning%20of%20MAXXI.html (accessed 19 January 2019). 8 See Indian Highway on the MAXXI website: www.maxxi.art/en/events/indian-highway/ (accessed 26 February 2019). 9 The complete title of Sumakshi Singh’s installation is Circumferences Forming: First Conforming Always Transforming Now Reforming and Leaving Centers Everywhere (2011). 10 See Indian Highway on the MAXXI website: www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/events/indian-highway/ (accessed 14 January 2019). 11 See further information about the video musical 99 Mantras: “The executive production was of Fattore K directed by Giorgio Barbiero Corsetti. Music by Riccardo Nova; choreography of Shantala Scivalingappa with the contribution of dancers, musicians and Indian singers.” See the website of 1F mediaproject: www.1fmediaproject.net/2011/09/25/indian-highway-maxxi-rome/ (accessed 19 January 2019). 12 See a video showing the installation online: http://vimeo.com/50762036 (accessed 21 January 2019). 13 Unfortunately, I did not receive permission to take pictures in the exhibition space. 14 See, for example, John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 2002. 15 Cultural theorist, art critic, and independent curator Nancy Adajania’s paper presented at the symposium linked to 48 C the Public Art. Ecology Festival, New Delhi, December 2008. 16 See the Yamuna-Elbe website: www.yamuna-elbe.de/index.php?title=Home (accessed 10 February 2019). 17 Ravi Agarwal is also founder of the non-profit organisation Toxics Links. See the Toxic Links website: http://toxicslink.org/ (accessed 10 February 2019). 18 Centre for Creative Ecologies: https://creativeecologies.ucsc.edu/ (accessed 10 May 2018). 19 See Ravi Agarwal’s website: www.raviagarwal.com (accessed 3 February 2019).

References Agarwal, Ravi, Studio, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 27, 2011. ———, Studio, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, April 5, 2012. Agarwal, Ravi, and Till Krause, eds., Yanuma Manifesto. Archana Press, 2013. http://toxicslink.org/docs/ Final_Yamuna_Book.pdf (accessed February 19, 2019).

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artdaily, “Indian Highway: A 360° Portrait of the Sub-Continent and Its ‘Miracle’ at MAXXI.” Artdaily. Org, 2012. http://artdaily.com/news/50725/Indian-Highway-A-360-portrait-of-the-sub-continent-andits -miracle-at-Maxxi (accessed February 19, 2019). Bublatzky, Cathrine, “Fotografie – Ein Transkultureller Verhandlungsraum. Eine Analyse Der Arbeiten von Ravi Agarwal (Delhi).” In Kulturelle Übersetzer: Kunst Und Kulturmanagement Im Transkulturellen Kontext, edited by Christiane Dätsch, 115–131. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. Clifford, James, “Museums as Contact Zones.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by James Clifford, 188–219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Demos, T. J., “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology.” In Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, edited by Francesco Manacorda, 16–30. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009. ———, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Duplaix, Sophie, Panel: European Reception of Contemporary Indian Art. New Delhi: Speakers Forum, Indian Art Fair, 2012. Ferracci, Giulia, MAXXI museum, Rome, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, January 3, 2012. Foster, Hal, The Art-Architecture Complex. New York: Verso, 2011. Graham-Dixon, Andrew, “Indian Highway at Serpentine Gallery.” Andrew Graham-Dixon Archive (blog), December 14, 2008. www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/indian-highway-at-the-serpentine-gallery. html (accessed February 19, 2019). Hoskote, Ranjit, “Kaleidoscopic Propositions: The Evolving Contexts of Contemporary Indian Art.” In India: Art Now, edited by Christian Gether. India Today. Ostfildern and Ishøj: Hatje Cantz and Arken Museum of Modern Art. 2012. Jumabhoy, Zehra, “Me, Myself, and You.” In India: Art Now, edited by Christian Gether. India Today. Ostfildern and Ishøj: Hatje Cantz and Arken Museum of Modern Art. 2012. ———, “Now, Voyager: Travelling around Has Become More Than a Lifestyle Choice for Artists and Their Artworks.” ArtIndia 17, no. 3 (2013). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “The Museum as Catalyst.” Museums 2000: Confirmation or Challenge (2013): 55–66. www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/vadstena.pdf (accessed February 19, 2019). Long, Kieran, “The Art-Architecture Complex. Review.” Icon Magazine, February 28, 2012. https://www. iconeye.com/opinion/review/item/9654-the-art-architecture-complex (accessed June 3, 2019). Macdonald, Sharon, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. Oxford: Berg, 2002. ———, A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. MacDonald, Sharon, and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. 1. publ. Sociological Review Monographs. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Maharaj, Sarat, “‘Perfidious Fidelity’: The Untranslatability of the Other.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher and Rasheed Araeen, 28–35. London: Kala Press, 1994. Menezes, Meera, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 25, 2012. Ong, Aihwa, “Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignity.” In Worlding Cities, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 205–226. Studies in Urban and Social Change. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Phillips, Kendall R., and G. Mitchell Reyes, Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011. Pütz, Robert, “Transculturality as Practice: Turkish Entrepreneurs in Germany.” In Islam and Muslims in Germany, edited by Ala Al-Hamarneh and Jörn Thielmann, 511–535. Muslim Minorities 7. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

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Roche, Maurice, Megaevents and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London: Routledge, 2002. Rogoff, Irit, Museum Cultures: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, edited by Daniel J. Sherman. London: Routledge, 1994. Schumacher, Patrik, “The Meaning of MAXXI: Concepts, Ambitions, Achievements.” In MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Arts, edited by Zaha Hadid Architects. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2010. Sengupta, Shuddabrata, Raqs Media Collective’s Studio, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 27, 2012. Singh, Kavita, “Colonial, International, Global: Connecting and Disconnecting Art Histories.” Art in Translation 9, no. 1 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2015.1058022. Sinha, Gayatri, “Introduction: New Persuasions in Contemporary Indian Art.” In Voices of Change. 20 Indian Artists, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 8–24. Mumbai: Radhika Sabavala, 2010. Svas̆ek, Marus̆ka, Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 2002. Whiles, Virginia, Panel: European Reception of Contemporary Indian Art. New Delhi: Speakers Forum, Indian Art Fair, 2012. Woodman, Ellis, “Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi Art Gallery in Rome: Stunning Building, Terrible Gallery.” Telegraph. Co.UK, May 24, 2010, sec. art. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/7760043/Zaha-HadidsMaxxi-art-gallery-in-Rome-stunning-building-terrible-gallery.html (accessed February 19, 2019).

6 Indian Highway VI finally on its way to China Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing 2012

When Indian Highway travelled to the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing in 2012, it was expected to be a pioneering “opportunity to highlight the unique relationship between the neighboring countries within artistic context” (Press Release by the Ullens Foundation 2012).1 Innovative and groundbreaking, it was hoped that the exhibition would make Indian contemporary art accessible to the Chinese art publics in an unprecedented way. This chapter will take a closer look at the arrival of Indian Highway and its immediate effects on the local art scene, as well as the relationship between India and China. Foregrounding an analytical shift to media coverage, artists’ perceptions, and exhibition reviews in online media, this discussion will underline the importance of global and local network practices as they establish the impermanence or arbitrariness characterising these translocal and transcultural practices. Major international art events like art fairs, biennials, and larger exhibition projects such as Indian Highway not only constitute impermanent practices, but also bring them to the surface as they become starting points for unexpected new dynamics of encounter and negotiation. Even though the venue in Beijing did represent the end of the exhibition’s European tour, it also heralded the possible beginning of an Asian tour, which ultimately failed to materialise. Thus, as this chapter will explore, the exhibition underwent a striking change of meaning and generated crucial new energies regarding anticipated global visions of a new internationalism in the field of visual arts (Fisher 1994b). Its consequences for the entire Indian Highway project could not be anticipated at the moment of its arrival in China, which marked in many ways a new chapter: for the exhibition itself, for the history of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, for Indian-Chinese relations, and most importantly, for the debate about artistic freedom within India. The first section, with the help of media analysis, will describe the different perceptions of Indian Highway at the UCCA Foundation. This will provide the background for the second section, in which I will describe a censorship incident that marked a significant development in the discussion about the independence of contemporary art in India, as well as the historicised relationship between art and diplomacy (Wallis 2001) with regard to the international relationship between India and China. All this, as the chapter will illustrate, played out against the backdrop of the contemporary Chinese art world (Chiu 2008; Hung 2011) and its ambivalent role as the supporter of a national identity intertwined with the growing global visibility of Chinese cities (Wang 2015).

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The road less travelled – Ullens Foundation for Chinese Contemporary Art In November 2007, the Ullens Foundation for Chinese Contemporary Art was founded as a nonprofit art centre by the art collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens. The museum contains three exhibition halls, an auditorium, a restaurant, a library, and a bookstore and is located in the vibrant 798 Art Zone in the Dashanzi area in Beijing, which is filled with artists’ studios, galleries, restaurants, design and fashion companies, and bars and cafes. Formerly an industrial area, 798 Art Zone was turned into a highly commercialised art district in 2002, when the factories in this area closed down and many Western galleries were set up. The name “798” refers to the state-owned Factory 798, which was formerly located in the area. Today, 789 Art Zone is the biggest art area in China2 and a major attraction for those interested in art. That the Ullens Foundation was chosen as the venue for Indian Highway is the result of a larger network that is mainly based on an established Beijing-London connection. This connection partly arises from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s long-term curatorial and research interest in Chinese contemporary art. The list of Obrist’s activities related to the Chinese art world is long, but some cumulative moments are still possible to identify as they also illustrate the long-standing relationship between Hans Ulrich Obrist and the curator at Ullens Centre, Philip Tinari. One example is the exhibition project China Power Station (2006–2011),3 which was also part of the on-going collaboration between the Serpentine Gallery (London) and the Astrup Fearnley Museum (Oslo). 4 The first articles in the international press on Indian Highway in Beijing, which was inaugurated by the Indian ambassador to China, S. Jaishankar, in June 2012,5 were mostly positive. The press release described Indian Highway at the UCCA as the most comprehensive presentation of contemporary art from India ever mounted in China.6 And in The Hindu, it was interpreted as a brave attempt to bridge the existing gap between the neighbouring countries and address their lack of knowledge of each other’s art scenes (Krishnan 2012). The journalist Chen Nan (2012) talked about the existing distance between the two countries by narrating an anecdote told by the artist Sudarshan Shetty. The artist, whose work was featured in Indian Highway, had travelled from India to China for the opening. He compared the lack of communication between China and India to the shortage of direct flights and expressed his wish that the exhibition could bridge the cultural gap between the two countries (ibid.). Participating photographer and bookmaker, Dayanita Singh, who also came for the opening commented that “the creative scene in India is vibrant but it has been slow to be noticed in China and many other places of the world” (Nan 2012). The online art magazine The Arts Trust was even more explicit in the article “Indian Highway VI Makes Way into the City of Beijing”, which underlined the importance of Indian Highway as a representation of India as an emerging global art power house and the fact that, in comparison to China: However, knowledge of India as a country, its people, culture and its vibrant creative landscape has been rather slow to take root in its powerful neighbour [sic]. In this context, the fact that “Indian Highway VI” finally makes way into the city of Beijing is a huge development. (The Arts Trust 2012)

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This comment clearly placed both countries, India and China, on an equal level as world superpowers. In line with the vision of the online magazine The Arts Trust, which was founded in 1990 to promote contemporary Indian art, the artists’ contributions in Indian Highway were understood to represent the presence of India as a global player. To many people, Indian Highway even represented an opportunity to transmit knowledge about India’s new role, its people, and its culture and to communicate this to China as well. The message was clear: contemporary art was representative of the rising Indian nation-state, which could no longer be ignored. This political or “national” perspective was not so clearly formulated when Indian Highway was shown at the European venues in Herning, Lyon, and Rome. In addition, it is notable that the media attention rather decreased during the later venues in Europe and only reached a new peak when the exhibition arrived in China. Certainly, shifts in intensity and topics appear to be closely related to specific institutions and the international position of local agents like the curators, but, as the Chinese context exemplifies, they also have to be seen in close relation to historically and politically shaped transnational interrelations. However, the exhibition was reviewed very differently in China. Some writers, for example, focused more on the success or non-success of the transcultural exchange and the dialogue between India and China as initiated by the exhibition. For example, the Beijing-based art critic and editor Iona Whittaker pointed out the lack of exchange between Chinese and Indian artists and a rather export-oriented Chinese art world to express her scepticism about the success of Indian Highway at the UCCA Foundation. In her comment, she referred to a wall text in the exhibition that declared, “What would a world look like in which the ascendant powers of Asia look not to the West, but at each other?” which came across like a Serpentine text, even as one resisted the urge to note the difference between looking “to” and looking “at” (Whittaker 2012). Whittaker raised an important issue when she addressed the circulation of contemporary art in the format of Indian Highway. In my earlier discussion on the symbolic meaning of circulation, the focus lies rather on the circulation of non-Western contemporary art in the international but still Western-dominated art world. Whittaker instead touches upon the quality of circulation with the following questions: In which direction does circulation move? Who is participating, and who is left out? What happens if the arrival of one region’s artistic practice in another region does not automatically create enthusiastic reactions to it? Does this identify a failure of the curators’ mission? Of Indian Highway? In China, the situation was precarious: on the one hand, it involved two states whose interrelations are very difficult in many respects: for instance, in terms of their border politics or with regard to their roles in the global community. The rivalry between the two countries and their problematic border issues have been the source of much instability in the Southeast Asian region, and this is also reflected in the very limited and restricted artistic exchange and dialogue between the artists of the two states. On the other hand, Western-dominated institutes like the Ullens Centre and the Serpentine Gallery, and curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philip Tinari, foster international art exchange even when local agents might not entirely agree and welcome these translocal practices.

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This certainly does not represent the full picture of the Indian-Chinese art worlds. There are alternative artistic initiatives that try to “break the ice” between India and China. A significant example of an attempt to establish artistic networks within Asia is the cross-cultural platform West Heavens.7 Another, Delhi-based initiative is Khoj, the international artists’ association founded by Delhi-based artists in 1997, which has promoted a worldwide exchange among artists through workshops, residencies, exhibitions, talks, and community projects with a major focus on an inner-Asian exchange. Taken together, these initiatives might seem inadequate in relation to the size and potential of the art worlds of both states, and more insight is needed to understand the gallery scene in China. According to the Beijing-based art critic Lee Ambrozy with whom I had an email conversation in 2012, galleries like Galleria Continua8 or Urs Meile Gallery9 have already included contemporary artists from India in exhibitions (Lee Ambrozy, email communication, 18 October 2012). However, they seem to be rather the exception, and in both cases, the galleries appear to have a European background or at least European cooperation partners. In contrast, West Heavens and Khoj are in this regard noteworthy and relevant as local initiatives. This is certainly not the case with Indian Highway, and thus the question displayed on the exhibition wall, as Iona Whittaker quoted it, “What would a world look like in which the ascendant powers of Asia look not to the West, but at each other?” (2012) might sound peculiar to a critical reader. Why is Western input needed to foster cultural artistic exchanges between India and China? Iona Whittaker expresses some scepticism because, as she critically notes, Indian Highway is a European project that has been re-heated for the Chinese art world, and the international embrace remains incomplete (ibid.). She seems to refer to the fact that non-Western art worlds do not always follow the same agendas as those set in the West. Thus, she explains that the Chinese contemporary art scene has different local motivations for exporting Chinese contemporary art but not for importing art from other regions (Whittaker 2012). This, but also the role of Western art institutions, still urges one to rethink existing forms of internationalism in the art world. The discussion of Indian Highway in China and media reports on the exhibition made it clear – prevailing internationalism is still the dominant model (Araeen 1994, 5). Arguments that foster the debate on a “New Internationalism”, which the Institute of International Visual Arts (London) initiated in 1994, still seem to resonate in the global contemporary art world of the twenty-first century. And even though “New Internationalism” was meant as a critical response to the significance of multiculturalism in the era of postcolonialism and its being “too often dependent on its connection to a self-correcting West” (Hanru 1994, 80), the understanding of an international art world as a dialogical, reciprocal, and democratised platform for artistic exchange requires on-going serious self-reflection. Does this suggest a form of neo-colonialism where the Western art world establishes an internationalism that still imposes a Western discourse but ignores local and alternative dynamics? It may be too early to answer this question, but this perspective at least helps to shape an analytical view. Philip Tinari is very conscious about his outsider role in the Chinese art world, as he stated in a conversation with Li Aoxue for China Daily in 2012. And since he was convinced of the

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significance of Indian Highway for Indian-Chinese exchange, he also wanted to guide the focus away from the dominant role of Western art as most of the time Chinese people only think about their contemporary art in relation with Western art and seldom consider its links to neighbors such as India. [Thus] . . . such an exhibition will provide an opportunity for Chinese audiences to know more about Indian contemporary art since there is a lack of communication between the two. (Aoxue 2012)

In this situation of diverging motivations, the media are major agents in the respective public discourses. The information they provide in Chinese and in the international media (in English) allow some insight into the local discursive landscape of contemporary art and, for example, into the lack of knowledge and isolation with respect to Indian contemporary art. Moreover, they also reflect the apparent contradiction between the diverging expectations and desires formulated by both Western curators and institutes as well as by local agents and the art scene.

