Indian art shows at Lunds Konsthall of Sweden

Lunds Konsthall of Sweden presents simultaneous exhibitions that offer distinct perspectives on the art and cinema of the Indian Subcontinent in recent history and today. The exhibits are ‘Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes – Reflections on Indian Modernism’ and ‘Raqs Media Collective: Steps Away from Oblivion’.

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–90) is regarded as one of the most important Indian artists of her generation, and her paintings, drawings and photographs, produced from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, are now being recognized as a key body of work within the modernist canon. She was influenced by an earlier generation of Indian abstract artists such as V.S. Gaitonde, and she is sometimes compared to Agnes Martin or Kazimir Malevich.

Her uncompromisingly abstract drawings from the 1970s onwards deserve to be considered on their own terms, but they also invoke a range of cultural references. This becomes particularly clear in her photos, in which meticulously cropped details of historical architecture and everyday life create aesthetic links to both contemporary culture and an Islamic visual heritage.

The exhibition brings together rarely seen drawings, paintings and photographs with unique archival material from Nasreen Mohamedi’s studio. It is curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson and organized and initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).
On the other hand, Raqs Media Collective ‘Steps Away from Oblivion’ is a circuit of films, installed on screens and as projections in a confined space, that invoke different rhythms of repose and transformation in today’s India.

The Raqs Media Collective have invited eight documentary filmmakers (Debkamal Ganguly, Ruchir Joshi, Kavita Pai & Hansa Thapliyal, M.R. Rajan, Priya Sen, Surabhi Sharma, Vipin Vijay) to rework key sequences in their earlier films.

The installation was originally shown within the context of Indian Highway, a traveling exhibition of contemporary art from India first presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2008. Raqs Media Collective is a group of internationally active artists and curators (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) based in Delhi.