HUB INDIA

Curated by Myna Mukherjee and Davide Quadrio

Hub India is a prolific exploration of the many registers that frame Contemporary art from the Indian subcontinent, a region of central importance to South Asia and increasing significance to the global world. The multipart project which was initiated originally for Artissima to provide an overview of the eco-system comprising galleries, institutions and artists active in India, has subsequently grown into an intelligently expansive curation that encompasses several variegations. These include Maximum Minimum, an exhibition at Artissima; Classical Radical, a tripartite museums show in collaboration with Fondazione Torino Musei – that will host the project in its museum facilities, Palazzo Madama – Museo Civico d’Arte Antica and MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale – and with the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti di Torino hosting the première of Sama: Symbols and gestures in contemporary art practices. Italy and India vol. 1, a film on contemporary art in Italy and India presented as a moving images installation.

Featuring over 65 artists from 10 of India’s leading contemporary galleries and museum, supported by the Consulate General of India and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and in collaboration with Artissima, Fondazione Torino Musei, Emami Art, Engendered and Arthub, Hub India is poised to be the largest and most significant conversation that contemporary art from India has had with the Western world in recent times.

Crossing the cultural rubicon between modern and contemporary art, these curations reject the colonial attitude of linear progress, rather use tradition as a means of innovation, a continuous re-birth. They understand contemporaneity as a telescoping of politics, civilizations and the global times we live in. The artworks can respond to the viewer’s desire to think about the multitudes of history, time and geo-politics of the region or focus entirely on its abundant aesthetics. The works are a diverse cross-section of genre, medium and process, ranging from line-drawings and paintings to miniatures and sculptures; terracotta and metal to paper works and canvas, prints and etchings to digital and AI works. They fire on all cylinders, blurring polarities of religion, caste or race, Asia and Europe, figurative representation or abstraction. These are a radiantly broad spectrum of voices ranging from modern and contemporary masters, superstars and icons to cutting edge and freewheeling narratives fresh for discovery. Far more layered and complex than a survey show, these curations provide a kaleidoscopic lens that shifts perception and challenges stasis through complex, evocative and never reductive ways. It is then left to the viewer to decide the gaze, to decide what they will finally see.

• Hub India – Maximum Minimum
Artissima, OVAL Lingotto Fiere
In collaboration with Emami Art

Maximum Minimum is the new geographic focus of the fair dedicated to the Indian subcontinent. The exhibition offers a panoramic look at the startling visual culture that reflects the abounding polarities, contradictions and dualities that comprise India. From the country’s ancient spiritualism to its modern materialism, its colonial past to its growing global centrality, its migratory flows from largely agrarian and rural towards rapid urbanisation, from dogma to technology, from marginal to mainstream, from historical monuments to contemporary architecture, from normative to radical, the curated show will look through myriad histories and representation
in the subcontinent.

Galleries and Artists

Nature Morte: Tanya Goel, Parul Gupta, Bharti Kher, Martand Khosla, Raghava KK, Mona Rai, Ayesha Singh
Gallery Espace: Dilip Chobsia, GR Iranna, Puneet Kaushik, Shambhavi
Emami Art: Arpita Akhanda, Jogen Chowdhury, Bose Krishnamachari, Maksud Ali Mondal, G Ravinder Reddy,
Bholanath Rudra, Prasanta Sahu
Akar Prakar: Jayashree Chakravarty, Ganesh Haloi, Manish Pushkale, Piyali Sadhukhan
Art Alive: Teja Gavankar, Chandrashekhar Koteshwar, Ghana Shyam Latua
Latitude 28: Chandan Bez Baruah, Noor Ali Chagani, Sudipta Das, Niyeti Chadha Kanal, Rahul Kumar
Shrine Empire: Neerja Kothari, Tayeba Begum Lipi, Sangita Maity, Samanta Batra Mehta, Divya Singh

• Hub India – Classical Radical (a tripartite museums show)
Palazzo Madama – Museo Civico d’Arte Antica
MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale
Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti di Torino

In collaboration with KNMA, Latitude 28, Akar Prakar, Art Alive, Emami Art, Gallery Espace, Shrine Empire,
Nature Morte, Sakshi Art, Jhaveri Contemporary, Vadehra Art, Volte

Classical Radical will feature contemporary and modern Art from the Indian subcontinent that explores legacy and antiquity in the sociological here and now. How do contemporary artworks illuminate, complicate and reappropriate heritage? The generation of new knowledge is and must be part of our relationship to our ancient visual traditions. How does contemporary art set against India’s variegated religiosities and plural histories carry residues of motifs, styles and ideas through millennia to come to this cultural moment? The exhibition will be an attempt to look at the classical and traditional legacy through a fresh lens. This is the first time that an invited project for the Artissima Art Fair expands to this incredible opportunity to inhabit three locations in the city and
connect major institutions and museums.