“Ghettoification” Such observation requires rethinking the curatorial mission behind Indian Highway, since it was in the European context it presented an unfixed notion of contemporary art from India to European audiences. In China, this was replaced by a new vision that saw the Chinese locality as a communication partner in the field of art. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that Indian Highway introduced Indian contemporary art to China against a backdrop of international diplomacy. The exhibits were shipped in from Europe, not from India, and China (and to some extent also its contemporary art scene) followed its own national agenda. This has played out in particular on an urban level in Chinese cities, which compete for status as global cities by assuming prominent roles as political and economic entities. Hosting expensive international mega-events, such as the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, was seen as a source of national pride (Wang 2015, 1). It is interesting therefore to consider how the manufactured nature of national identity through cultural representation is connected to cultural festivals and used as a form of cultural diplomacy in the context of a longer history of deploying art exhibitions as propaganda (Wallis 2001, 265). Following on from this, one might argue that Indian Highway was used to symbolise and sustain national communal bonds (2001, 266), whereas the UCCA Foundation’s agenda was to foster international exchange between Europe, India, and China by sending the exhibition along the road less travelled from India to China (Jahagirdar 2012). However, as the second part of this chapter will discuss in more detail, the spatial and temporal moment in Beijing and the political situation in India in 2012 resulted in a sort of detachment or interruption of the exhibition from this agenda “through the engineered overproduction of certain types of images or the censorship or suppression of others, and through controlling the way images are viewed or by determining which are preserved” (Wallis 2001, 266). In this sense, the cultural representation of Indian Highway was used to produce a particular view of India’s national history and politics through diplomatic complicity between Indian and Chinese governments.

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In parallel to her critical stance, the art critic Iona Whittaker also confirmed the quality of the Indian Highway initiative, emphasising the need to take a first step in the process of IndianChinese exchange: things have to start somewhere – it’s about time – and why not with an extensive exhibition of works by contemporary Indian artists both established and more new? This is certainly a refreshing show – not least for its ability to rouse Beijing-based audiences (here read critics, too) from their comfort zone. From the word go, here are unfamiliar, engaging works. (Whittaker 2012)

A cultural exchange certainly has to start somewhere, and Iona Whittaker also saw the potential for local Beijing/Chinese audiences and artists when she stated that “[p]erhaps this big exhibition not only introduced contemporary Indian art to audiences elsewhere, but also provided aesthetic and sensory counterpoints to artistic production wherever it lands” (ibid.). In her comment, she also refers to some of the limitations in painting for Chinese contemporary artistic genres and for conceptual artists, particularly those “young, reflective individuals finding personal expression through immersive media like video” (ibid.). This also needs to be read against the background of the (inter)nationalisation of Chinese contemporary art as analysed by Wu Hung (2011), who observes the “creativity of a new kind of artist, who creates contemporary art through simultaneously constructing his or her local identity and serving a global audience” (2011, 291). Hung identified a contemporary turn in the Chinese art world from the 1980s to the 1990s (292), when many artists distanced themselves from a Chinese artistic avant-garde and from critics who “envisioned themselves as participants in a delayed modernization movement, which aimed to reintroduce humanism and the idea of social progress into the nation’s political consciousness” (ibid.; see also Hsiao-Hwei 2003, 24–39). Melissa Chiu, who dates the beginning of the contemporary to the late 1970s (2008, 19), also provides some crucial insight into the developments of Chinese contemporary art. She indicates the major role played by museums and survey exhibitions in the success and international circulation of avant-garde Chinese art since the early 1990s and, for contemporary art, the international auctions of contemporary Asian art held by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in 2005 and 2006 (7 ff.). Today the situation of international visibility has changed. Whereas there was no local gallery system in place for selling art in the 1990s (11), today public museums and private galleries as well as art fairs in Beijing and Shanghai ensure the availability of contemporary art within the country (ibid.). In this context and with regard to European initiatives such as Indian Highway, the question remains how art institutions, and in particular European art institutions committed to Chinese contemporary art and located in China, have the potential to pave new ground for international and inner-Asian artistic exchanges beyond a European/Western paradigm, perhaps even by inviting regional exhibitions from other Asian countries such as Indian Highway. This is reminiscent once again of the “New Internationalism” movement in the 1990s, which was dedicated to breaking up the Western notion of multiculturalism as it functioned in “response to pressure from the postcolonial world” and in terms of “modernity’s vast global migrations to and from the centres of power and their peripheries and the consequent multiple communities of the 20th century metropolis” (Fisher 1994a, x). “‘Multiculturalism’ remains stained above all by the West’s failure to engage in a dialogue of equality with

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its neighbours and to relinquish its control over meaning production. The West, in short, never ceases in its attempts to re-centre itself as the privileged subject of knowledge” (ibid., xi). Even the initiative of New Internationalism that included, among others, Gerardo Mosquera’s first engagement with the problems of transcultural curating, did not remain undebated for its risk of becoming “twisted by the existing structures of power to sustain their own positions” (ibid.). The critiques of Indian Highway raise similar issues: How can a regional exhibition like Indian Highway provide a space for an internationalism and multiple transcultural exchange between Indian and Chinese artists outside a European paradigm? When I asked Lee Ambrozy about her view of the exhibition’s significance for the local art community in Beijing, she was fairly conscious and careful in her answer: “It is hard to gage [sic] the significance. There is very little cultural exchange between the Chinese and the Indian artist communities, and of course this exchange was facilitated through the ‘West’, so it is a strange anomaly in that sense” (Lee Ambrozy, email communication, 18 October 2012). She proceeded to explain that [t]he show was the first of Indian artists in Beijing on such a major scale. Galleria Continua has also shown Indian artists, but I can’t say that many Chinese artists I am familiar with think about, or are highly influenced by artists living and working in India. Meile Gallery has done some exchanges where their artists have done residencies in Pakistan, I know. (ibid.)

Ambrozy conceives a slight “complicity” or sympathy on the part of Chinese artists towards their Indian companions in terms of, as she puts it, “sharing the same sort of geographic ghettoification” (ibid.). In this sense, “It was with an air of sadness and pity that many people viewed the show, [as] a nice chance to see art otherwise unavailable, but nothing near a stand in for authentic cultural exchange” (ibid.). “Ghettoification”, as it refers to a position in the international art world where one is made marginal and peripheral and not easily accessible and available outside, except with the support of Western institutions, leaves open the question of what other format might be able to provide a solution for marginalisation. The artists Dayanita Singh and Sudarshan Shetty believe that one of the most important challenges is the lack of local infrastructure in India’s art world, and in this they identify similarities between Indian and Chinese art. In a post on the Shanghaiist blog by Kyle Mullin, both artists elaborate on non-profit art spaces in India as a possible way to establish alternative art discourses outside Western domination. As Sudarshan Shetty explains, India desperately needs such large, benevolent and informed spaces for art [such as the non-profit 798 area]. There is still a very naive idea of what art should be and how it should appear, what its functions are in society, and such places would provide endless benefits. There is nothing like the UCCA anywhere in India right now, though there is a potentially exciting development with the emergence of privately funded museums like the Devi Art Foundation and the artists run initiatives like Khoj in Delhi. (Shetty in (Mullin 2012)

Shetty continues, giving voice to the particular concern that a solution cannot come from outside India but only from within (ibid.). Accordingly, he argues that he does not believe that “an

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imitation of any other culture’s institutional infrastructure will be helpful for India in the longterm” (ibid.). Instead, the exciting challenges lie in trying “to imagine specific ways that India could establish itself internationally, of course with some fundamental similarities to other international models, but without constantly being forced to cash in on an exotic passport” (ibid.). In this respect, he also sees similar challenges for India and China to establish structures “that can survive in the long term whenever the (Western) art market’s current excitement for the two countries inevitably fades” (Shetty in Mullin 2012). Thus, both artists see the need to find an Indian way to establish a strong position and discourse within Indian society. The prevailing opinion is that the influence of Western institutions prevents India’s art world from establishing itself internationally and, furthermore, that the Western perspective continues to reinforce a system of long-established conventions in viewing and representing non-Western arts as exotic in the larger context of international contemporary art. However, countries like India clearly lack the alternatives to solve these problems and to locate themselves in the international context. This is connected to the lack of local art infrastructure. Certainly, Western art market interests cannot provide stable structures for local markets, but they are considered very influential. Is it then surprising that Western-initiated projects like Indian Highway do not provoke too much enthusiasm among the local art community, but rather strengthen a sense of complicity? Similar to the artist Sudarshan Shetty, Lee Ambrozy identified a shared experience where Indian and Chinese artists are still being forced to use their ethnic backgrounds to achieve international awareness (Lee Ambrozy, email communication, 18 October 2012). Maybe, this is also due to the strange fact that the Indian Highway project was facilitated by the West (ibid.). In this sense, “ghettoification” not only brings to light the non-existent local art infrastructure that could provide alternatives to the West, but also exposes the non-existence of linkages between art communities like those in India and in China. Sudarshan Shetty also addressed this issue when he explained, “Europe seems closer (than China). We take our works more to European cities and then bring them here (China). China seems further away” (Shetty in Patranobis 2012a). In this respect, it remains a question for debate if Indian Highway can be seen as a starting point from which to solve the disconnectivity between art communities within Asia. Artistic exchange might need engagement which is more intense than simply viewing art objects and listening to talks in an exhibition that addresses general audiences. There were other reactions to the arrival of Indian Highway at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art as well. Some focused more on developments within the museum and talked about the already-mentioned shift from Chinese towards Indian contemporary art (Qianwen 2012). In response to this, the organisers of Indian Highway at UCCA seemed to feel obliged to justify their decision to bring Indian contemporary art over to China. Philip Tinari is quoted in this article as giving the following explanation: We have been clarifying rumors [about losing interest in Chinese contemporary art] since last year”, said Philip Tinari, president of UCCA. “The situation is that we are still enthusiastic about Chinese art, but meanwhile we are developing a new interest in Indian art. (Qianwen 2012)

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Hans Ulrich Obrist, responded with similar appeasement and emphasised the equal long-term institutional interest in Chinese as well as Indian contemporary art at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo (Qianwen 2012). Obrist’s reply sounds both like pacification and the formulation of a future vision. Does the local demand for Western attention not drive a further disconnect between India’s and China’s art communities and a rivalry between the two superpowers? In this regard, a permanent moving back and forth between different local art worlds by influential agents like Obrist not only creates impermanence, it also fosters uncertainty and instability in the contemporary art world along lines of inclusion and exclusion. Since networking activities also produce powerful tensions and define the contemporary art world as a system of hierarchies in which particular regions compete for international attention, this dynamic contrasts with the Western notion of a contemporary art world that welcomes and interconnects new art centres on an equal level. Instead, further inequalities arise because different local situations can ensure neither the sustainable influence of these new centres nor a long-term belonging to the global art world. Do we even know how such uncertainty and instability in the global art world influences local art practices or the cultural value of those contemporary art practices in local as well as global contexts? While the reinforcing tendencies of a Western-dominated international art world support the development of new art centres in formerly excluded regions – for instance, the art biennial in Thailand in 2014 (MH/CN/CXMA 2013 – it remains to be seen whether this will lead to a new, sustainable organisation of the international art world. The contemporary international art world not only consists of institutionalised systems like the biennial or art fair system, it is mainly shaped by individuals and their respective networks. Indeed, the participating agents, institutes, and localities sometimes appear almost arbitrary and inconsistent in contrast to broader economic and political developments. It might also be difficult to find an encompassing logic in the up and down of networking strategies, as they also remain largely hidden in the in-between spaces caused by the geographical distances between venues and collaborating partners. Aside from all these network activities, art events like Indian Highway in Beijing also support the rise of different agents and powers, and art businesses always depend on local governmental support. In this regard, other interests on different social levels, including local politics, economies, and transnational diplomatic relations, have a major impact on the success or failure of those networks. This was certainly the case with the Indian Highway network, where different translocal and transcultural entanglements shaped the meaning of the exhibition according to its Chinese locality, although they often remained hidden to the public. However, unexpected crises and conflicts can sometimes make these networks transparent. Crises or scandals in the art world can emerge when agents who do not permanently participate in an art world suddenly intervene and when they, for example, assert the claim that the art, or a particular art object, is offensive. In the case of Indian Highway, one such moment occurred when the fairly uneventful exhibition journey within Europe was interrupted by an unexpected incident in China: Indian politicians asked the exhibition organisers to remove a video work which they construed as being a false representation of India’s government and society to the Chinese public. The work, by the multimedia Mumbai-based artist Tejal Shah entitled I Love My India

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(2003),10 was one of the permanent artworks that had been part of Indian Highway since its 2008 inauguration in London. In order to contextualise the incident and place it within a larger framework of non-art related associations, I will describe the content of the video and then analyse the meaning of the censorship.

Don’t they love their India? – Indian Highway censored Neither the well-established China-Europe curator network nor the thus-far inconspicuousness of Indian Highway during its Europe tour would have led anyone to predict the controversy that erupted at the exhibition venue in Beijing in 2012. Almost four weeks after the opening at the Ullens Centre, a public controversy over Indian Highway was sparked when the media reported an unexpected case of censorship at the exhibition and the removal of an artwork. But why did the censorship happen? And why by Indian officials? The following will discuss the content of the artwork, since it refers to a larger political context in India in 2012 – the year of the announcement of candidates for India’s prime minister. This background is important to understanding the act of censorship not as an Indian-Chinese affair alone, but rather as part of a political debate that was occurring within India. When I, for now, introduce the video I Love My India by describing some scenes, it is with the intention of framing the question of what audiences unfamiliar with the Indian background might see in the video and whether the exhibition space fostered a particular reading. This will be followed by an analysis of artists’ statements in conjunction with the curatorial information, which will provide insight into the controversy. In July 2012, The Hindu published an article entitled “India Asks Beijing Gallery to Censor Art Show Over Gujarat Riot” (Krishnan and Dikshit 2012). The authors of the article reported that the Ullens Centre had received a request from Indian government officials in the Ministry of External Affairs to remove one of the exhibits. The controversial art piece was the ten-minute video installation by Tejal Shah, I Love My India (2003), which had been one of the permanent artworks of Indian Highway since its inauguration in London in 2008. In this video, Shah presents interviews with different passersby at a recreational air-gun shooting stall in a public promenade in Mumbai. In these interviews, the artist asks the candidates questions about the socio-political situation in India, the position of minority groups, and, in a concrete context, about the communal pogrom that had taken place between Hindus and Muslims in several locations in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Some background information on this human tragedy is needed in order to understand the censorship as an Indian political affair. In the context of Indian Highway, the act of censorship seemed to have triggered a premature end for the European curatorial project and, at the same time, a new facet of transcultural and translocal practices. More than 1,000 people were killed during the genocidal pogrom waged against the minority Muslim community by right-wing Hindu nationalist state and non-state actors in Gujarat in 2002. Shocking photographs circulated around the world documenting terrible acts of cruelty and atrocities committed by members of both religious groups. It is believed that the murder of Hindu pilgrims, burnt in a train in the city of Godhra (many of whom were returning from Ayodhya, the city where a mosque had been demolished in 1992), instigated the catastrophe. Many

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of the public debates about this pogrom related to the role of Gujarat’s then–Chief Minister and member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi, and the Gujarat police force, who were both criticised for not having intervened or prevented the extreme violence and were, in fact, suspected of having supported it. More information circulated in which the local police were accused of killing Muslims or of not protecting Hindus, depending on the sources. The situation in Gujarat also had an historical dimension, since it was a reminder of an earlier pogrom that had taken place in Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992. At that time, pogroms between Hindus and Muslims had broken out around the Babri Mosque, which was built on the believed birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The trigger for these cruelties was an announcement made by a member of the BJP, who claimed that the mosque should be demolished and that the RamJanmabhumi temple must be rebuilt. Enraged local Hindu communities then participated in a march to destroy the Babri Mosque in December 2002. State-wide riots followed, and several thousand people were killed. In 2003, the artist Tejal Shah recorded a picture of the on-going conflicts between the Hindus and Muslims in India.11 By asking “We want to know what you think about the situation of democracy right now in India” or “Do you know what happened in Gujarat last year?”, Tejal Shah addressed notions of religious and national identity, minority politics, and the idea of India’s democracy. Using a performative gesture, Shah created an intense interface that connected visual experience, self-reflection, and self-positioning. The performative character of the video unfolds when the people who are interviewed shoot at a balloon target. Well known in India’s public amusement parks, the targets of such shooting stalls are usually decorated with colourful motifs like flowers formed out of balloons. For the video, the artist rented a shooting gallery and had replaced the flower motif with yellow, red, and blue balloons creating the words “I love my India”. While the interviewees were reflecting on their ideas about democracy and the Gujarat crises, they were shooting the “I love my India” sign with a toy gun, as if they were trying to shoot their own country. The following photograph taken in Indian Highway at the HEART Museum in Herning demonstrates the scene (Plate 6.1). On her website, Tejal Shah describes the video as follows: This video is set against the backdrop of genocide against the minority Indian Muslim community in the state of Gujarat (starting Feb 2002). It takes place one year after the genocide at a popular public recreational site, that of the “balloon target shooting” stall. The text I LOVE MY INDIA acts as a catalyst and the balloon board, an interface screen within the visual space, through which larger concepts of religion, national identity, self and community are mitigated. It’s a performative intervention set within the recreational and violent gestures of the everyday, while drawing comments on the world’s “largest democracy”. The responses are sometimes hilarious and often apathetic, culminating in a sense of loss, of a perceived nationhood and a love for home. (Shah)12 13

The video consists of different scenes with different perspectives, locations, and people. It begins very calmly with shots of a location near the seaside. It is evening, the sun sets, and with the sounds of many people, laughter, and traffic, a relaxed atmosphere is created. These opening shots

