Aicon Gallery presents 'Dali's Elephant', a group exhibition that traces the echoes of Surrealism in modern and contemporary art from the Indian Subcontinent.

Participating artists including Manjit Bawa, Sakti Burman, Jogen Chowdhury, K. Laxma Goud, Unver Shafi Khan, Suneel Mamadapur, Rekha Rodwittya, Prasanta Sahu, Avishek Sen.

In 1967 Air India commissioned Salvador Dali to produce a limited edition ashtray which was to be given to a select group of lucky first-class passengers. Dali produced a small unglazed porcelain ashtray composed of a shell-shaped centre with a serpent around its perimeter. This was supported by three stands, two of which point in the same direction and resemble an elephant's head. The third stand was inverted so that it resembled swan's head. Dali was initially paid no more than a few hundred dollars for his design but when they received the design the airline bosses were so delighted that they made Dali the surprise gift of an elephant. Dali lived with the elephant for a few days at his Portligat home before donating the beast to the local zoo.

This odd and indeed, 'surreal' episode, is one of the few concrete encounters recorded between Surrealism and India. Whilst there is a growing amount of literature on the impact of Surrealism in the Caribbean and Latin America, its influence or role within modern and contemporary Indian art is undocumented. On a case by case basis it is possible to discern the influence of Surrealism on a number of individual Indian artists or as an indirect influence on others. For instance K. Laxma Goud's works from the mid 1960s through the 1970s teem with surrealistic imagery and many contain scenes that are filled with people, beasts and phalluses in odd conjunctions. Manjit Bawa also blurred the distinction between human and animal form in simplified forms that reference the mythic. Sakti Burman's works also reference the mythic in a way that recall the dreamscapes of Western surrealists with incongruous figures floating together in the same picture plane. Like these two artists Jogen Chowdhury's figures have a certain playfulness, and like Bawa and Burman the artist spent some time in Europe with the result that an Indian sensibility seems to have combined with the legacy of the surrealist avant-garde.

In more recent art, artists such as Rekha Rodwittya and Unver Shafi Khan are not so much consciously reacting to surrealism but seemingly using a visual language which consciously or unconsciously nods to surrealism. In Rodwittya's case this is pursued in order to interrogate the gendered female self. In Shafi Khan's case, his visual language is consistent with the wit and the exploration of sexual innuendo that was central to the surrealist revolution. Prasanta Sahu also is using a surrealistic visual language but to his own ends with his combination of seemingly wildly divergent motifs. The direct influence of surrealism is paradoxically most apparent in the work of a younger artist such as Suneel Mamadapur, who perhaps by being part of a generation at home with postmodern quotation fairly directly alludes to Dali in his works. Finally a contemporary artist such as Avishek Sen can avow the direct influence of surrealism but also produce works that have a twenty-first century surrealistic ethos at heart by being simultaneously witty, playful and sinister.

This exhibition is not a traditional art historical case of tracking down influences directly - indeed many of the artists involved would disavow anything as straightforward as straightforward influence. Instead it might be argued that the surrealists might be understood as arguing against Western rationalism and Enlightenment values (this is made most clear in their famous revised map of the world, 'The World in the Time of the Surrealists'). In doing so they articulated a set of values such as the unconsciousness, the irrational, the playful and the mythic which we associate, rightly or wrongly, with worldviews that are non-Western. In this somewhat playful reading of them, the surrealists then become proto non-Western artists - it is then no surprise at all when non-Western artists from India and Pakistan through to Latin America produce work that visually and conceptually echoes with the surrealists vision. In a sense this is a scenario that is similar to André Breton discovered on arriving in Mexico, promptly getting lost and reporting: "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world." 'Dali's Elephant' is a show that attempts to unpick the relationship between India and surrealism. It does not intend to be a show about the legacy of surrealism in India, but in the spirit of Air India's commissioning of Dali, more about the unexpected appearances of the surreal in the Indian Subcontinent - unlooked for by viewers, unattributed by artists and splendidly, surrealistically made Indian.