The show is divided into three sub-groups:

1. Palazzo Madama – Museo Civico d’Arte Antica | Disruptive Confluences
The exhibition in Palazzo Madama explore syncretism and hybridity through mostly three-dimensional works, that connect and juxtapose the outstanding collection in the Palace with the history of the Indian subcontinent, suggesting complicated histories of trading, religious exchange and dominations, imperialist remains and syncretic evolutions. Creating a hybrid imagery that is both veiled and provocative ultimately reveals narratives and relationship with a Eurasian perspective.

Artists: Jayashree Chakravarty, Sudipta Das, Tanya Goel, Ranbir Kaleka, Manjunath Kamath, Benitha
Perciyal, G Ravinder Reddy, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Ayesha Singh, LN Tallur
Special thanks to Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa

2. MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale | Residues & Resonance

The exhibition in MAO comprises of contemporary renaissance composites that both iconize and obliterate the very classicism they reference. The works are rooted in heritage examining traditional styles, schools, and genre, and going beyond to develop a relationship, a language, a dialogue with it. While the concerns have travelled with the vagaries of time, the forms of these works have retained hauntingly similar patterns resonant with residues of the past. Like a Philip Glass concert, each iteration sounds familiar but the cumulation of successive iterations makes each a different and unique experience. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a radical section of neo-miniaturists, who borrow from the evocative stylized and gemlike ornamentation of traditional miniature styles and vasli paintings but are subversive and explore ways to stretch and pull apart the vocabulary of a seemingly insular style.

Artists: Waseem Ahmad, Khadim Ali, Anindita Bhattacharya, Sakti Burman, Sudipta Das, Priyanka D’Souza, Baaraan Ijlal, Manjunath Kamath, Puneet Kaushik, Samanta Batra Mehta, Piyali Sadhukhan, Paula Sengupta, Yugal Kishore Sharma, Nilima Sheikh, The Singh Twins, Gopa Trivedi, Waswo X Waswo

3. Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti | Multitudes & Assemblages

The trajectory of visual art in India is one of multiple transitions; it spans and internalizes the wider discourses of colonialism, nationalism and International modernism. It relates to visual traditions in the light of postmodernism and seeks to validate its position in the contemporary arena of visual art making. Multiple narratives unfold simultaneously in this exhibition. These artistic narratives are like haptic elements, refusing to lose their reality, presence, speed, heat or humidity even while being an incongruous evidentiary of a connective focal point in a curation towards a community of possibilities. Evoking more nostalgia than history, these voices rise sometimes in unison and sometimes in tension with each other at opposite sides of time, like a mirror, reversing the gaze upon a new familiar but radical pastiche of liberation, ecology, urbanisation, migration, feminism, gender, subjectivity and sensation.

Artists: Harshit Agrawal in collaboration with 64/1, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Sakti Burman, Sheba Chhachhi, Jogen Chowdhury, Priyanka D’Souza, Tanya Goel, Laxma Goud, Ganesh Haloi, Manjunath Kamath, Puneet Kaushik, Bharti Kher, Martand Khosla, Neerja Kothari, Balbir Krishan, Rahul Kumar,Tayeba Begum Lipi, Shruti Mahajan + Ravindra G. Rao, Paresh Maity, Debasish Mukherjee, Manish Pushkale, Mona Rai, Rekha Rodwittiya, Debanjan Roy, Prasanta Sahu, Wardha Shabbir, Shailesh BR, Shambhavi, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Ayesha Singh + Abhimanyu Dalal, LN Tallur

Installation supported by Plotini (IT)
Project Management by Shefali Mehrotra and Francesca Filisetti
Special thanks to Paola Gribaudo

Sama: Symbols and gestures in contemporary art practices. Italy and India vol. 1.
A visionary and pioneering film installation that explores the exciting world of Contemporary Art in both the Indian sub-continent and in Italy, and lends context by investigating the semiotics i.e. the signs and symbols surrounding them in history and culture. It allows the audience to glimpse into the aesthetics of the two regions by exploring histories of tradition vs. modernity, pedagogies of the two countries, gender, archaeologies and politics of the time; themes of migration, exile, time and memory; religiosity and syncretism; and regional specificity amidst global times. The installation, imagined as collective continuum of different narratives that echo artist voices across continents and heterogeneous contemporary art practices. They also excavate now-rare and valuable forms of craftsmanship in Italy and India. The film develops an emotional bridge between the two countries, as an example of the historical cultural and socioeconomic extremes of the Euro-Asian continent, which despite their differences and complexities share a common ancestral connection and in doing so resolve distances into intercultural dialogues open to interpretation.

The film is commissioned and produced by Arthub, Engendered, the Embassy of Italy in New Delhi and the Italian Cultural Institute of New Delhi together with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. Directed in India by Onir, script by Alessandra Galletta, based on a concept by Myna Mukherjee and Davide Quadrio.