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are followed by sequences of men installing the shooting gallery with the coloured balloons, and balloon after balloon, the words “I Love My India” unfold. This scene of the preparation of the balloon target ends with the picture of a gun targeting the “I Love My India” (see Plate 6.1). A whole series of interviews with young people at the shooting range follows. Subtitles in English provide translations to the questions raised by a female voice off screen (the person, probably the artist, is not visible) and the answers by the interviewees. In between, other scenes are faded in. They show an excited and angry crowd demonstrating somewhere else (no further information is given in the video about setting and time), holding up signs with drawn pictures of a man or slogans like “Modi Murderer” or “Man eater Modi”. Only by carefully listening to the interviews and using background knowledge can the viewer understand that this demonstration was directed against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of murder during the Gujarat pogrom in 2002. The demonstrators hold their hands, painted red, in front of the camera, in order to drive home their anger with their “bloody” hands. Further interview scenes follow, and the video ends with the emptied target disappearing into the night. What might a viewer unfamiliar with the Indian context see in this video? Even though the dialogue is written in English, the entire narrative of the video and its political background are not self-explanatory. In the exhibition spaces in Oslo (2009) and in Herning (2010), I had observed that in general, not much information was provided to introduce the larger context of this or other artworks. In Herning, for example, the video I Love My India was placed between two screens with other video works. On the left, the video National Highway Number 1 (2002–2004) by Shilpa Gupta was installed and, on the right, the video Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (2008) by Raqs Media Collective. Aside from the titles, the years, and the artists’ names, of all these video installations, only Tejal Shah’s was briefly described with informational text: In the video “I Love My India” from 2003, Tejal Shah is working within the conditions of state sponsored genocide against the minority Indian Muslim community in Gujarat in 2002. Shah herself has both narrated the video and filmed it at a public recreational ground at Nariman Point, Mumbai. The video combined with the format of an opinion poll, the candid and direct testimonies ranging from loss, apathy, prejudice and ignorance, not only question democracy at the local level but also humanity. Shah’s work asks the viewer to re-examine his own political stance and poses the questions whether it today has become more acceptable to commit such acts of violence when the war on terror has been positioned as a universal cause and the bulwark of democracy. As well as the exploration of gender and sexuality, Shah also deals with the concepts of religion, national identity self and community in her artworks. (description text, HEART Museum 2010)

This description provided only the minimum of information on the local context and the communal riots and tried to shift the focus to a much wider global set of topics, including political opinion, democracy, religion, gender, and national identity. In my view, this clearly represents the declared goal not only of the curators, but also of the art piece: to de-localise specific cultural issues and to try to make them accessible to a global audience by generating a global message. However, it is hard to estimate whether a viewer could easily establish a rational relationship between the content of the video and his or her own personal experiences. A major challenge

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seems to have been that, as a genre, it is not very different from a documentary or mass-media production. This genre caters to audiences who are constantly confronted with reportages on television or YouTube (online video platform) about war, demonstrations, and human crises and might not be sensitive enough to catch the subtle message I Love My India communicates. More importantly, it is necessary to watch the entire video in order to understand the conflict between the acts of shooting and speaking, but not many visitors really take the opportunity to do so. The following photographs provide further details of the interview scenes in Tejal Shah’s video; the last two depict scenes from the anti-Modi demonstration (Plate 6.2). The next scenes are from the demonstration against Chief Minister Modi. They immediately follow the question “What do you think of Narendra Modi?” On her homepage, the artist provided a video excerpt of I Love My India as well as the transcription of the screened interviews. In the following, I quote the beginning as well as the end of the interviews as they both provide concrete opposing positions in terms of people’s perception of India’s democracy: Okay, speak in English! We want to know, what you think is the situation of democracy right now in India. All this is nonsense, what’s the use in it? Just take a gun and shoot! All I know is that there is no democracy. Earlier it was there, now not at all. (I Love My India, video dialogue)14

The question “What do you think of Narendra Modi?” was answered by a young woman who had not formulated an engaged opinion on this: Narendra Modi, ya, I was just trying to get his name . . . There were lots of stories. Some were against him, some were for him; so I can’t really say. I guess if what he did was actually what people say he did, then I guess what he did was really wrong. (I Love My India, video dialogue) 15

The entire interview part of the video ends with the following statement by a man: I don’t think there is any other country like India. Here there is freedom for everything, anyone can say anything. And I feel that this “I Love India” you have written and I am shooting on, it makes me feel very bad because you are saying, “I love India” and asking about the democracy of India and after that you are shooting on the same, you could have written anything else here. (ibid.)

This last comment differs from the former statements because this interviewee sees – perhaps he might be the only one – no reason to complain about the social situation in India. Even though this reaction appears to be very positive, in light of the communal riots and vast poverty in the country, it could be seen as rather oblivious to postulate that freedom is enjoyed by every citizen. Even though I would be very careful in judging such a position, the statement in the video establishes a powerful counter-position to the former, sometimes critical and sometimes uninformed, replies by other candidates. Perhaps it was because of the tenor of these voices that the journalist in the Indian Express asked: “Don’t They Love Their India?” (Kalra 2012) when reporting on the censorship incident. But why should criticism or ignorance about a terrible incident like the pogroms mean a general rejection of the entire state?

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The last interviewee recognises the ambivalence arising from talking about democracy in India while shooting on the balloon target “I Love My India”. Acknowledging that he does not feel comfortable, he not only remarks on this and deconstructs the performative gesture of the entire situation, but he also represents some form of sensibility and responsibility. Indeed, by contrast, the journalist’s general statement can also be read as similar to an act of censorship, condemning, as it appears to, the democratic freedom of speech in terms of artistic practice but also in terms of freedom of opinion, which the citizens of any democratic nation-state enjoy. These observations are certainly not easy to resolve, and they need more discussion, in particular among people living in India. In the end, I felt puzzled by the reactions I Love My India has provoked, not within global audiences, but within a country that calls itself the largest democracy of the world. This, I would argue, says much more about the democratic situation in India than about the artwork itself. The video itself is powerful: watching the artwork, I had the impression that the interviews, the performative part as well as the different reactions by the interview candidates, produced ambiguity in the entire narrative of the video. And it is this ambiguity which makes the work particularly expressive. Its strength lies not only in the artistic strategy of positioning the viewer as an external observer who recognises the humorous or even cynical relation between the interview and the shooting act, but also in the inclusion of the viewer as a participant in the dialogue. The context of the work, like the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India, the Gujarat genocidal pogrom in 2002, and the existing inequalities in terms of minority rights in India, might not be familiar to external German or Chinese audiences, but I would suggest that this is not as important as it seems. Rather, the work allows the viewer to reflect on his or her own positions and behaviour in terms of politics and human rights on a global level. In another scene in the video, the artistic message becomes more apparent. This is a sequence in which a close-up of the face of a young person (maybe the artist herself) sitting on a moving merry-go-round is partly shown. Photographs of destroyed buildings interrupt this scene while the entire sequence is displayed with the following subtitle (Plate 6.3): Seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something. Once you have seen certain things, you can’t un-see them. (I Love My India, video dialogue)

These scenes, which illustrate ease and enjoyment on the merry-go-round in contrast with scenes of violence and destruction in relation to the written and spoken thoughts about political responsibility, touched me most as a viewer but also as a citizen of a democratic society. At this point, the video became part of a larger discourse where it allowed any viewer to shift attention from the local Indian context to his or her own and to reflect on his or her own personal responsibility towards humanity. It was obviously Tejal Shah’s intention to address with her artwork the individual viewer, to emphasise self-reflection and political responsibility as well as her own role as an artist. In a statement from her solo exhibition The Tomb of Democracy in Berlin, she declared: As an artist, as an India [sic] artist, as an Indian artist living and practising in this country, I am compelled not just to hold a mirror to the society but also to myself; for once you’ve seen certain things, you can’t un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something. Fascism is indeed as much about people as about governments. It begins at home. In drawing rooms. In bedrooms. In beds.

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If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as it should), like the ordinary citizens of Germany in the 30s, we too will learn to recognise revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen. This is me. This is us. In India. (Shah, March 2003)16

By defining the Gujarat pogroms as acts of “fascism”, Shah positions her work as political and as a clear critique of India’s state and society. This reading is not consciously encouraged in the context of Indian Highway; nevertheless, the combination of various genres such as life performance, documentary, and interview strengthen her artistic and personal argument. She uses a human tragedy like the Gujarat pogrom not only to reflect on her own position as an artist in India and to criticise the democratic system, but also to appeal for a particular, universal statement on humanity. But can this be why Indian officials perceived the video as objectionable? Why did the Indian government censor the video in Beijing and not earlier at another venue? What reactions did the censorship provoke, and what did it mean for Indian Highway?

Cultural intimacy I will elaborate on these questions in this section with reference to the documentation of the censorship in some of the online media. The aim here is to discuss the incident at Indian Highway in Beijing in light of its meaning for the entire exhibition project, as it contradicts in some ways the idea of “cultural intimacy”, a concept formulated by Michael Herzfeld (1997, 2009) to define specific situations of discomfort or embarrassment in particular cultural contexts. The censorship dismantled a nexus of complex translocal and transcultural entanglements that had taken place between the different parties. Thus far, interactions like intense network practices had supported the circulation of Indian contemporary art in Europe and had thus provided an experimental platform to negotiate curatorial-artistic exchange. In the Chinese context, however, the quality and content of the entangling changed when new agents appeared and claimed the exhibition for their own purposes. This not only changed the structure of the entanglements, but also restricted Western dominance in the contemporary art world, leading to a bizarre reversal in the meaning attributed to Indian Highway, which was a contrast to what the European curators had originally developed. Accordingly, the uncontrollable dynamics in the art world at the time also became apparent: for example, the self-regulating tendencies that define limits for former influential persons like European curators. The “cultural intimacy” and embarrassment that the artwork provoked in the Indian government and also for some private Indian persons who commented on online articles on the censorship related, therefore, to the perhaps unexpected agency of the artworks. Only some English online media like newspapers and blogs made the censorship incident public. These reports only referred to a limited number of official statements on the censorship incident: for example, a statement by the BJP spokesman; a comment by photographer Ravi Agarwal whose works were also part of the Indian Highway exhibition; and an official protest statement written by Indian artists and published in The Hindu entitled “Say No to Censorship”.

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Aside from these public reactions, people in other important positions did not contribute to the controversy. For example, Philip Tinari and the other curators, including Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, refused to give an official statement. The artist, Tejal Shah, who did not receive any official information about the issue by the curators, could not take a stand. Accordingly, the story remains fragmented, and the lack of information does not allow for a final conclusion to be reached about the censorship and its consequences for Indian Highway. Nevertheless, for the sake of summing up the information that became observable in some online media, the silence of persons involved in the exhibition delivered a clear statement of non-intervention.17 This information allows us to argue that the act of censorship was a signal to the European curators and their aim of making Indian art internationally accessible. Although the curatorial search for new exhibiting strategies was meant to establish an exchange with artists located on eye level, and although it was critically discussed, it may not have totally succeeded in the European context. The censorship in China was a clear interruption of this search, and the intervention by Indian officials marks a “cultural intimacy”, not between curators and artists, but between artists and Indian officials and other citizens, which the European curatorial authorities did not intend and could not avoid. Moreover, curatorial authority on the global stage could not prevent the local artists from facing censorship in India, which was a clear restriction of their artistic freedom of speech. Censorship is obviously a powerful tool that the authorities use to control artistic practice within a country like India, where censorship is not unknown. The border crossing of this power and the international impact of Indian officials in a private gallery in China, where censorship and surveillance are part of daily life, certainly illustrates the power of India’s authority. The following will reconstruct the story behind the censorship incident as far as it was made public. But first it is important to mention that part of the embarrassment came from the fact that the Indian Embassy in Beijing was one of the official partners of the exhibition at Ullens Centre and that the Indian ambassador to China, S. Jaishankar, had inaugurated the exhibition on 23 June 2012. It is not unusual for officials from politics or industry to participate in exhibition openings. This happens quite often, especially when their departments or institutes support public institutions like museums or exhibition projects. But in the case of the venue in Beijing, the participation of the Indian ambassador is important to note because later, in July, he was unintentionally drawn into the controversy. After his speech at the opening, the ambassador was quoted by journalists, such as Ananth Krishnan (The Hindu), as saying, “Art can be provocative, and we should see it as freedom of expression” (Krishnan 2012). However, the ambassador could not have been referring to the video I Love My India by Tejal Shah because it had not been turned on during the opening due to technical problems. Possibly, he was referring to another video work in the show, the video installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007) by Amar Kanwar, which deals with cruelty against women during Indian-Pakistan conflicts. Only four weeks after the exhibition’s inauguration, the controversy about the video I Love My India emerged when the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) complained officially about the video to the Ministry for External Affairs in India. The complaint was partly caused by the party’s embarrassment about the contents of the video, as it criticised BJP member and Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Accordingly, the BJP officials also expressed their disbelief that the Indian ambassador to China had inaugurated the exhibition

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despite its objectionable content. As part of these complaints, BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman made the following statement: These [artworks] are completely objectionable and BJP takes strong objections to this. We demand that the Ministry of External Affairs immediately call the Indian Ambassador to China and seek an explanation from him as to how he could inaugurate something where the image of India is being shown in such poor light. (cf. Bhatt 2012 or Zeenews 2012)

As seen in the photographic stills, the video work by Tejal Shah documented that Narendra Modi was publicly criticised for his unclear role during the communal pogrom in Gujarat. Additionally, some of the interview statements in the video included critical comments on India’s democracy. This was perceived by the BJP as offensive, and the party believed that it would present a negative image of India: “The short film on Indian democracy shows India in poor light, highlighting the Godhra-related incidents alone and showing that Indian democracy has failed. This is completely objectionable,” BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman said (Outlook India 2012). Although it was not possible to trace from the media how the exhibition or the video work by Tejal Shah had caught the attention of members of the BJP party, in other articles it became more obvious that this act of censorship was very much part of an on-going inter-party quarrel in India and not necessarily an issue in India-China relations, as one might have expected. In the article “BJP Objects to Film Containing Clippings of 2002 Riots” (Outlook India 2012), these quarrels are more openly defined when BJP spokesperson Sitharaman is quoted: She [Nirmala Sitharaman] also reminded that during the Indo-US nuclear deal [2008 under the American government by George W. Bush], the then Indian Ambassador to the US, Ronen Sen, had spoken about the opposition parties in Parliament as “headless chickens”. Such kind of instances don’t help the situation at all and Congress party and UPA [United Progressive Alliance] government should realise it cannot continue with this kind of defaming of India, outside particularly, said Sitharaman. She said the Indian Ambassador to China had inaugurated the exhibition in which these two “very serious” issues came up. (ibid.)

The “headless chicken” statement and the I Love My India video are both marked as specific actions that offended India’s image as a democratic nation-state and, by extension, the honour of Indian officials who believed that party quarrels or controversies about local communal riots or the role of particular politicians should not be made public to other nation-states. This situation of discomfort or embarrassment created by locally embedded cultural policy of gesture formed an exemplary moment of cultural intimacy as defined by Herzfeld: this space of ostensibly negative values that in fact conceals deep social bonds is above all a zone of discomfort with, and largely implicit critique of, the official discourse that in turn denies and condemns everything that constitutes cultural intimacy. (Herzfeld 2009, 134)

Thus, while “gesture is a way of creating intimating communication while under public [or in this case under international] gaze” (Herzfeld 2009, 133), it also creates “cultural intimacy” as “the

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zone of internal knowledge whereby members of a society recognise each other through their flaws and foibles rather than through their idealized typicality as heroic representatives of the nation” (ibid.). In this regard, it is not only the role of art that has to be debated, but also the role of the public online media, which allows individuals to participate in debates about censoring the I Love My India video through the comment fields below online published articles which function as a public discussion forum. Such forums are an interesting source for more in-depth data on how this debate was taken up publicly. The following briefly addresses one such discussion in the postings beneath the article published in The Hindu entitled “India Asks Beijing Gallery to Censor Art Show over Gujarat Video” (Krishnan and Dikshit 2012). This forum became of particular interest for this analysis because most of the posted comments dealt with the issue of censorship and freedom of speech, while others engaged in a more political debate on the communal riots and the role of politicians. The first post in this forum clearly supported the censorship, whereas the second post expressed the claim for the right to voice criticism. This comment was later answered with the argument that the right to free speech should be acknowledged only inside India and that politicians should take the responsibility of protecting India’s integrity.18 In another forum, a commentator shared the opinion that such internal debates should not be taken to the international stage. The comment was posted in the comments section that followed a protest letter written by Indian artists against the censorship of Tejal Shah’s work. This letter was published in The Hindu under the title “Say No to Censorship” and can serve as yet another example of cultural intimacy since the author stresses that it is necessary to leave internal affairs inside the country in order to avoid presenting a “miserable” image of India to the world. Here, the author does not focus precisely on the act of censorship or the artwork by Tejal Shah but deplores any kind of writing and documenting work that portrays India in a bad light. At this time, and when these discussions in the media appeared, a business delegation from Gujarat travelled to China, and Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi officially visited Japan for a four-day trip.19 Indian officials’ anxiety that the Indian nation-state might have been defamed on the international stage by airing internal quarrels publicly, even through the arts, might have been an important reason for the censorship controversy. On the micro level of the Indian political parties, the BJP might also have been afraid that the supposed defamation of India could affect Gujarat’s officials and negatively influence upcoming cooperation plans. Either way, it became clear that both the official complaints about the artwork and the power of Tejal Shah’s artistic statement were seen as serious dangers to the global position of India. Michael Herzfeld has defined the “global hierarchy of value”, which in the assumed postcolonial era is still occupied by “the idea of the West” (Herzfeld 2005, 66). When the Ministry of External Affairs reacted and initiated the removal of the artwork from the exhibition space, the seriousness of the situation for the Indian state became evident. The ministry spokesperson made the following declaration: There was a video exhibit that was about four-odd minutes long . . . [sic]. It had some politically controversial overtones. Our mission had taken it up with the organisers and since then the organisers have removed that exhibit,” the external affairs ministry spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin told reporters here. (Millenium Post 2012)20

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And even though the Indian government did not play an official role in the exhibition organisation at UCCA, but only covered the travel costs for two Indian artists, Dayanita Singh and Sudarshan Shetty, the censorship and the debates around it revealed the relationship between the local politics of cultural identities and the global hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2005). It is also apparent that the exhibition needed to be framed by the controversial India-China relationship in order for the censorship to occur. This is made clear by the fact that the artwork by Tejal Shah was not objected to at the previous venues in Europe. In another article in The Hindu, the explanation for this was “that as the show was privately curated by the Serpentine Gallery, they [the Indian officials] neither sought to give their consent nor look[ed] to formally approve of the works of art” (Krishnan and Dikshit 2012). This is not a convincing explanation; furthermore, one might well question why censorship happened at all in a non-Indian art institute located outside India. With Nirmala Sitharaman’s demand that the Ministry of External Affairs should “show that it can act on its own officials [sic] which are there to spread goodwill about India and not such [a] bad picture” (Outlook India 2012), an impression emerges that the officials from the BJP wanted to demonstrate their moral power. China’s cruel habit of “censoring” artists and intellectuals in the country is widely known, and cases like that of the artist Ai Wei and the censorship of the internet and other incidents have caused worldwide protests and solidary movements. In the case of the Tejal Shah artwork and Indian Highway at the Ullens Centre, the Indian government seemed to be directly competing with China in this regard. Sutirtho Patranobis, a journalist of the Hindustan Times, noted that “a dark period in India’s recent history shouldn’t be publicised abroad” (Patranobis 2012), and he cynically noted that “[b]y that logic the Tiananmen Square massacre [in Beijing in 1989] shouldn’t be discussed anywhere. All dark days in our history should be conveniently wiped out from gullible memories” (Patranobis 2012). He went on to provocatively suggest that India might have something to learn from China if it tried to imitate it in terms of censorship (ibid.). It might, therefore, have been expected that the Indian officials would not censor just a single artwork but the entire exhibition in order to ensure that it did not present India in a negative way. But what is the sense in removing only one art piece? More importantly, one must note that India is a country where artist censorship happens at regular intervals, reflecting its ambivalent relationship with its own art and artists. The controversy around Maqbool Fida Husain’s art, initiated by right-wing Hindu nationalists, is one major example of Indian censorship, but there are also more recent cases of arbitrary and incomprehensible censorship by Indian officials. I have the impression that the same reluctance to create any controversy and conflict with Indian officials in public might have influenced the Indian Highway case. This might explain why neither Philip Tinari nor the curators from Serpentine Gallery or Astrup Fearnley Museum have given any official statement on the censoring of I Love My India. But does this mean that the government has the right to intervene whenever it sees fit? How can injustice and the restriction of democratic rights end if institutes like galleries and museums oblige such arbitrary forces?

