Curated by Peter Nagy
New Delhi is the third station in a series of exhibitions of contemporary Indian art at Galerie Krinzinger. Since September 2008, the Bangalore and Mumbai art scenes have been on display. The series will now be completed with this exhibition focussing on the New Dheli art scene.
New Delhi is the capital of India, a political and bureaucratic city with a population of 14 million spread across 1480 square kilometers. In many ways it is three cities in one: a capital of the Moghul Empire (dating from predominantly the 17th Century); the planned ceremonial capital of the British Empire (built during the second decade of the 20th Century); and the urban sprawl that has spread in all directions out from these centers since Independence in 1947.
Bombay (Mumbai) is the commercial capital of the country and the more active city for contemporary art and its market. The cultural life of New Delhi is both more intellectual and more international, as it is the site of a number of major universities as well as all foreign embassies and their cultural programming. Just as the cinema, media and advertising industries influence the contemporary art made in Bombay, the political and the historical, which are readily apparent in the daily life of the city, influence the contemporary art of New Delhi. The landscape of the city, like Rome, is littered with the relics of monumental architectural extravagances while the beating heart of the city is the functioning administrative complex, reeking of pomp and circumstance, privilege and dominion.
New Delhi is also the melting-pot metropolis, as communities from each part of India have created their own specialized sub-divisions within it. Without consciously setting out to make “political art,” many of New Delhi’s artists do create works that are redolent of the political and historical currents that pulse through their city. Many tend to gravitate toward the quixotic icons that pepper the city, reminders of both past and recent ambitions and follies, struggles and achievements. Both the Government and the People of India are represented in these iconographies, cross-referenced to spotlight ironies, collaged together to speak of an increasingly complex reality. This exhibition is not meant to be a portrait of New Delhi but rather one of the many possible indexes through which to interpret the city, its inhabitants and how it comes to articulate the nation as a whole.
At Krinzinger Projekte, Mithu Sen and Bharat Sikka are shown in a concurrent exhibition. Resulting from her residency at Krinzinger Projekte, Mithu Sen will create a suite of new works on the ground floor that combine drawing, collage, photography and sculpture into a synthetic installation. Often autobiographical, frequently erotic and always playful, the artist melds found images and objects into striking juxtapositions and humorous anecdotes. Her style owes something to Surrealism and Art Brut, but also draws heavily on Indian tribal and folk art, urban popular culture, and traditional miniature painting.
On the second floor, Bharat Sikka will show his »Indian Men« and »Urban Landscapes«. His photographs often hover between a posed self-consciousness and a more spontaneous snap-shot aesthetic. Examples from two on-going series will be shown together, illustrating the anxieties at the heart of India’s entry into a more international realm of business and culture. The photographer’s “Indian Men” are generally upper-class and welloff, pictured alone within their homes or at work, seemingly isolated from the world around them. His “Urban
Landscapes” can be harsh, desolate, and hauntingly beautiful. In these works he captures the continuing rifts in India society, evidenced in its new architecture and lack of civic infrastructures.
