The Barbican’s thrilling new exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998, brings to life a critical period in Indian art and history, which has rarely been treated with such curatorial density: the 23-year span bookended by Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency in 1975 and India’s nuclear tests at the Pokhran Test Range in 1998. The timescale of this exhibition is hugely significant and suggestive, moreover, of the crucial ways the exhibition, with its massive compendium of 150 artworks by 30 Indian artists, aims to wrestle with time and periodisation as institutions of art writing—that which make possible certain narratives of nation, protest, freedom and dreaming in India.
The exhibition’s temporal pillars should not, in this sense, merely be read as a call to renew thinking around this tempestuous phase in India’s postcolonial development, a period shaped by a suspension of civil liberties, a rise in unmitigated industrialisation, and growing alienation from India’s founding non-violent ideals. These temporal pillars also signal the exhibition’s decisive departure from the curatorial frameworks of the past three decades, which have by contrast worked to instantiate “1947” and, in turn, the partition of the Indian subcontinent as a temporal benchmark for any history of modern South Asian art. In this departure, The Imaginary Institution of India does not disavow the importance and impact of these past frameworks for Indian art history and its future directions, the magnitude of which has opened the field to new ways of seeing and responding to the particular spatial and temporal dilemmas posed by processes of postcolonial border-making in the 20th century. Rather, the exhibition seems to point, if subtly, to the oversaturation of such frameworks, putting pressure on the need for new curatorial strategies to unsettle the field’s temporal imagination.
For an exhibition so heavily invested in problems of time, it is interesting to note how easy it is to lose sight of the exhibition’s chronological infrastructure while moving through its curated spaces. Chronology does not equate to linearity in The Imaginary Institution of India. The exhibition’s ‘loose chronological’ structure unfolds time as a crochet of knots, wherein historical flashpoints are knitted together into new and productive configurations by the entangled and enduring economies of friendship, love, desire, family, religion, violence, caste and community. In this act of crochet, the exhibition’s opening gambit is particularly salient; as visitors ascend from the vibrant pink skies of Gieve Patel’s Two Men with Hand Cart (1979) and move towards the vacant orange streets of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City (1975), both affective studies in colour and desolation with ties to the 1975 Emergency, the domestic interiors of Vivan Sundaram’s House (1994) and Nilima Sheikh’s Shamiana (1996) come into aerial view. The juxtaposition is more than one of the contrasting medium, which anticipates the radical experiments in installation, cross-media and performance that dramatically reshaped the landscape of Indian art by the late 20th century. These latter, large-scale installations punctuate the curatorial pairing of Patel and Sheikh’s painted cityscapes with striking meditations on shelter and interiority produced in the wake of the 1992 communal riots at Ayodhya. If the rough kalamkash surfaces of Sundaram’s House probe the tenacity of home as a sanctum of warmth in the face of violent displacements of body and belonging, the vibrant lyrical iconographies of Nilima Sheikh’s painted panels in Shamiana unfold home’s enduring capacities for pleasure, joy, community and dreaming amid similar conditions of upheaval. This is a juxtaposition, in other words, which urgently entangles the scales of disruption and disorientation that interlink 1975 and 1992.
If the provocation, then, is to move past more prescriptive, linear art histories of “progress”, which centre artworks as archives of reactivity in/to time, the exhibition is quite effective in dispersing any search for causality. Its 13 interlocking spaces immerse visitors, instead, in alternate axes of continuity, which take shape through the palpable swell of collective concern in this period around such issues as communal violence, gender and sexuality, urbanisation and indigeneity. Moreover, these axes open the exhibition’s artworks as “untimely” archives of urgent action, unexpected connection and enduring solidarities. My use of “untimely” here is not meant to ascribe a sense of ill-time, lateness or misfortune. It is meant, rather, to invoke a condition of what art historian Saloni Mathur has described as “being meaningfully at odds with the times”. It was really powerful, in this latter view, to encounter M.F. Husain’s grave memorial to Safdar Hashmi (1989) cached amid one of the exhibition’s upper galleries, like a well-kept secret. The monumental painting, which depicts a fallen fragmented figure, commemorates the brutal assassination of Safdar Hashmi, the political activist, actor and playwright renowned for his work in public street theatre. In the exhibition, the painting is placed in careful conversation with the work of K. P. Krishnakumar, N. N. Rimzon and Savindra Sawarkar, artists who explore the daily and bodily brutalities of racial, religious, class, caste and sexual differences in brush and ink, etching and sculpture. The material grouping is among the exhibition’s most visceral in its grief, if also among its most disquieting. Indeed, if visitors are inundated with a mix of wonder and apprehension while walking up the Barbican stairwell in search of the exhibition’s beginnings, the return journey back down the stairwell, mediated by this conjuncture of bodily difference, cascades with this same grief and disquiet. The mood is a stark contrast to the well-rehearsed narratives of masculine heroism which usually encapsulate Husain as a founding member of the Progressive Artists Group in 1947. Here, Husain’s painted limbs are ripped from this temporal shadow, folded into other genealogies of minoritisation, protest and collective radical imagining in India, genealogies which speak not to the powers of a triumphal arc, but to the pain and possibilities of a more fragmented present.
And yet, not all of the exhibition’s temporal gestures feel entirely legible. For instance, given the importance of rupture, breakage and fragmentation to the exhibition’s wider approach to time and narrative, it is difficult to make sense of the recurring use of brick in the exhibition’s physical design. Is this material choice a matter of timeliness too? From the moment visitors enter the exhibition, brick is overwhelmingly present. A low brick platform props up stacks of the exhibition’s iconic pink guidebook, which visitors are gifted upon entry to keep, carry, read and digest at their own pace. Temporary brick walls bifurcate the gallery’s curatorial spaces into geometric compositions carving out certain narrative routes, while others are made to bear the weight of artworks, becoming the infrastructure of juxtaposition and disruptive sight lines. Brick also helps galvanise moments of pause throughout the show. It is used to create makeshift benches, which encourage visitors to stop, sit, contemplate and breathe. The burnt orange colour of this accumulation certainly makes for a striking contrast against the sanitary white surfaces of the Barbican’s own industrial edifice. It is also easy to see how the brick, with its perforated surfaces, contributes to the exhibition’s dramatic investments in light and shadow. But then, perhaps the reasons for brick are even more simple. Brick, as both material and motif, interlinks many of the exhibition’s artworks.
Brick makes an appearance in Sundaram’s The Indian Emergency II (1976-77), a satirical series of graphite drawings that deconstructs conventional iconographies of state power. Brick can be found in the background of Sudhir Patwardhan’s acrylic canvas, Town (1984), where it struggles to contain the growing sprawl of modern industrial labour. Brick is an important component of Rummana Husain’s Unearthed (1993), where it encircles the ruins of a terracotta pot in an allegory for the shattering of India’s social and secular fabric. Bricks, made from cow dung, are also a crucial element in Sheela Gowda’s Mortar Line (1996), where the vernacular material opens new ways of thinking about the embodied violence of majoritarian politics in India. Although, if brick is a mirror for anything in the exhibition, it might be far better understood as the traces of an inward admission: an acknowledgement of the exhibition’s own complicities in the processes of institutionalisation it seeks to disrupt; of the difficult relationship of its conceptual and built environments to time and history; of the part it has already come to play in said imaginary institution of India.