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Despite the deafening silence on many sides, Indian artists publicly reacted to the censorship and expressed their incomprehension and anger. For example, the participating photographer, Ravi Agarwal, expressed his deep frustration about the incident and the role of the Indian government in an interview: “It’s terrible what they have done and I’m not comfortable with the feeling that the Indian government is becoming censorship-prone to art. It’s strange and I’m surprised. I can’t understand why the Indian government should do this . . . The work is not offensive, it is playful and has people remembering something that has happened in the past. It’s not a national show, it’s an exhibition at a private gallery,” says Ravi Agarwal.” (Kalra 2012)

Large parts of the Indian art community also protested against the censorship. In a public protest letter circulated by members of the Safdar Hasmi Memorial Trust,21 artists and art experts such as Ram Raman, Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram, Ranjit Hoskote, and curator Peter Nagy formulated clear words of resistance and protest against the removal of the art video: That its subject is the communal killings in Gujarat in 2002 is only indicative of the fact that many contemporary artists in India have focussed on communal, political and social problems which we have faced in the last two decades. We have fought hard to uphold the right to free speech which is a pillar of democracy. The exhibition has already been seen by thousands in London, Oslo, Rome and Lyon. It is ironic that our government would seek to censor the exhibition in China. The exhibition is in a private space and has not been sponsored by the government. Even if it had been, such censorship is totally unacceptable. The Ministry should immediately withdraw any such advisory and the video should be reinstated right away. (Raman et al. 2012)

The artists make a strong argument for their artistic engagement with local conflicts and communal problems in India, an engagement that is intrinsic to their freedom of speech. In other words, this can also be read as the right to create critical art that represents India – not so much in its national ideology after independence but as a state that struggles with the challenges of modernity. At this point, the exhibition seemed to have reached an important moment, one that is indicative of the nexus of translocal and transcultural entanglements. This nexus, as it unfolds in the moment of censorship, perfectly dismantles the different meanings read into contemporary art production in India as different agents receive or represent it. The European curators wanted to foster dialogue with regard to Édouard Glissant’s notion of mondialité. As Julia Peyton-Jones explains in the context of the Chinese venue of the exhibition, “[i] t seeks to foster dialogue while resisting the homogenising forces of globalisation. It is important to stress that there can never be a universal language to art” (Chatterjee 2012). The Indian politicians, on the other hand, stressed that art should not represent the dark side of India’s history to

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the outside world but should uphold the image of “India Shining” – India as the largest democracy of the world, a country of freedom, equality, and liberty. The artists who reflect much more about their artistic responsibility, as Tejal Shah argued, attempt to act politically by looking at conflicts and problems, to engage with them, and to make people reflect on them. These are the different positions that the censorship has made visible, and these are the three positions that are being contested by the idea of Indian contemporary art in the context of Indian Highway in Beijing. This nexus was dismantled precisely at this point because the exhibition had reached a stage of independence or a situation when the performed representation, the staging of Indian contemporary art by European curators, had reached the limits of control. Through the entire journey of the exhibition at all its venues, Western curators were asked to contribute their own perspective, to curate the contemporary art from their own subjective point of view on what they thought Indian contemporary art might communicate to Western audiences or how it should be represented. In China, the tide turned. Although it was displayed in a Western institute, the non-European context paved the way for other, new forces and authorities. Indian Highway was no longer a European project but became an Indian one precisely because it had provoked a debate within India about the notion of contemporary art. The European organisers had aimed to initiate a dialogue between Indian and Chinese artistic practices in order to indicate that there was no universal language of art. With regard to this aim, the project seems to have failed. An Indian-Chinese exchange is only possible in alternative, but not Western-dominated, art initiatives. Interaction, joint artistic exhibition projects, and workshops are platforms for exchange, but only if they are not generated by third parties such as European curators alone.

Notes 1 See the UCAA website: http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/indian-highway/ (accessed 6 March 2018). 2 See, among others, www.798district.com (accessed 19 January 2019). 3 See China Power Station on the Serpentine Gallery website: www.serpentinegallery.org/2006/10/china_ power_station_part_i_8_o_1.html (accessed 19 November 2018). 4 Philip Tinari contributed to the issue of Fused Magazine (Fused Magazine n.d.) that accompanied China Power Station. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book The China Interviews was edited by Philip Tinari and Angie Baecker (Obrist 2009); he also co-authored the book The Future Will Be . . . the China Edition with Philip Tinari (Obrist, Marta, and Tinari 2012). The arrival of Indian Highway in Beijing can be understood as the result of these on-going collaborations. 5 See a photograph showing the ambassador S. Jaishankar together with the director and curator of the Ullens Center, Philip Tinari, in front of the installation by Subodh Gupta entitled Take Off Your Shoes and Wash Your Hands in the article “Worldscapes” by Ananth Krishnan in The Hindu on 30 June 2013: www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/worldspace/article3588347.ece (accessed 19 November 2018). 6 See Indian Highway on the Ullens Centre For Contemporary Art website: http://ucca.org.cn/en/ exhibition/indian-highway/ (accessed 19 November 2018). 7 With forums, workshops, exhibitions, and film screenings, this programme has been working towards promoting interaction and cross-cultural exchange since 2010. See the “About Us” page on the West Heavens website: http://westheavens.net/en/aboutusen (accessed 25 January 2019). Other examples of West Heavens initiatives include projects like the film festival You Don’t Belong: Moving Images from India in Hong Kong (2013) or the West Heavens Salon’s Urban Forays in Contemporary Bombay Cinema (2013). A recent event worth mentioning is the curatorial project Place, Time, Play: Contemporary Art

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from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom, an exhibition featuring Indian and Chinese artists that was coordinated by Indian curator Chaitanya Sambrani and West Heavens director Chang Tsong-Zung. See Place, Time, Play: Contemporary Art from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom on the West Heavens website: http://westheavens.net/en/publishing/123 (accessed 25 January 2019). See the list of exhibited artists at the Galleria Continua website: www.galleriacontinua.com/italiano/ artisti.html (accessed 25 January 2019). See the list of organisers and co-organisers on the Art Link Art website: www.artlinkart.com/en/space/ exh_yr/425guC/24fbAAsq (accessed 25 January 2019). The video work I Love My India was originally part of a larger installation entitled Under the Shade of the Sword and was shown for the first time as part of Shah’s first solo show entitled The Tomb of Democracy at Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin/Beijing in Berlin as well as in a group show titled The Rest of the World (Pirmasens, Germany), both in 2003. For further information, see the artist’s website: http://tejalshah. in/home/ (accessed 19 January 2019). In addition, her video also criticises the ideological Hindu-nationalistic rhetoric of many commercial and popular Hindi films such as Pardes (1997) (translation: India/homeland) with Shah Rukh Khan and Amrish Puri as main actors. In addition to the artist’s statement on the I Love My India video, Tejal Shah also provides an excerpt of the video on her homepage as well as the dialogue of the screened interviews. See http://tejalshah.in/ project/under-the-shade-of-the-sword/i-love-my-india/ (accessed 19 January 2019). See also another artist statement about the work in an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Tejal Shah in 2011: http://vimeo.com/40390427 (accessed 18 February 2019). See Tomb of Democracy by Tejal Shah on the Photography Now Website: http://photography-now.com/ exhibition/2012 (accessed 5 on July 5, 20108). See the transcript of the video on Tejal Shah’s website: http://tejalshah.in/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ Dialogues_ILoveMyIndia_2003.pdf (accessed 19 January 2019). See Tomb of Democracy by Tejal Shah on the Photography Now website: http://photography-now.com/ exhibition/2012 (accessed 19 January 2019). I will refer to online resources such as Art Radar Asia (PR/KN/HH 2012), The Hindu (Krishnan and Dikshit 2012), The Indian Express (Kalra 2012), The Sunday Guardian (Pal 2012), and the SaffronArtBlog (Gupta 2012). I have chosen these publications because of their accessibility and also because they reported not only about the opening of Indian Highway, but also about the later censorship incident. Interestingly, most of the publishers were from India, but I could find hardly any critical comments in Chinese online media published in English. For the sake of anonymity, no direct quotes or names are mentioned in this analysis. For more information on Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan, see his official website: www.narendramodi.in/ cm-embarks-on-historic-tour-of-japan-from-july-22nd/ (accessed 1 June 2018). This article is no longer available online. See the Safdar Hasmi Memorial Trust website: www.sahmat.org/ (accessed 25 February 2019).

References Ambrozy, Lee, Email Communication with Cathrine Bublatzky, October 18, 2012. Aoxue, Li, “In the Zone.” China Daily, February 17, 2012. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/weekly/2012-02/17/ content_14628721.htm (no longer available). Araeen, Rasheed, “New Internationalism: Or the Multiculturalism of Global Bantustans.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher and Rasheed Araeen, 3–11. London: Kala Press, 1994.

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TheArtsTrust, “‘Indian Highway VI’ Makes Way into the City of Beijing.” TheArtsTrust, July 2012. www. theartstrust.com/Magazine_article.aspx?articleid=445 (accessed February 19, 2019). Bhatt, Abhinav, “Documentary on Gujarat Riots Dropped from Exhibition in Beijing.” NDTV.Com, July 24, 2012. www.ndtv.com/article/india/documentary-on-gujarat-riots-dropped-from-exhibition-in-beijing247131 (accessed February 19, 2019). Chatterjee, Madhusree, “‘Indian Highway’ Presents Art of Transition, Growth in India to World: Curators.” 2012. www.thaindian.com/newsportal/lifestyle/indian-highway-presents-art-of-transition-growth-in-indiato-world-curators_100633631.html (accessed February 19, 2019). Chiu, Melissa, Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know. 1st ed. New York: AW Asia, 2008. Fisher, Jean, ed., “Editor’s Note.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, x–xiv. London: Kala Press, 1994a. ———, ed., Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. London: Kala Press, 1994b. Fused Magazine. n.d. China Power Station Part I. www.fusedmagazine.com/store/productdetail.php?product_ id=129 (accessed January 19, 2014). Gupta, Sanjana, “Indian Government Requests Removal of a Video from Exhibition in China.” Saffronart Blog (blog), August 16, 2012. http://blog.saffronart.com/2012/08/16/indian-government-requestsremoval-of-a-video-from-exhibition-in-china/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Hanru, Hou, “Entropy; Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, edited by Jean Fisher and Rasheed Araeen, 79–88. London: Kala Press, 1994. Herzfeld, Michael, Cultural Intimacy. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———, “The Cultural Politics of Gesture: Reflections on the Embodiment of Ethnographic Practice.” Ethnography 10, no. 2 (2009): 131–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138109106299. Hsiao-Hwei, Yu, ed., Hou Hanru: On the Mid-Ground. Hongkong: Timezone 8, 2003. Hung, Wu, “A Case of Being ‘Contemporary’: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art.” In Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader, edited by Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, 391–306. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2011. Jahagirdar, Archana, “The Road Less Travelled.” The Indian Express, July 29, 2012. https://indianexpress. com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/on-the-road-less-travelled-soul-survivors-anu-malhotra-photoexhibition-5441565/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Kalra, Vandana, “Don’t They Love Their India?” The Indian Express, July 26, 2012. www.indianexpress.com/ news/dont-they-love-their-india-/979508/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Krishnan, Ananth, “Indian Highway to Beijing: The Hindu.” The Hindu, January 7, 2012. www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/indian-highway-to-beijing/article3590223. ece (no longer available). Krishnan, Ananth, and Sandeep Dikshit, “India Asks Beijing Gallery to Censor Art Show over Gujarat Video.” The Hindu, July 25, 2012. www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-asks-beijing-gallery-tocensor-art-show-over-gujarat-video/article3679583.ece (no longer available). MH/CN/CXMA, “Thailand to Launch First Biennale: Pattaya 2014.” Art Radar Asia (blog), June 14, 2013. http://artradarjournal.com/2013/06/14/thailand-to-launch-first-biennale-pattaya-2014/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Millennium Post, “Gujarat Riot Video in China ‘Embarrasses’ Govt.” July 25, 2012 (no longer available). Mullin, Kyle, “Gallery Showcases Paths between India and China.” Shanghaiist (blog), July 20, 2012. http://shanghaiist.com/2012/07/20/gallery_showcases_paths_between_ind.php (accessed February 19, 2019).

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Nan, Chen, “Traveling Art Show Brings Vibrancy.” China Daily, July 15, 2012. www.chinadaily.com.cn/ sunday/2012-07/15/content_15581423.htm (no longer available). Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews, edited by Phil Tinari and Angie Baecker. Hong Kong: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2009. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Karen Marta, and Phil Tinari, The Future Will Be . . . The China Edition: Thoughts about What’s to Come. Torino, Beijing and New York: Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli; UCCA; Distributor, Artbook/D.A.P, 2012. Outlook India, BJP Objects to Film Containing Clippings of 2002 Riots. July 24, 2012. https://economictimes. indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/bjp-objects-to-film-containing-video-clipping-of-2002gujarat-riots/articleshow/15124972.cms (accessed February 19, 2019). Pal, Deepanjana, “Art of Journalism? Politics Takes Driver Seat Again.” The Sunday Guardian, August 24, 2012. www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/art-of-journalism-politics-takes-driver-seat-again (no longer available). Patranobis, Sutirtho, “India, China on Same Censorship Page?” http://www.Hindustantimes.Com/, July 31, 2012. www.hindustantimes.com/world/india-china-on-same-censorship-page/story-2II2j2y9Df9n2DjUvZsUzK. html (accessed February 19, 2019). PR/KN/HH, “Indian Highway: Opening Borders of Dialogue between China, India – Round Up.” Art Radar Asia (blog), August 21, 2012. http://artradarjournal.com/2012/08/21/indian-highway-opening-bordersof-dialogue-between-china-india-round-up/ (accessed February 19, 2019). Qianwen, Lu, “For Now, the Focus Shifts to India.” Global Times, July 12, 2012. www.globaltimes.cn/ content/720703.shtml (accessed February 19, 2019). Raman, Ram, Vivan Sundaram, Geeta Kapur, and Dayanita Singh, “Say No to Censorship.” The Hindu, 2012. www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/say-no-to-censorship/article3689730.ece (no longer available). Ullens Foundation. “Press Release” June 23, 2012. http://159.138.20.147/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ Indian-Highway-Press-Release-EN-20120623.pdf (accessed June 21, 2019). Wallis, Brian, “Selling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy.” In Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, edited by D. J. Sherman and I. Rogoff, translated by Marc Roudebush, 265–281. London: Taylor and Francis, 2001. Wang, Meiqin, Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art. London: Routledge, 2015. Whittaker, Iona, “A Review of Indian Highway at UCCA (Randian).” Iona Whittaker (blog), September 7, 2012. www.ionawhittaker.com/?s=Indian+Highway. Zeenews, “China Exhibits Gujarat Riots, Mocks Narendra Modi.” Zeenews.Com, July 28, 2012. https:// zeenews.india.com/news/nation/china-exhibits-gujarat-riots-mocks-narendra-modi_789550.html (accessed February 19, 2019).

7 Shared exoticisms or the limits of the national exhibition Some final observations

I

n 2011, just one year before Indian Highway’s journey came to an end in China, France celebrated India with three separate events of art and culture: Indian Highway at Musée d’art de Contemporain (MAC) in Lyon (24 February–31 July 2011), Paris-Delhi-Bombay 1 at Centre Pompidou in Paris (25 May–19 September 2011), and a solo exhibition of work by the British-based artist Anish Kapoor at the Grand Palais for Monumenta. But 2011 was also an important year for India’s contemporary art world, as this was the first time that the state of India represented itself in a pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennale. While the two shows in France introduced more or less the same international group of Indian contemporary artists and invested in the on-going dilemma of conveying “a particular representation of a nation, premised on such pseudoprimordial notions as identity” (Hoskote 2012, 54; see also Wallis 2001; Buck 2013), India’s representation in Venice sparked new debates – both in Europe and in India – about curatorial models and the representation of art in a national exhibition. In contrast to the Indian Pavilion in Venice, which was curated by the Indian art theorist and curator Ranjit Hoskote, the two French group shows were curated by Europeans and attracted only moderate interest from both the European and Indian media. Whereas the Indian Highway curator at MAC, Thierry Raspail, attempted to avoid any notions of exoticism, the show at Centre Pompidou, curated by Sophie Duplaix and Fabrice Bousteau, tried to initiate an Indian-French dialogue between the participating artists from India and France in order to introduce the “India of today” to French audiences. In contrast to the Lyon edition of Indian Highway, which did not receive much attention in Delhi, the Paris-Delhi-Bombay exhibition was critically debated during the Speakers’ Forum at the India Art Fair in 2012, not least for its failure to break with the “perform[ance] and reperform[ance of] outdated and Western-centric categorizations of West and non-West” (Buck 2013, 213). In discussions, the Paris-Delhi-Bombay exhibition was panned for its “outdated and one-directional structure” (2013, 215), and the exhibition’s exoticising of India was scrutinised in relation to past events: “[T]he packaging of India and its art for a Western audience recalls the 1985–1986 Festival of India held in the United States” (ibid.). As Buck rightly states, this is reminiscent of Brian Wallis’s (2001) observation that at “those nationalist and propagandizing events, the ideological effort to package an exotic cross-cultural encounter produced a spectacularized image of a

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nation devoid of conflict” (Buck 2013, 215). The European shows, both in Lyon and Paris, were thus seen to promote an outdated, repetitive, and Western-driven discussion about the Western curatorial representation of non-Western art, one which validated the notion of contemporary art as national representation. In contrast, Hoskote’s curation of the Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was an exceptional attempt to go beyond the national exhibition format and to present Indian artists according to their transcultural competences. This retrospective look at the European perception of Indian contemporary art in 2011 and the disputed perception of European representation in Delhi in 2012 will juxtapose European and Indian curatorial strategies in the international display of contemporary Indian art. This will lead me to a summary of the observations compiled over the research period of five years (between 2008 and 2012), when survey shows about Indian contemporary art attracted an extraordinary amount of attention. Although Indian Highway still had two more venues ahead of it – in Rome and Beijing, as introduced in chapters 5 and 6 – the year 2011 marked an important turning point in the debate around one of this ethnography’s main interests: to identify on-going interactions between the European and Indian art world as transcultural entanglements, especially after “shared exoticism or the limits of the national exhibition”, became thoroughly scrutinised in investigations of the Indian Highway exhibition and various other representations of contemporary art from India. In 2011 my research guided me not to Lyon or to Paris but to Delhi, where I conducted two months of research, and to the Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The chief focus of this chapter will therefore be a comparison between the Indian Highway exhibition in Lyon and the Indian Pavilion in Venice, in reference to catalogue material, printed reviews and interviews, and personal observations in Venice, as well as conversations with Ranjit Hoskote and Meera Menezes in Delhi. The epilogue, which treats my last official journey to Delhi in 2014 when the situation in the local as well as international art worlds had changed yet again, will form the close of this book and the end of my ethnographic project along the Indian Highway. In a temporal criss-crossing between 2011 and 2014, I will first briefly introduce the three exhibitions that took place in France and Italy in 2011, beginning with the Indian Highway show in Lyon called Partage d’Exotismes. I will then juxtapose these shows with the Indian Pavilion in Venice, Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode (Figure 7.1).

Lyon/Paris/Venice – contemporary Indian art in Europe Previously, I referred to Sarat Maharaj who, at the Indian Highway conference in London (2009), spoke of understanding artworks in their diversity as an artistic mode of producing the contemporary and as a form of knowledge production (see Chapter 2). Maharaj’s remarks caution against a misleading yet frequent interpretation of the art exhibited in survey shows as a representation of the curatorial theme. This was also underscored by Ranjit Hoskote, who sees a risk that national shows like Indian Highway will create expectations of seeing “Indian” art. These shows tend to oversee what he and Nancy Adajania have called a “critical transregionality” inherent in many practices of contemporary cultural production. In this context, as I have argued throughout this book, the notion of reciprocal collaboration between

Figure 7.1 Indian Pavilion. Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode. Insight View, 54th Venice

Biennale. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2011)

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international curators and artists from India reflects yet another moment of misinterpretation – or at least reveals a narrowed perspective that neglects the contemporary artistic situation in India as an integral part of an entire contemporary. The dissonances and resonances between the global and the local that emerge from such situations are integral to the transcultural experience.

Indian Highway at MAC In Lyon, the notion of “reciprocity” played an important role in the curatorial capture for Indian Highway – this time, reflected in the theme of shared exoticism. Indeed, it was probably no coincidence that Thierry Raspail, the director of MAC and the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, recycled the curatorial theme Partage d’Exotismes (also the title of the 5th Lyon Biennale in 2000) as the title for Indian Highway. At the biennale in 2000, the curator of Magiciens de la Terre (Centre Pompidou, 1989), Jean-Hubert Martin, was invited, as guest curator, to build upon the discussions that Magiciens had raised in the late 1980s about the exoticising of non-Western modern art. This exhibition, also known as The Whole Earth Show, was seen as a critical attempt to engage with “certain aspects of neo-colonial mentality in the West, particularly a resurgent interest in ‘primitivism’, which Martin felt aestheticized exotic cultures without destabilising Western definitions of fine art, modernism or identity”.2 By presenting the participating artists (fifty from the West and fifty from the so-called margins) on an equal level, irrespective of their cultural origin, Magiciens de la Terre was a curatorial response to William Rubin’s exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa, New York, 1984), which sought to break existing categories by underlining the interrelations between “tribal” and “modern” art. It showcased works by Western artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, who borrowed visual elements from non-Western culture groups in Tahiti (in the case of Paul Gauguin) or parts of Africa (in the case of Pablo Picasso’s African Period from 1906 to 1909). The way in which modern artists were exhibited alongside the art objects that had inspired them and in an art museum like the MoMa was an innovative move at the time. In light of postcolonial debates,3 several scholars criticised this as a Eurocentric discourse for perceiving and representing non-Western colonised people as their “other”. Postcolonial studies identified categories such as the Western “self” and the non-Western “other” as central to critical reflection on colonial discourses and Eurocentric perspectives. Thus, Primitivism attracted heavy criticism for sustaining a stereotypical and traditional power-related idea of the “other” and the “primitive” as the exotic counterparts to the civilised West. At this time, Jean-Hubert Martin’s organisation of Magiciens de la Terre was an influential contribution to new forms of exhibiting art from outside the Western hemisphere. Today, however, adapting the notion of a “sharing exoticism” to contemporary art from India in the context of Indian Highway seems a somewhat clumsy and blatant re-usage or reinvention of a debate that is connected to past postcolonial discussions. It nevertheless provided intriguing insight into the curatorial discourses about exhibiting non-Western art, which became obvious when Thierry Raspail stated in the Indian Highway catalogue that the conventional exhibition, with its universalist, thematic, closed outlook, is now obsolete, given that its character has traditionally been dictated in a unilateral way by a central authority or institution for ready – made consumption and circulation. (Raspail 2011, 6)

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In contrast to this one-sidedness, emphasis needs to be on the various agents and institutes that in different parts of the contemporary art world follow different speeds and intentionality. This will allow us to understand situations beyond a neo-imperialist Western “attempt to anchor the world’s discourse in the sound of its own voice” (McEvilley 2002, 98). In this book, I have disclosed the different speeds and dynamics inherent to translocal and transcultural entanglements according to the empirical insight I gained from my long-term research along the Indian Highway at the different venues in Europe, as well as in India. The curatorial capture for Indian Highway in Lyon seems to have been a critical response to the historical visual representation of politics in the former colonising West and the production of the (post)-colonised ‘other’ in Western museums and exhibitions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The earliest exhibitions of this kind include the first edition of the World Fair held at Crystal Palace, Hyde Park (London) in 1851, where for the first time the “entire world” became visible and visit-able through the exhibited collections of artefacts and objects from colonised cultures. The World Fair, in its attempt to collect, preserve, and order the world as it was known at that time, became an instrument for presenting and legitimatising colonial power and consciously creating an image of the “colonised other” as an “exotic”, “wild”, and “mystic” counterpart to European societies.4 Situating a contemporary art show like Indian Highway in the twenty-first century, not only as an exercise in reciprocity, but also as a Partage d’Exotismes (Raspail 2011, 5), can be read as a response on the part of the French exhibition-makers to a particular moment in the institutional history of exhibiting art from non-Western regions, a history that was marked by exhibitions like Magiciens de la Terre at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 1989). This exhibition, as mentioned, was an early attempt to display artistic production from the West in combination with non-Western art practices. However, a closer look at Lyon and its history of exhibitions in cooperation with Jean-Hubert Martin reveals a long period of engagement with art and the notion of “exoticism” (Levin 2001). This is of even more interest in light of the borrowed title from an earlier art event in Lyon, the fifth edition of the biennale on contemporary art in 2000. For the Lyon Biennale, the Magiciens de la Terre curator, Jean-Hubert Martin, together with the biennale director, Thierry Raspail, conceptualised the theme Partage d’Exotismes. As an explanation, the foreword to the 5th Lyon Biennale declares that there are no hybrids, no post-modernist montages of miscellaneous objects. There are just meetings of individual readings, which are exchanged and, even if distorted, shared. No centre, no periphery, a stock and some unaffectedness, to draw on and reconstitute. (Prat and Raspail 2000, 24)

This critique of the centre-periphery world system, recycled eleven years later for Indian Highway, seems to hint at a consciously posed self-criticism and reflection. For the biennale, a committee of anthropologists addressed “some questions of cultural policy, cultural eras, mixedness and purity, the universal and the relative, fields of organisation and intercultural interpretation” (Prat and Raspail 2000, 19), and the support of five scenographers was used to organise the museum space. It was decided that the focus would be on multiplicity, and it was explained that, “[E]xoticism is one of the central points [that] even [if] it is something of

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a coquetry, is that exoticism should be accompanied by an ‘s’; and also that it should be shared, because it is reciprocal” (Prat and Raspail 2000, 20). The organisers of the Lyon Biennale also argued in the catalogue for a reciprocal relation between different practitioners. However, they also considered their own position reflectively: but though it may be reciprocal and shared, it is of course not equitable. There is no naivety on our part in the deliberate assertiveness of the title; this “sharing of exoticisms” is non-egalitarian because it is part of the domain of art, which has always been circumscribed and refined by the West. We speak of course from the standpoint that structures us: the present history of art in the West. Furthermore, we are white, and male; and in this respect we are neither the filter nor the custodians of a neutrality. (ibid.)

These remarks relate well to my discussion of the contradictory curatorial discourse on reciprocal collaboration and the observed non-equitability in the Indian Highway context (see Chapter 1). And whereas Hans Ulrich Obrist refers to a reciprocal dialogue with the artists, the artists demand a more egalitarian acceptance in the international art world, which is denied to them by putting the focus on their nationality. Although the organisers of the 5th Lyon Biennale concede that their Western standpoint structures them, it is interesting to note the slight shift towards a rather “lax” usage of the notion of “reciprocity” in the context of Indian Highway, which seems to be interchangeable with “egalitarianism”. Not only are the Western predicaments dismissed, so too are the artists’ demands to be perceived beyond their nationality. It is very difficult to find a concrete link between the theme of “sharing exoticisms” and the exhibited art at Indian Highway in Lyon. The preface in the catalogue, where Thierry Raspail attempts to introduce the reader to a much larger discourse, is far from satisfactory. By asking “What kind of history would it be that avoided Eurocentrism and Orientalism of every kind? And what kind of exhibition? A desperate attempt, perhaps. Indian Highway IV is more like an exercise in reciprocity. Let us call it a Partage d’Exotismes (a sharing of exoticisms)” (Raspail 2011, 5), the complexity of the situation is presented as overwhelming and therefore unresolvable. The questions do, however, represent the acknowledged urgency of an on-going search for exhibition formats that avoid both Eurocentrism and Orientalism. According to Raspail, the “sudden existence of ‘China’, ‘India’, the ‘Middle East’ and ‘Africa’ reinforced the myth of the West, and meant adopting . . . dualistic historiographic fable: ‘Us/Them, here/there, inside/outside’” (ibid.). Admittedly, this explanation may be difficult to convey to visitors who are unfamiliar with the debates on Orientalism and may struggle to understand the relationship between Eurocentrism, reciprocity, and “shared exoticisms”. And while Raspail deftly handles philosophers, writers, and thinkers such as Edward Said, Rabindranath Tagore, Max Weber, Bruno Latour, and Carlo Ginzburg, mixing – in two short paragraphs – debates on colonialism and modernism, he also presupposes a well-informed reader. The climax of Raspail’s discourse makes reference to Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991) in the following: Let us put the charm of symmetry into practice and articulate our reflexivity with passion and meticulousness. And let us follow this furrow to drive home the point that: “Incapable of seeing in him the

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attachments that make him act, he who believes himself, on this account, to be Western, imagines other people not to be that, and consequently to be wholly ‘Other’, whereas they differ only in that which, precisely, attaches them.” To put it briefly, we might suggest that there is no more essence in hybridism than in creolism. There is only history. (Raspail 2011, 5)

Unfortunately, the catalogue pages do not allow for a detailed engagement with Raspail’s remarks, nor do they clarify how artists or art objects correspond to this historically loaded comment. The catalogue articles were taken from the first catalogue in London, and no further texts were provided to illuminate the apparent challenge of the exhibition. And in contrast to the principles of the Lyon Biennale, where artworks were exhibited according to ethnographic categories in order to break up the constraints of geographical grouping, in Indian Highway, exhibited artworks were still ordered geographically as “India”. Thus, operating on this highly abstracted and intellectualised level of debate, it remains difficult to estimate the “shared exoticisms” in the exhibition project or, indeed, why artworks might present a mutual exoticism and how this could allow for the breaking apart of a dualistic fable. As Raspail states in the introduction, the curatorial format of a touring exhibition that transforms with each local curatorial position suggests answers “to flows, controversies, multiple critical instances, forms of knowledge (or lack of it), analysis, prospectives and traditions, subaltern studies and postcolonial attitudes” (2011, 6). And he continues that “the conventional exhibition, with its universalist thematic, closed outlook is now obsolete, given that its character has traditionally been dictated in a unilateral way by a central authority or institution for ready-made consumption and circulation” (ibid.). It should be mentioned as a positive that the museum also organised an extensive programme to accompany the Indian Highway exhibition, one which aimed to include the public in the theoretical debates about art and culture and which I unfortunately missed. In order to elaborate on thoughts about “mixing”, “hybridity”, and “creolisation”, as brought up in the catalogue preface, the museum programme featured not only film screenings, but also various discussions and presentation formats. In addition to roundtables, scholars were invited to talk about notions of art, culture, and circulation. Some were asked to contribute short statements on selected art objects in the exhibition in relation to the question “Why blending and not creolisation?”5 There was even a conference held in which the artist and curator Bose Krishnamachari introduced the upcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale6 in Kerala (India) in December 2012, which he had founded and organised together with artist Riyas Komu. In another session, the anthropologist and philosopher Jackie Assayag was invited for a presentation on India and globalisation.7 Visitors to the exhibit were given a document that included an exhibition plan that laid out the locations of the art objects on two floors (altogether 2,000 square metres). Moreover, it presented more details on the background of the Indian Highway concept and the particularities of the MAC edition and positioned the exhibition as a reflection of a new type of global artistic organisation.8 The reader also received information on the “show within the show”, contributed by Mumbai Studio Architects and their site-specific architectural installation. This addition of an artistic contribution to the main exhibition was meant to make the idea of art more open to “Indian visual culture”, and, once again, the paper suggested that Indian Highway enabled global exchange.

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Compared to other exhibition projects on Indian contemporary art that were running in Europe in 2011, Indian Highway at Lyon garnered rather positive feedback, at least for its overall curatorial concept of a travelling exhibition that would allow a dialogue between artists, work, and place (Kayser 2011). Furthermore, the overall programme illustrated the ambitious curatorial endeavour to pin down the Lyon edition of Indian Highway as a particularly reflective moment, as well as to interrupt a universalising tendency in the travelling national exhibition.

Indian contemporary art exhibition in Paris Similar to the Indian Highway at MAC, the Paris-Delhi-Bombay exhibition at Centre Pompidou also envisaged exchange and dialogue. The French curators, Sophie Duplaix and Fabrice Bousteau, invited thirty Indian and seventeen French artists to engage in reciprocal dialogue with their peers. As Tracy Buck describes, the exhibition “presented the works of thirty Indian artists – all of whom live and work in India, rather than in the diaspora – and seventeen French artists, fourteen of whom visited India for the first time in preparation for the show” 2013, 212–213), and thus, “the French artists were selected based on their presence in the contemporary French art world, rather than on any prior engagement with India. Their works accordingly seemed largely contained by the narrative constructed by the exhibition about India” (213). As will become clear, the historical relationship between the artists proved to be as “tenuous . . . [as] that between Paris and Indian cities” (ibid.). This concept of exchange and dialogue created a mood of superficial political correctness and curatorial collegiality rather than a serious attempt to open up the discourse between Western discourses and non-Western art. The aim in Paris was to encourage a concrete artistic exchange that would represent India through the eyes of Indian and French artists. The results were disappointing and attracted much criticism, particularly from Indian sites. When more than two-thirds of the artworks were commissioned from contemporary artists who, in general, did not have any interaction with India, the promised intensity of engagement remained a curatorial conceit functioning comfortably within the national paradigm. Furthermore, the organisers also undertook the difficult task of presenting contemporary art in relation to sociological and ethnographic themes about India, its politics, its culture, and its history, in order to provide French audiences with information. The exhibition was organised around six themes – politics, urban development and the environment, religion, the domestic space, women in society, and the history of craft production – speak to “the profound changes undergone by a society in wholesale expansion” (Paris-Delhi-Bombay . . . exhibition map 2011) and were arranged, according to Pompidou director Alain Seban and exhibition curators Sophie Duplaix and Fabrice Bousteau, in a way that could “pave the way for dialogue” and “forge long-lasting ties between [France and India]” (“The Exhibition: Paris-Delhi-Bombay” 2011, 2). (Buck 2013, 213)

A documentary section, including texts, photographs, and graphics grouped around historical landmarks since India’s independence in 1947, was placed at the centre of the exhibition. From that centre point, visitors could walk to the different artworks, which were placed according

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to an imposed formal logic. This way of ordering fine art into categories was, arguably, one of the largest problems with the exhibition. Shumi Bose noted, for instance, that “All the work here is framed in the context of a commentary on modern India, which can limit the ability of the pieces to work on their own terms” (Bose 2011). The curators certainly would have had many other options in conceptualising the show and organising the artworks. The writer Mira Kamdar (2011) sees an institutional problem in which the Centre Pompidou was trying to catch up with the dynamics of the contemporary art world, which had replaced Europe with Asia as its centre (Kamdar 2011; see also Mukherji, Ahuja, and Singh 2014). She further observes that the Indian contemporary art scene is very well represented in Paris where private art galleries organise solo-exhibitions of work by Bharti Kher (Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin), Sudarshan Shetty (Galerie Daniel Templon), and Anita Dube (Galerie Dominique Fiat), seemingly proving the waning influence of traditional art institutes. Other shows feature Indian artists who are not part of Paris-Delhi-Bombay, among them the diaspora artists Zarina Hashmi and Anish Kapoor. Kamdar notes: Ironically, it is hybridised, cross-border, supra-national artists such as Kapoor and Hashmi who may be more representative, or at least as representative, of current global realities, including that of a globalising India, than those artists chosen to represent “India” within the carefully researched and reasoned categories of Indian politics, society and culture laid out by the Centre Pompidou. (Kamdar 2011)

With this argument, Kamdar questions not only the format chosen by the French curators at Centre Pompidou, but also the selection of artists. Diasporic artists like Hashmi and Kapoor cannot be considered the only artists who represent the global reality of hybridity and border crossing, however. Although it was not emphasised in the group shows in Lyon or in Paris, other artists from India – including those presented in Indian Highway – represent a diversity in artistic production that has become a crucial voice for hybridity in the complex field of Indian contemporary art. Again, it is important to emphasise that the meaning of a contemporary artist and his or her art – whether it is a national representation, a product of “global realities”, or something in-between – can easily shift in relation to the exhibition format, its conceptual approach, and the locality. As Buck critically examines: the exhibition presents the artists’ works almost solely as an overdetermined response to the globalizing project of contemporary India, which is depicted as rocky and problematic. This narrow and didactic lens presents a pedantic picture of both the art and the society that produced it, and discourages more nuanced readings of the works. (2013, 215)

It is the question of who is representing whom that needs to be examined more carefully. A challenging example of these complexities, as they are strongly connected with a liberalised idea of belonging and its conceptualisation in contemporary art, was eventually provided by the Indian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, which Ranjit Hoskote curated under the title Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode in 2011.

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The Indian pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale The Indian Pavilion curated by Ranjit Hoskote at the 54th Venice Biennale provided an alternative position to the European curation of Indian Highway. According to personal observation at the pavilion and conversations with curator Ranjit Hoskote, the exhibition Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode formed a central response to the on-going debates on representing contemporary art at international venues. As the introductory text in the pavilion demonstrates: The four artistic positions presented in India’s first curated national participation in the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – commissioned by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s National Academy of Art – dramatize the dynamic relationship between cultural citizenship and national identity. This pavilion is premised on a complex idea of Indian: an India viewed, not simply as a territorially bounded entity, but as a proposition that extends itself through the global imagination. In this reading, India is home, but also focus of diasporic longing, stage in a transcultural theatre, and a starting-point for a new atlas of regional aspirations. (wall text, Indian Pavilion, Venice 2011)

India’s attendance at the prestigious biennale in Venice had been long awaited in India, as Shukla Sawant commented (Shukla Sawant, Delhi, 1 March 2011). However, it is not an easy undertaking to organise a show at the Venice Biennale, since governmental support has to be acquired in both financial and bureaucratic terms. Earlier attempts to win Indian governmental support for representation in Venice – undertaken, for example, by gallery owner and curator Peter Nagy for the fifty-first edition of the Venice Biennale in 2005 – failed due to bureaucratic difficulties, as Meera Menezes informed me (Meera Menezes, Delhi, 23 February 2011). Perhaps this earlier rejection had to do with the fact that an American gallery owner from Delhi was promoting India’s participation in the event. However, as the gallery system in India has adapted very slowly since the 1980s to the dynamics of the contemporary art market, and India’s government is, generally speaking, rather reluctant to pledge significant support for the art world, Peter Nagy was one of the first agents to commit to a sustainable focus on contemporary art at the prestigious Venice Biennale. Around 2004 or 2005, he saw the growing importance of India’s presence in the international art community and believed that the private sector was more capable of representing India in the contemporary art scene than the government, which, as he explained to me in 2010, would simply opt to keep India out (Peter Nagy, Delhi, 22 February 2010). Nagy eventually found an alternative way to bring Indian artists to Venice in 2005 without governmental support from India. In cooperation with the Montalvo Arts Center (California),9 the two curators Gordon Knox (director of the Lucas Artists Programs/Montalvo Arts Center) and Julie Evans (a New York–based artist) and with the support of Nuova Icona (Cultural Association for the Patronage of Contemporary Visual and Performing Arts, Venice), Peter Nagy curated the show iCON: India Contemporary.10 The show presented the artists Atul Dodiya (b. 1959), Anita Dube (b. 1958), Ranbir Kaleka (b. 1953), Nalini Malani (b. 1946), Raqs Media Collective, and Nataraj Sharma (b. 1958). In the introduction to the catalogue, Peter Nagy explained that [T]oday [2005] it seems that the spotlight is turning towards the country’s contemporary arts. A bit late, one might say, but it seems that a globalised art scene first had to digest ample amount of product from China and Japan, even South America and Africa, before it could begin to focus on India. (2005, 5)

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In 2011 the Indian government decided to support an Indian Pavilion, building on, as Shukla Sawant told me, existing three or four-year-old plans (Shukla Sawant, Delhi, 1 March 2011). Moreover, Sawant believes that the governmental concession was due to the increased public presence of international curators in India. In the preceding years, many of the directors of prestigious events like the Venice Biennale or documenta began to travel extensively in order to introduce their curatorial plans to art scenes all over the world. The curators of Indian Highway, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar Kvaran, for example, also gave presentations in Delhi. Thus, it was apparent that there was an opportunity for the development of mutual interests, from the international as well as from the local side, which could support the international integration of Indian contemporary art. However, this certainly does not mean that change in local situations occurred in tandem or that there was suddenly more transparency in decision-making or selection processes. Indeed, the selection of the Indian Pavilion curator, Ranjit Hoskote, who is a member of the Lalit Kala Academi Board, can be seen as one example of this lack of transparency. The selection process in this case can be ascribed to the particular nature of the general communication network connecting government, media, and art critics in India, which is not systemised or largely established. Meera Menezes expressed her surprise about the sudden shift in governmental policy regarding the Venice Biennale, and my own research could not verify from the newspapers if there was ever an official statement released. Information seemed to have leaked out through unofficial channels. When I was in Delhi at that time (spring 2011), I read the first announcement about the Indian Pavilion in one of the countless newsletters that circulate within the international art world and function as major catalysts for networking activities. The news about the nomination of Ranjit Hoskote spread, at least partly, in this unilateral direction before the nomination became officially public in India itself.11 On the whole, it came as some surprise that the distinguished curator Ranjit Hoskote had been nominated without any larger public announcement. The nomination committee involved members of India’s National Academy of Art and the Lalit Kala Academi, and financial support was pledged by the Ministry of Culture, which can be taken as an important marker of governmental recognition of contemporary art in India.12

Beyond Indianness Along with the information about India’s attendance in Venice and Hoskote’s curatorship of the pavilion, the artist list was also circulated. The artists selected for the pavilion were Zarina Hashmi (b. 1937), Praneet Soi (b. 1971), Gigi Scaria (b. 1973), and the Desire Machine Collective. These artists differed from the “big names” of Indian contemporary art who were circulating in the global art world at that time. In terms of practices and themes, they were also very heterogeneous. The Desire Machine Collective, a rather new artist collective in India at the time, was established by the media practitioners Sonal Jain (b. 1975) and Mriganka Madhukaillya (b. 1978) in 2004 and is based in Guwahati (Assam). They work with multimedia, including installations, films, sound, and projects in public spaces, and were represented in the pavilion by the film Residue (2010–2011). This film, as they explain in an interview with Nancy Adajania, “takes an abandoned thermal energy plant as its meditative focus. We are guided through an industrial ossuary replete with the remains of machinery” (interview with Adajania 2011, 49). This film provided a meditative visual and acoustic visual experience that was located in a single darkened room in the pavilion.

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Opposite, the printmaker Zarina Hashmi’s work, which included, among others, Dividing Line (2011), was installed. In this selection of woodcut prints in black on handmade Indian paper, she elegantly combined geometric lines and patterns. Zarina Hashmi is a senior diasporic artist based in New York. She has received international and national recognition for her filigree printmaking and sculpture work, which is deeply related to her own personal traumatic experiences during the partition of India in 1947. Praneet Soi, a painter, sculptor, and mixed-media artist based in Amsterdam, who travels frequently between India and the Netherlands, is very mobile in his practice and has transformed the idea of art production in a fixed locality like a studio. At the pavilion, he covered large parts of a wall with an acrylic mural of black and white figures that looked like cut-outs pasted on the wall. This work is accompanied by a slide-projection work, Kumartuli Printer (2010–2011). Gigi Scaria, based in New Delhi, is a painter, sculptor, and video artist whose work focuses on metropolitan India and the architecture of housing processes and urban planning. With his installation Elevator from the Subcontinent (2011), a three-screen interactive video installation, passengers (the visitors) travel through different levels, providing voyeuristic insight into different living rooms, which are structured along different hierarchies in society. According to Hoskote, the pavilion was a “laboratory where the idea of ‘India’ may be tested” (Hoskote 2011a, 17), and in this regard, he also explained his selection of artists in the catalogue: [T]he artists I have chosen for the Indian Pavilion explore complex histories and volatile lifeworlds. Taken together, Hashmi, Soi, Scaria and the Desire Machine Collective embody impulses from diverse regional modernities, religious lineages, subcultural locations, aesthetic choices, and philosophical standpoints. (ibid.)

Early in 2011, when India’s attendance at the Venice Biennale first became public, Ranjit Hoskote, in conversation with me and my colleague Christiane Brosius (Ranjit Hoskote, Delhi, 6 March 2011b), talked about the multiple challenges that curating an Indian Pavilion posed. The pavilion was going to be on display in the Artiglierie section of the Arsenale in Venice, one of the most important historical areas of the old maritime and Mediterranean power. In the context of this specific environment and Venice’s reputation as a nation-builder, it was crucial for Hoskote to consider the question of what comes after the nation and to present an emerging and self-confident field of contemporary artists from India beyond the national paradigm. In this sense, it was part of his agenda not to present (with the exception of Zarina Hashmi) internationally well-known and hyped artists. Instead, Hoskote selected artists who worked across various modes of production, but also across geographical boundaries and whose positions would help to expand the territorial notion of India (ibid.). When I met Ranjit Hoskote in Heidelberg in 2010, he explained his and Nancy Adajania’s position: I think what interests us now, is artists who do not work from nationally anchored positions. I’m looking really at cultural producers, who travel elsewhere, become complicit in other kinds of situations and crises and then produce work that comes from certain ethical engagements, rather than geographical ones, if you like. So, it’s really a way of recovering where the location of cultural production is. (Ranjit Hoskote, Heidelberg, 19 July 2010)

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When I asked, “Which culture?” Hoskote replied that this was exactly the question because this would be a new cultural form that did not fit into pre-existing formats. He continued that this was the reason why the idea of “Indian” was problematic to him. He could understand that institutions had to present their survey exhibitions with art from elsewhere and then use the “Indian” prefix for marketing reasons, but this also caused contradictions. Hoskote explained that Because audiences are told that this is an exhibition of Indian art, so they arrive with hundreds of hundreds [sic] of preconceptions about India. And when they see practices and works of this kind, I’m not sure what happens. I think there is bafflement. I think there’s a kind of bewilderment. Because what is happening with artists of this kind now, is that they’re not working from any ideal . . . received notion primordial of India at all. (ibid.)

I observed this bewilderment firsthand when I conducted my fieldwork and participant observations at the various exhibition sites of Indian Highway. I described this observation in Chapter 4 on Indian Highway in Herning where the people I spoke with eventually saw an Indian background in the art but generally found that the themes were more global. Here, the discrepancies between the processes of curatorial meaning production, artistic language, and visitor reception appear in a very concrete form. Also, Hoskote states that the actual positions of the artists exceed the rubric of the national show completely (ibid.). In contrast with Indian Highway, which struggled a great deal with the problems that arise from adopting the format of a national show, for Ranjit Hoskote, “Indianness” did not appear to be a dilemma, as he explained in 2011 (Ranjit Hoskote, Delhi, 6 March 2011b). His intention was to present artists in the Indian Pavilion so that they would be seen beyond their national identities and according to their transnational and transcultural artistic practices, their biographies, and the themes they were interested in. And while the curators in Lyon captured Indian contemporary art using the notion of “shared exoticisms” and reinvented national and cultural boundaries and differences, Hoskote concentrated on artists who represented to him a shift from the emphasis on a fixed and a priori national identity to a positionality that extends itself across plural anchorages of belonging [as this shift] allows to view India as a conceptual entity that is not territorially bounded, but which extends outward into the global space of the imagination, in the form of arguments, dreams, memories, and visions. (2011a, 17)

Indeed, when I visited the pavilion with a group of students, we encountered visitors who expressed their disappointment with the curatorial concept; they felt it was not Indian enough. In this sense, Ranjit Hoskote changed the terms of the discussion when he created the pavilion as “a site of unexpected transcultural encounter and coproduction” in order to question not only the nation-state, but also the system of global art (2011a, 20).

A recap of this book The international circulation of contemporary art from India, as facilitated by the travelling Indian Highway exhibition (2008–2012), provided an important case study of sites where the borders of identity become confused when art objects, signs, and ideas on art and culture become

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the aim of negotiation and contestation. In this respect, an exhibition that was meant to give an overview of Indian culture is bound to attract critical reflection on the possibility of it representing an “imperialist view” in the context of art history. The display of art, in combination with a wide range of cultural programmes, including literature, dance, performance, film, and food, performed within the museum space, aids the formation of meaning through new forms of cultural consumption. Such a programme, as it accompanied the exhibition to all its venues, reflects a new quality and quantity in recent exhibition practice and marks shifts within the museum world that “blur the boundary between science museum, history museum, cultural centre, art gallery and theme park” (Dicks 2003, 144). Even art museums “are trying out new locations and approaches as they become more geared towards design-led, spectacular exhibitions and attention-grabbing installations” (ibid.). The inherent new ways of hosting spectacular events in the exhibition space relates to what has become known as the “Bilbao effect” or the “Guggenheim effect” (Faires 2007). Museums are constructed as spectacular architectonical projects and are used to upgrade and revitalise unknown and insignificant regions into tourist sites for the purposes of investment, business, and international visibility. Organising an exhibition programme – one that is diverse and entertaining, as well as informative – with the intention of transmitting knowledge to an unknown group of interested visitors has challenged curators, cultural experts, and anthropologists alike. In the context of exhibiting non-Western art, the European curators of Indian Highway were faced with the dilemma of having to provide as much information and translation as necessary so that the exhibition and artworks would be accessible for its audiences. On the other hand, the challenge certainly lay in the balance – giving too vast an interpretation of the artworks could also be detrimental. Thus, a main question for this study was: How do different curators attempt to translate the art to audiences? “Indianness”, as it is interpreted and received in the Western – or rather, non-Indian – context, offers an opportunity to historicise art as well as to embed it in an on-going transformation process of the “self” and the “other”. The dilemma that arises from a disciplinary desire to classify and distinguish art according to its national or regional origins as “Indian” or “Chinese” is very much part of a Western discourse about non-Western art, and it goes back to the modern period. In the contemporary era, from the late 1980s onwards, the classification of artists and art practices as “Indian” has provoked diverse sensitivities and reactions, according to my research. Researching the wide range of answers and opinions about cultural specifics, which may or may not be inherent to an artwork or represented by it, have helped us to realise that Indian contemporary art has been hijacked by a far more complex and constitutive field of meaning production. In reference to comments made by Ranjit Hoskote, it is crucial to point out a particular logic of production that is inherent in recent network activities in the art world, as they have largely formed the groundwork for the Indian Highway project. In response, this study has taken up the challenge of examining the exhibition as “complex, dynamic learning systems with feedback loops, basically to renounce the unclosed, paralyzing homogeneity of exhibition master plans” (Obrist 2001, 27). When James Clifford used the terms “transculturalisation” and “contact zone” to approach museums in twentieth-century Western societies, he emphasised the interactive nature of the relationships and entanglements between various communities, stakeholders, and museums (1997, 188). In response to exhibitions becoming “[l]ocal/global contact zones, sites of identity-making and transculturation, of containment and excess, these institutions epitomize the ambiguous future

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of ‘cultural’ difference” (1997, 219), the approach employed in this study envisaged moments of entanglement, exchanges of multiple perspectives, and engagement between various protagonists at the different sites of the exhibition and the local art field in Delhi in order to unfold the dynamics of transcultural dissonance and resonance in the contemporary art world as premised with the exhibition as a transcultural contact zone (see Chapter 4). The rise of Indian contemporary art and the networking and market-driven practices in this context are not isolated phenomena. At the end of the 1990s and in the early twenty-first century, Indian liberalisation, along with the global upswing of prices and the prominence of international large-scale art exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale or documenta in Kassel (Germany), brought increasing international acknowledgement to India’s contemporary artists. At these nodes of international networks, the grid along which artworks, artists, curators, and other art experts travel between the Global South and the Global North become visible. Infrastructures created by exhibition projects such as Indian Highway have moved alongside the visibility of Indian contemporary art but have also formed a rather late testimony. In this situation, and supported by continuing practices of translocal border crossing and encounter, processes of transformation, re-definition of culture, and cultural belonging have become inherent in contemporary global cultures. This ethnographic study has helped to reveal, with its empirical insights and by drawing upon the perspectives of different individuals, including the sensorial and emotional responses of curators, art experts, and visitors, that culture exists through engagement with contemporary art. Hence, I have stressed “transculturality” as forming an attribute and creating seamless continuity through the entire history of Indian Highway. As Indian Highway moved, each venue developed its own essential nature, which created different forms of “transculturality”. This dual nature of continuity and difference was thus framed more substantially and in reference to the art theorist and curator Sarat Maharaj (2011), who approached the large-scale exhibition documenta and its eleven venues through the double terms of continuity and discontinuity to illustrate that each documenta exhibition could be seen as discrete, incommensurable curatorial events. . . . that differences between them are quibbling: insubstantial enough for us to treat them as one undivided thing. The documenta process is shot through with a tension between two forces: Inszenierung und Kritik [staging and critique]. (Maharaj 2011, 11)

In the same way, the different venues of Indian Highway can be seen as balancing between “staging a spectacle” and “a critique”, the latter understood as a form of “reflexive analytic” (ibid.). For my own study on the travelling exhibition Indian Highway, this meant investigating the history of the exhibition at different venues and understanding each location as an essential entity in which Indian contemporary art became staged as a “spectacle” for a particular locality and audience. On the flip side of international circulation, it became similarly necessary to critically reflect upon the intersection between Indian Highway and other exhibitions of contemporary art from India in Europe, as well as its connections with the field of contemporary art inside India. When Maharaj emphasises that the art-critique model has become the norm in the global art world today, he argues that “[a]s contemporary art sets up shops across China, South Africa, India,

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Brazil staging and critique intersect as a part of its symbolic and market actualité a norm once associated almost only with something like Documenta” (ibid.). This led me to frame the contemporary art field as a dynamic research field where curators and artists contribute to a self-critical and therefore self-sustaining contemporary field of art that crosses territorial and cultural borders while establishing and re-defining a common “language” within a shared art world. At the same time, by tracing the transformation of the form of the exhibition as a “spectacle and critique” across the different venues (Chapter 4), the study aimed to direct attention not only to the broader field of the contemporary art world, but also to the specific localities where Indian Highway was showcased during its tour. The dual and often contrary meaning of Indian Highway lies in the different facets of “transculturality” that unfolded at the different exhibition venues, be it in London or Denmark, and provided a theoretical reference point with which to analyse the museum as a zone in which transcultural contacts become possible. Moreover, the mobility of the artists, the curators, the exhibition, and also the art objects, through different institutional as well as economic and cultural contexts, raised the question of how practices of travelling and border crossing epitomise contemporary cultural production.

Questions of identity, location, and belonging I assumed that contemporary art production today, with its international mobility, speaks for developments and processes in India and for an art that is a form of emancipation for and artistic reflection on the society it comes from. Shuddhabrata Sengupta agreed with this notion and suggested that in this context, anthropologists should not only ask the question “What do we mean when we are asking where an artist comes ‘from’?” (ibid.), but also what was meant by “from”: [A]nd that is a question that actually anthropologists are quite equipped to ask. It will help to – it’s a dialogue that can occur between the practice of artists and those who study questions like “Where you come from?” What is “from”? I mean, that’s what you do as an anthropologist. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

I added that the notion of “belonging” was similarly important, and he replied that these kinds of questions about identity, belonging, and locatedness were what they as artists want to ask “in more and more precise as well as nuanced ways” (ibid.). When I approached him with the question of how I, as an anthropologist, should pose the question in an appropriate way, he replied that the question of “Who are you?” could be asked in different ways, such as “Where are you coming from – and where are you going?”: I mean it is an interesting question “What does identity mean?” – does identity mean a reflection of a self, outside time and space? Does it mean a self that is a product of the collisions of the histories that everyone inhabits? Does it mean what we are becoming? . . . I mean where are the societies going? . . . It is not to say that one question is better than the other. It is only to insist that the question has many parts and has many shapes and has many dimensions and many facets. It’s more a multi-dimensional object. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

The need for more preciseness about plurality also became clear in Ravi Agarwal’s reaction when he insisted, “You know what I am? I am Indian”. And with reference to other artists

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who constantly refer to Indian mythology, he pointed to the different usages and meanings inherent in the term “Indian” (Ravi Agarwal, Delhi, 5 April 2012). But beyond disciplinary stereotyping, a challenge still emerges in posing questions on art and culture differently within the discourse of anthropology. Shuddhabrata Sengupta responded to this by opening up another perspective: “But then I think the question is always to ask what does the knowledge or the awareness of another history or another culture do to our understanding of ourselves?” (ibid.). I agreed that self-scrutiny was a necessary part of self-reflectivity, and Sengupta continued: I think the limited role coming back to the question of an exposure to another sides of culture – like a survey exhibition is always that – the limited role it can play is not in offering its public elsewhere a window into some other culture. But actually, to use that opportunity to think about where it is and what it is. And similarly, for the artist practitioners like ourselves to use this opportunity heuristically to rethink what we are and who we are. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

I was reminded of the similarities between the visitor reactions in the exhibition spaces of Indian Highway in Oslo and Herning, where the artworks were used as a tool to reflect on visitors’ own lives. These different facets of reaction, including critiques but also personal experiences, observations, and practices from the curators’ and the artists’ perspective, as well as my own reactions as an anthropologist and visitor, meant that “processes of (self)positioning have to be regarded as a vital element” (Pütz 2008, 533) when cultural encounters with art are examined. At this point, the high degree of complexity and interconnectivity between actions, cultures, and localities in the field visualise a transculturality as practice (Pütz 2008). Sengupta rightly did not insist on dissonances but on resonances, thus allowing one to ask what a survey exhibition like Indian Highway revealed not only about “India”, but also about “Europe”: That’s maybe the real question about the survey exhibitions – not what it tells us . . . [sic] but what does it produce at the instance of the exhibition. And how those are different in different places, because even the Indian Highway produces different things in different places. Which is then a means by which we can actually look at contemporary Europe. (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi, 27 March 2012)

Sengupta’s explanation refers to the letter Raqs Media Collective had written to the “distant observer” (Raqs Media Collective 2006). The artists had pointed out that Having said all this, we wish to reciprocate the gift of your curiosity with some questions of our own. A gift for a gift, one might say. Crucially, these questions hinge on the act of observation, and the fact of distance. This exhibition, or any collection of artworks that undertakes a journey from a set of points of origin to a certain destination that is at a distance, may be said to produce and invite acts of “distant observation”. What does it mean to observe at a distance? What becomes clear when you see from afar, and what becomes occluded? What becomes aggrandised, and what comes undone? If we follow the pulls of

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these questions we might find ourselves in a place where the placement of any work of contemporary art in contexts remote from where it may have been produced becomes problematised productively, in several interesting directions. (ibid.)

Such resonances, in this letter circumscribed as emerging from a “distant observation”, demonstrate an exciting transformation of the perspective on “the self” and “the other”. When the artist collective allows us to formulate new questions about a long-existing situation of polarising identities, they also identify the productive quality of critical transcultural engagements. With its action-oriented empiric research, this study on Indian Highway unfolded the “transcultural theatre” in the contemporary art world that Hoskote proclaimed in his curatorial note on the Indian Pavilion in Venice. Whether in an exhibition space, through the interaction with an art object by a curator or a visitor, a discussion during the Speaker Forum at the Indian Art Fair in Delhi, censorship, or artists’ and intellectuals’ participation in discourses about general values of Indianness, the presented insights indicate processes of self-positioning in reference to cultural symbols that are always newly constructed by a continuous process of interpretation.

Epilogue I returned to Delhi to visit the sixth edition of the India Art Fair in 2014. In the weeks leading up to it, I received information as well as invitations for upcoming events, and announcements were circulated via social networks about the exhibitions that would accompany the India Art Fair. A retrospective for the artist Subodh Gupta was planned entitled Everything Is Inside. It was curated by the Italian curator Germano Celant (senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum and artistic director of the Prada Foundation) and was scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi in January 2014 (Figure 7.2). I was eager to see it, since in 2011, I had already seen a major exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s work at NGMA in Delhi, and I remembered the critique it elicited: Why is it necessary to invite an artist who does not live in India, and why do we celebrate it as a “homecoming” (Figure 7.3)? Anish Kapoor’s and Subodh Gupta’s exhibitions were not the only retrospectives of contemporary artists from or based in India. In November 2013, the artist Atul Dodiya was featured in a survey show curated by Ranjit Hoskote at the NGMA. Initiatives like these, when contemporary artists are exhibited in a national gallery, still mark a clear shift towards a broader governmental acknowledgement of contemporary artistic practice within the country. They indicate an important trend since, in general, governmental support for the art world, and particularly for contemporary art using visual and installation practices, is still rather limited. The rare governmental initiatives to develop a sustainable art infrastructure through museums and art fairs, or through regular international representation at places such as a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, are restricted to sporadic engagements. For example, after India’s participation at the 54th Venice Biennale, the Ministry of Culture in India did not take up another initiative for participation in 2013.13 This provoked critical reaction from the local art community, which was kicked off by the

Figure 7.2 Jaipur House, National Gallery of Modern Art. New Delhi. Exhibition

Everything Is Inside by Subodh Gupta. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2014)

Figure 7.3 Anish Kapoor Exhibition. Entrance of the National Gallery of Modern Art.

New Delhi. Source: Photograph Cathrine Bublatzky (2011)

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artist Bharti Kher, who expressed her frustration and disappointment at the absence of India at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) in a poetic blog entry (Kher 2013). Addressed “to whom it might concern”, she declared in the following (excerpt): When we sent our specialists (i [sic] heard 35 or so) from the Indian government last year to witness our first participation in 116 years, with their junkets and ice-cream coupons, didn’t they see that Venice was about the art and sharing of ideas and not fake handbags or collecting masks? Maybe they forgot, maybe they were busy eating ice cream on a hand carved wooden gondola. What was I doing? What can I do now? If we cant [sic] play with the stuff of dreams anymore, where will be the invention? If we can’t bear witness, how will there be a memory of the things that should never be forgotten. You can say, “who cares” . . . nationalist agendas are not relevant anymore. I agree. Art is not relevant because it cannot change the world. I agree. But we can’t escape apathy and indifference and I’m not talking about politics, I’m talking about love. (ibid.)

A number of responses followed Bharti Kher’s provocative statement, including those by Peter Nagy (Gallery Nature Morte, Delhi); Pooja Sood (Khoj International Artists’ Association, Delhi); the artist Mithu Sen; and the artist, curator, and activist Ram Raman (Sahmat). They all criticised the lack of governmental support as well as the urgent need for solidarity within the art community to jointly take position and protest. It remains to be seen what the consequences of this will be. As of 2015 and 2017, India would not have a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. When I arrived in Delhi, two days before the India Art Fair opened its doors, the atmosphere in the art world was one of excitement. I was very surprised at how easily, despite my long absence, I found myself drawn into the circuit of art events at several art localities throughout the entire city. In Delhi, these localities are not situated in a particular district marked out for cultural entertainment or museums, like in many European cities, but are spread out over the entire urban district. This situation caused some uneasy and hectic commuting as large numbers of “art lovers” and professionals started their “event hopping”, not an easy undertaking in a city where traffic jams and an incomplete metro system complicate mobility. However, despite criticism from participants, many galleries and private museums scheduled their exhibition openings and art events as close as possible to the art fair in order to attract high attendance figures as well as a larger number of buyers, collectors, and gallery owners. Even art events in other cities like Dhaka or Chennai shifted their openings towards February. Although a huge number of contemporary art events happen in the early months of the year all over the country, they remain mostly concentrated in the capital. These new trends are comparable to the situation in Europe, where large numbers of visitors and professionals travel to Italy (Venice Biennale), Germany (documenta), Switzerland (Art Basel), and the Netherlands (Manifesta in Amsterdam) around the same time. Although on one hand, this dynamic certainly has its advantages, on the other, as Shukla Sawant notes, running to various exhibition openings in a short period of time does not allow for an intense experience of the art. And for this reason, many people, including her, decide not to participate in this “art rush” but prefer to see exhibitions afterwards (Shukla Sawant, Delhi, 6 February 2014).

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In my case, time was limited. Thus, on the first evening after my arrival, I went to a talk by the visual artist Nalini Malani and Homi K. Bhabha at the Kiran Nadar Museum (KNM). The talk was related to the exhibition You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag at the KNM, which was Nalini Malani’s first comprehensive retrospective in India. The Kiran Nadar Museum, founded by Kiran Nadar14 and opened in 2010, is the only other private art institute in Delhi besides the Devi Art Foundation. The museum is located in one of the largest malls in Delhi, in the Select Citywalk Centre, which opened in 2007. I had visited the museum during my previous trips to Delhi and was keen to see if its setting had changed. The last time I visited this part of the mall (2012), most of the shops around the museum were still unoccupied. These empty spaces with grey concrete walls and construction sites created a strange contrast to the museum, which was meant to attract the mall public. In 2014, the situation had not changed much. In many ways, I was preoccupied with catching up with the situation in Delhi and the developments that had unfolded during my two-year absence. It was for this reason that I met many of the artists and art experts who had been important conversation partners and companions during my research, such as Ravi Agarwal, Meera Menezes, Vidya Shivadas, and Shukla Sawant. I was interested in hearing about the market situation and how contemporary art was sold, especially during the India Art Fair. And I was surprised to discover that, since the previous year, the investment in contemporary art had been in notable decline, and many galleries had sold much less contemporary art compared to previous years. Meera Menezes told me that even European collectors like Saatchi had started to sell off their collections of Indian contemporary art because its market value was declining (Meera Menezes, Delhi, 8 February 2014). This, she said, illustrated the strong investment-oriented interest in contemporary art from India in Europe over the past few years. When I met Meera Menezes for a last conversation on my very last day in Delhi, she commented that Indian contemporary art was a “flavour of the month” for the art market (ibid.). And Vidya Shivadas, the curator at Vadehra Gallery, even expressed her view that the “bubble” around art might burst completely (Vidya Shivadas, Delhi, 4 February 2014). Thus, the decline of survey shows on Indian art in Europe seems to have gone hand in hand with a decline in international market interest. This economic situation might also be the reason why, compared to the years 2011 and 2012, European perception did not play a major role as a topic at the India Art Fair Speakers’ Forum. In this context, I was curious to hear any opinions about the relevance of Indian Highway for India’s art world. When I asked Shukla Sawant, whom I met in her office at the School of the Arts and Aesthetic (Jawaharlal Nehru University), whether she would have been interested in seeing the Indian Highway show in Delhi, she confirmed that she would and also added that she would have expected the show to provide a good overview of contemporary art practices in India (Shukla Sawant, Delhi, 6 February 2014). This was certainly also what the Indian Highway curators envisaged when they defined the “organic” exhibition model, as Gunnar Kvaran explained to me during a Skype conversation (Gunnar Kvaran, Skype communication, 14 February 2014). Since the exhibition was designed to grow from one venue to the next, it was also supposed to accumulate curatorial perspectives on contemporary art from India from all the participating curators as well as the artists-curators who had organised the “show within the show” (Gunnar Kvaran, Skype communication, 14 February 2014). This

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curatorial idea had originated from the insight that it would not be possible to curate only one show on contemporary art from India (ibid.); to present what was happening in the art world in India, a multifaceted model was needed. This organic format should have allowed for a symphony of poly-vocality on contemporary Indian art, of which the Indian Highway exhibition in London would have been just the starting point. However, Kvaran was also critical about its success, because, according to him, not all of the participating institutes had played “the curatorial game” in the same way (Gunnar Kvaran, Skype communication, 14 February 2014). Partly due to a lack of curatorial competencies, partly due to a lack of resources, from Kavaran’s perspective, only the MAC museum in Lyon, and its director and curator Thierry Raspail, were able to fulfil the expectations of the main curators.15 Good curatorship would have included a critical engagement with the local art scene in India, for example through curatorial research trips to India but also a growing of the number of artworks in the exhibition. In general, Indian Highway received positive reviews in comparison to other regional survey shows on Indian contemporary art because of its “organic” nature as a travelling exhibition as well as the artist-curator feature. Mainly, this “show within the show” turned the exhibition into a “laboratory”, as Vidya Shivadas pointed out some years back. However, Kvaran also acknowledged that only some editions of the “show within the show” were productive critical interventions by artists, such as Steps Away from Oblivion, curated by Raqs Media Collective for Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2008) (Gunnar Kvaran, Skype communication, 14 February 2014). This section helped to draw attention to the genre of the documentary film as part of the contemporary art world in India, since it had largely been left out by the main curators. Another one was the show by the Bombay-based artist Bose Krishnamachari, entitled On the Road to the Next Milestone, curated at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. Another good contribution, to Kvaran’s mind, was initiated by Mumbai Studio Architects and their site-specific architectural installation at MAC in Lyon in 2001, which introduced architecture as part of “Indian visual culture”. However, the overall curatorial feature was also criticised in Delhi because the artists who had been invited to curate the “show within the show” would mostly select other artists from their own peer group instead of presenting a larger variety of contemporary artistic practices in India. Kvaran also seemed a bit sceptical and expressed some disappointment that the “show within the show” did not form a “correcting element” to the entire exhibition as they had imagined it would (Gunnar Kvaran, Skype communication, 14 February 2014). The answers I received in reply to my question about whether Indian Highway might have caused any “echo” in India were often circumspect. The main reason for this was the timing. The exhibition had been set up at a moment in the contemporary art world when many artists had already received international acknowledgement, and several survey exhibitions had already been shown in Europe and America. Indian Highway did not travel to Delhi or to any other city in India as was originally planned. I had expected to hear that this was due to Indian cultural ministry objections, especially in light of the partial censorship at its last venue in Beijing in 2012. But, in fact, financing proved to be the defining problem. The costs associated with the exhibition had risen to an unexpected degree

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on its journey from Europe to China, and by 2014, the exhibition seemed to have almost completely faded from people’s minds. Nevertheless, Indian Highway facilitated many direct encounters that resonated for viewers and sustained the dismantling of long-established conventions of viewing and representation which encouraged new paths of thinking about Indian contemporary art in the global context.

Notes 1 See “Paris-Delhi-Bombay” page on the centre Pompidou website: http://mediation.centrepompidou.fr/ education/ressources/ENS-PDB/index-en.html (accessed 21 January 2019). 2 See the “Magiciens de la Terre: Jean-Hubert Martin Editions du Centre Pompidou 1989” page on the Former West website: www.formerwest.org/ResearchLibrary/MagiciensdelaTerre. (accessed 22 January 2019). 3 For an extended discussion on postcolonialism, see Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (2003), Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2009), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). 4 For further discussion on World Fairs, see Sharon Mac Donald, A Companion to Museum Studies (2011) and here Robert W. Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums”; Bettina Messias Carbonell, Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (2012); David Raizman and Ethan Robey, Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851–1915 (2017). 5 See Indian Highway on the MAC Lyon website: www.mac-lyon.com/mac/sections/fr/expositions/2011/ indian_highway_iv(accessed on 21 January 2019). 6 See the Kochi-Muziris Biennale website: http://kochimuzirisbiennale.org/ (accessed 21 January 2019). 7 See the entire programme of the Indian Highway exhibition on the MAC Lyon website: www.mac-lyon. com/mac/sections/fr/expositions/2011/indian_highway_iv (accessed on 18 January 2019). 8 See the floor plan document of Indian Highway IV at MAC Lyon: www.mac-lyon.com/static/mac/ contenu/fichiers/fiches_expo/2011/ih-eng.pdf (accessed January 18, 2019). 9 See the Montalvo Arts website: http://montalvoarts.org/ (accessed 18 January 2019). 10 See Universes in Universe, 51st Venice Biennale website: http://universes-in-universe.de/car/venezia/ bien51/eng/ind/ (accessed 18 January 2019). 11 However, it should be noted that in the case of large exhibitions and biennial programmes, the organisers of prestigious art events like Venice Biennale and documenta, in general, tend to reveal information very late. 12 At the 55th Biennale in Venice in 2013, India was not represented. 13 In 2015 at the 56th Venice Biennale, India was represented by the curated show My East Is Your West, curated by Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana. This exhibition was founded by the Gujral Foundation (New Delhi): https://gujralfoundation.org (accessed 14 February 2019). 14 Kiran Nadar is the wife of Shiv Nadar, a renowned industrialist and philanthropist in India. For information about the Shiv Nadar Foundation, see www.shivnadarfoundation.org/20years-snf (accessed 11 February 2019). 15 In 2013 he [Kvaran] was invited to be guest curator of the Biennale de Lyon in cooperation with the Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon (MAC), Thierry Raspail.

References Adajania, Nancy, “Energy Lines: Interview with Desire Machine Collective.” Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode: India Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale Di Venezia, 2011. Agarwal, Ravi, Studio, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, April 5, 2012.

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Bose, Shumi, “Paris-Delhi-Bombay.” Domus, June 2, 2011. www.domusweb.it/en/art/2011/06/02/parisdelhi-bombay.html. Buck, Tracy, “Exhibition Reviews.” Museum Worlds 1, no. 1 (2013): 212–217. https://doi.org/10.3167/ armw.2013.010114. Clifford, James, “Museums as Contact Zones.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by James Clifford, 188–219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Dicks, Bella, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability. Issues in Cultural and Media Studies. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003. Faires, Nancy Dean. 2007. This Is Not a Museum: The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Reno: University of Nevada. Hoskote, Ranjit, Heidelberg University, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, July 19, 2010. ———, Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode: India Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale Di Venezia. Dr Sudhakar Sharma, 2011a. ———, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky and Christiane Brosius, 2011b. ———, “Kaleidoscopic Propositions: The Evolving Contexts of Contemporary Indian Art.” In India: Art Now, edited by Christian Gether. India Today. Ostfildern and Ishøj: Hatje Cantz and Arken Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Kamdar, Mira, “This Pomp at the Pompidou.” The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, July 1, 2011. www.caravanmagazine.in/arts/pomp-pompidou. Kayser, Christine Vial, “Indian Art Season in France: Installation Dominates 2 Major Museum Shows.” Art Radar Asia, July 13, 2011. http://artradarjournal.com/2011/07/13/indian-art-season-in-franceinstallation-dominates-2-major-museum-shows/. Kher, Bharti, “Bharti Kher’s Anguish over India’s Shameful Absence at Venice Biennale Because of Bureaucratic Stupor & Nepotism Sparks Debate among Top Dog Artists & Virtuosos.” AltGaze: Plug in or Drop Out (blog), June 14, 2013. www.altgaze.com/?p=956. Kvaran, Gunnar, Skype Communication with Cathrine Bublatzky, February 14, 2014. Levin, Kim, “The Lyon Biennale.” NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 13–14 (2001) : 96–99. doi:10.1215/10757163-13-14-1-96. Maharaj, Sarat, “Merz-Thinking: Sounding the Documenta Process between Critique and Spectacle.” On Curating, no. 9 (2011): 11–19. www.on-curating.org/documents/oncurating_issue_0911.pdf. McEvilley, Thomas, “Eurocentrism and Contemporary Indian Art.” In Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities, edited by Yashodhare Dalmia, 86–101. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002. Menezes, Meera, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 23, 2011. Mukherji, Parul Dave, Naman P. Ahuja, and Kavita Singh, eds., InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2014. Nagy, Peter, “ICon: India Contemporary.” In Icon: India Contemporary, 5. New York: Bose Pacia, 2005. ———, Nature Morte, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 22, 2010. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, “Panel Statements and Discussion.” In Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility, edited by Paula Marincola, 27–32. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001. Prat, Thierry, and Thierry Raspail, “Thierry Prat, Thierry Raspail.” In Partage d’exotismes: 5E Biennale D’Art Contemporain de Lyon, 1:7–29. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux: diff. Seuil, 2000. Pütz, Robert, “Transculturality as Practice: Turkish Entrepreneurs in Germany.” In Islam and Muslims in Germany, edited by Ala Al-Hamarneh and Jörn Thielmann, 511–535. Muslim Minorities 7. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

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Raqs Media Collective, Once Again, To the Distant Observer. 2006. https://www.raqsmediacollective.net/ images/pdf/3568e0a5-3180-4c82-9f2a-5028fe5e202a.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019). Raspail, Thierry, “Preface.” In Indian Highway: Catalogue, edited by Kathleen Madden and Thierry Prat, 5–6. Cologne: Koenig Books, 2011. Sawant, Shukla, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 1, 2011. ———, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 2, 2014. Shivadas, Vidya, Vadehra Galley, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, February 4, 2014. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Studio Raqs Media Collective, Delhi, Interview by Cathrine Bublatzky, March 27, 2012. Wallis, Brian, “Selling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy.” In Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, edited by D. J. Sherman and I. Rogoff, translated by Marc Roudebush, 265–281. London: Taylor and Francis, 2001.

Index Adajania, Nancy 2, 43, 51, 57, 58, 70–73, 99, 107, 110, 131, 132, 167, 176 Agarwal, Ravi 36, 59n8, 132–134, 138 anthropology 2, 70, 116, 132, 138, 182 archipelago 15, 49 art and agency 48 art architecture complex 16, 115–119, 121 art-cultural system 15, 128 artist-curators 6, 45, 53, 55, 188 Astrup Fearnley Museum for Modern Art 1, 6, 28, 62–86 Bangalore 17, 20, 30, 78, 103 belonging 10, 28, 65, 67, 96, 98, 100, 150, 174, 178, 180, 181 biennale 49, 105, 134, 169, 170, 175 biennial 6, 12, 15, 44–46, 49, 112, 142, 150, 189n11 British Empire 40 censorship 29, 142, 146, 151, 154–162, 183, 188 Centre Pompidou 16, 29, 120, 166, 169, 170, 173, 174 Chennai 17, 20, 186 China 1–3, 5, 6, 15, 27–29, 31, 36, 46, 49, 65, 66, 72, 76, 77, 81, 83, 110, 130, 138, 142–163 Chopra, Nikhil 64, 83, 86, 94 circulation 3, 5, 15, 50, 69, 70, 82, 95, 98, 101, 111, 144, 147, 156, 172, 178, 180 citizenship 136, 175 cohesive identity 10 contact zone 1, 2, 28, 49, 90–92, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102 contemporaneity 4, 36, 52, 68 contemporaneousness 3, 4 contemporary art: America 1; in Asia 42; Brazil 1; China 1, 28; contest and negotiate 3; cultural and economic value of 5; cultural settings in

27; ethnification of 65; Europe 1; European perception of Indian 129–138; exhibition 2, 98, 130, 173; HEART Museum 91–95; Husain, M. F. 37, 38; India 1–4, 10, 38, 45, 76–86; Indian exhibition in Paris 173–174; Indian Highway exhibition 5–10, 26; Kiran Nadar Museum 90; market 3; National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) 115–119; Ullens Foundation for Chinese 143–151 creative city 15, 16–27, 122 cultural identity 9, 76, 100 cultural intimacy 29, 156–162 curator 2, 6, 10, 11–13, 17, 18, 20, 28, 38, 40, 43–47, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58, 65, 74, 76, 79, 82–84, 86, 91, 99, 102–104, 107, 109–112, 115, 120, 123–125, 127–129 Dawood, Shezaad 51, 64 decolonizing 2, 4, 8 Delhi 2, 8, 12, 13, 14, 17–21, 24, 25, 26, 36–60 Denmark 90, 91, 93, 111, 181 Deora, Mukul 51, 64 the Desire Machine Collective 124, 126, 176, 177 Devi Art Foundation 17, 21, 82, 90, 148, 187 dissonance 2, 9, 28, 29, 116 effective power 4, 62, 69, 128 ethnography 3, 4, 8–10, 15, 27, 28, 69, 97, 167 Ferracci, Giulia 120, 123–129, 138 France 166, 167, 173 geopolitics 2 ghettoification 29, 146, 148, 149 glass network 13 global art world 2, 15, 16, 36, 46, 109, 150, 176, 180 Gowda, Sheela 96, 97, 124 Gupta, Subodh 17, 28, 39, 69, 74, 77, 81, 98, 106

Index |

Hadid, Zaha 116, 117, 121, 122 Harsha, N.S. 41, 98, 120, 123 Hashmi, Zarina 174, 176, 177 Hauz Khaz 25, 26, 90 HEART Museum of Contemporary Art 6, 90–112 Herning 1, 6, 27, 40, 42, 90–112 Hoskote, Ranjit 2, 10, 11, 15, 51, 52, 57, 70, 72, 95, 99, 100, 102, 136, 137 human identity 73 Husain, M. F. 37–39, 54, 79, 123, 160 identity 12, 49, 50, 52, 53, 72, 77, 110, 124, 127, 166, 169 incredible India 63, 79, 96 Indian art: 360-degree portrait 120–129; circulation and perception of 82; contemporary art market 3–4, 16–27, 40, 78, 86, 99, 130, 167–178; contemporary social life 8; define 15, 43; developments in 107; ethnic indicators 11; ethnographic project 8; in Europe 2; exhibitions 107, 130, 131, 135; fascinate Western audiences 67; financial dimension 101; globalisation and the role of 108; global marketing and consumption of 1; international interest in 5, 6; internationalisation history 1; investigation of 52; promote contemporary 144; public debates 134; Raqs Media Collective 83; represent idea, Western art perspective 134; stereotype 115; traditional 39; unproductive rhetoric 52; in Western museums 40, 45; vs. Western worlds 51 Indian Art Fair 17, 18, 183 Indian Art Summit 17–19, 31n13, 37 Indianness 1–4, 6, 8, 12, 39–52, 65, 66, 68, 71, 76, 78, 82, 109, 110, 176–178 International Artists’ Association Khoj 17, 90 Italy 115, 120, 123, 124, 126–130, 138 jet-set flâneur 44–47 Kanwar, Amar 41, 76, 82, 124, 134, 157 Kapoor, Anish 79, 117, 126, 166, 174, 183 Kher, Bharti 17, 40, 69, 72, 73, 107, 109, 110, 174, 186 Khoj marathon 17, 18, 31n14, 131 Kiran Nadar Museum 21, 90, 187 Komu, Riyas 94, 172

193

Krishnamachari, Bose 41, 64, 69, 74, 83, 84, 94, 116, 124, 172 Kvaran, Gunnar B 1, 6, 16, 28, 45, 58, 65–68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81–84, 103 laboratory effect 28, 65, 70, 83–86 Lado Sarai 25, 25, 26, 90 Lalit Kala Academi 25, 176 London 1, 6, 8, 10, 16, 18, 28, 36–60, 81–83, 90, 106 Magiciens de la Terre 44, 169, 170, 189n2 Maharaj, Sarat 5, 43, 51, 52, 55, 56, 79, 84, 108, 167, 180 Malani, Nalini 94, 123, 175, 187 Martin, Jean-Hubert 15, 169, 170 Menezes, Meera 17, 20, 76, 77, 90, 107, 108, 116, 134, 135, 167, 175, 176, 187 mobility 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 18, 67, 68, 108, 124, 181, 186 Mumbai 10, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 74, 78 Museé d’ Art de Contemporain de Lyon (MAC) 6, 20, 66, 166, 169, 172, 173, 188 Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) 6, 16, 115–139 Nagy, Peter 12, 19, 20, 43, 51, 75, 76, 90, 107, 108, 161, 175, 186 nation 6, 8, 38, 57, 65, 76, 78, 81, 104, 118, 120, 126, 133, 136, 144, 158, 159, 166, 167 National Gallery of Modern Art 20, 22, 25, 79, 90, 183–185 nationalising 115 nationalism 1, 2, 40, 65, 68, 79, 142, 145, 147, 148 network 2–6, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17–20, 29, 42, 46, 50, 69, 79, 99, 106, 112, 131, 132, 142, 143, 145, 150, 151, 156, 176, 179, 180, 183 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 1, 6, 11, 15–18, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49–51, 55, 56, 84, 86, 102 occident 77 orient 10, 48, 50, 58, 64, 69, 116, 117, 129, 135, 144 Oslo 1, 27, 28, 40, 41, 48, 58, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76 Pakistan 67, 68, 83, 124, 148, 157 Paris 16, 29, 75, 115, 116, 120, 125, 130, 167 Paris-Delhi-Bombay 29, 120, 135, 166, 173, 174, 189n1

194 |

Index

performing museology 117, 122 personal ecology 132 Peyton-Jones, Julia 6, 16, 56, 103, 106, 157, 161 politics of representation 3, 9 Pors & Rao 69–71 post-colonial context 6, 65 postproduction 2, 4, 62, 69, 76 practice of transculturality 10 primitivism 44, 169 Raqs Media Collective 5, 13, 28, 29, 37, 51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 77, 97 Raspail, Thierry 66, 69, 170–172, 188 reciprocity 18, 43, 44, 49, 50, 55, 56, 169–171 relational aesthetics 28, 62, 127 resonance 2, 4, 9, 28, 29, 54, 137, 138, 169, 180, 182, 183 Rome 1, 16, 27, 28, 75, 106, 115–139 Sawant, Shukla 13, 19, 90, 175, 176, 186, 187 Scaria, Gigi 176, 177 Sengupta, Shuddhabrata 53–55, 116, 135–138, 181, 182 Serpentine Gallery 1, 6, 8, 18, 28, 36–60 Shah, Tejal 29, 124, 151, 152–154, 158–160, 162 Shahpur Jat 25, 133 shared exoticism 29, 120, 167, 169, 171, 172, 178 Shetty, Sudarshan 94, 143, 148, 149, 160, 174 shining India 79, 96, 99 Shivadas, Vidya 84, 90, 103, 116, 187, 188

show within the show 6, 13, 28, 37, 41, 44, 45, 47, 50, 52–55, 58, 82–84, 86, 94, 101 Soi, Praneet 176, 177 strategic transculturalism 116 Subbaiah, Kiran 68, 69, 77, 82, 94 survey exhibition 2, 10, 19, 42, 77–79, 96, 100, 109, 128, 134, 135, 147, 178, 182, 188 Tinari, Philip 143, 145, 149, 157, 162 Toft, Stinna 28, 91, 92, 94–96, 99–101, 103–112 transcultural curating 44, 47, 48, 148 transcultural dissonances 116 transcultural fabric 5–10 transculturality 9, 10, 45, 51, 57, 72, 91, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 129, 131, 135, 180–182 transformation 3, 4, 11, 41, 45, 54, 64, 71, 73, 76, 81, 97, 120, 128 transition 73, 75, 94, 95, 105, 128 translation 1, 3–5, 9, 51, 52, 91, 95, 97, 101–103, 109, 110, 128 translocality 10, 56, 57, 91 transmission 71, 79, 86 travelling 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 45, 46, 49, 70, 82, 86 Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) 6, 29, 142, 143, 146, 148, 160, 162 Upadhyay, Hema 69, 71, 100, 124 urban identity 68 Venice 29, 115, 125, 166, 167, 168, 174–177, 183 Vilasini, Vivek 94