The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998

The Barbican takes us on a fascinating ride through two and a half decades of Indian art, teasing out the transformations and contradictions in the country’s recent history

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998. Installation view, Barbican Art Gallery. 5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025. © Eva Herzog Studio / Barbican Art Gallery.

Barbican Art Gallery, London
5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025

by JOE LLOYD

On the night of 2 December 1984, methyl isocyanate leaked out from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, central India. More than half a million people in nearby towns were exposed to the highly toxic gases. At least 3,737 people died as a result. Many faced life-long illness, including unborn children. Soon after the disaster, the photographer Pablo Bartholomew travelled to the region to document it. His photographs capture scenes of true horror. Thousands of cattle lie dead by a railway track. The Union Carbine signage is smeared with red paint. The most chilling image features the buried head of a child who died from the leak, his blank eyes reproaching the world around him.

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998. Installation view, Barbican Art Gallery. 5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025. © Eva Herzog Studio / Barbican Art Gallery.

At the Barbican Art Gallery, a selection of Bartholomew’s devastating images face two paintings by Madhvi Parekh, both inspired by memories of her rustic childhood. Happy in the Village (1982) is a depiction of farmers enjoying some downtime with their animals. Parekh’s people are pastel-coloured blob-men, like characters from the cartoon Adventure Time, and they inhabit a whimsical world where perspective matters not, inspired by Rangoli design-making. Nearby, Jyoti Bhatt’s photos capture Rangoli and other folk arts, an India of decorative embroidery and mural-painting, then as now threatened by urbanisation and economic mutations. In this one room alone, the challenges of representing a country as ancient, gargantuan and diverse as India become apparent.

C. K. Rajan, Mild Terrors-II, 1991-96. Courtesy the artist and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 makes a heroic tilt at it. The first exhibition of its kind in the world, it takes in art from all media, created during a tumultuous 24-year period from Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency to the Pokhran nuclear tests. To call this a time of great social and economic upheaval is mild. Gandhi’s 21-month long emergency saw India temporarily become an almost authoritarian regime, with censorship, police violence and mass sterilisation. In the decades that followed, the economy grew and created new inequalities, cities swelled and rural traditions faded away. Artists found themselves able to document these changes and their ravages, while also exploring their own potential as artist-activists. The exhibition ends in 1998, after India successfully tested its own nuclear weapons and the country was elevated to incipient superpower status.

This is an important exhibition internationally and for London. India is everywhere in Britain, from the rapacious spoils of the East India Company to the Victorian empire, through the presence of an enormous diaspora and their cultures today. Yet art from India often gets a short shrift, despite its stupendous artistic history and present. The Imaginary Institutionis a much-needed corrective. It offers a crash course in a rich artistic seam. As is the Barbican’s wont, the exhibition is crammed to the gills, with almost 150 works by about 30 artists, few of whom are likely to be familiar to the average visitor. The accompanying booklet will be an essential aid to many. Yet despite the profusion, the exhibition does not seem overstuffed. There are few weak links – and more than a dozen artists who deserve further presentation.

Gieve Patel, Two Men with Handcart, 1979. © Gieve Patel. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum Photo: Barbara Kennedy.

It follows some artists all the way through the period. The show opens with a painting by Gieve Patel, Two Men with Hand Cart (1979), which depicts a calm conversation against a worn wall. In the background of this timeless scene, however, we see the vast apartment blocks of what was then Bombay, now Mumbai, a city with seemingly no limits. The monumental Off Lamington Road (1982-86), painted a few years later, takes us deeper into the city’s dense alleys, which Patel surveilled in his work as a doctor. The people have blurred features, as if to indicate that they are transients in this busy part of town. Both these early works have a dreamlike quality, rendered in soft pastel-esque hues. In December 1992, brutal sectarian fighting broke out after a rightwing Hindu mob demolished a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, throwing artists into despair. Soon after, Patel painted Battered Body in a Landscape (1993), a stark depiction of a bloody corpse. India had woken up.

Gieve Patel, Off Lamington Road, 1982-86. Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
. © Gieve Patel. Courtesy Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

We see other paintings undergo similar shifts. The Arpita Singh behind the fantastical, Chagall-esque The White Peacock (1985) becomes the artist of My Mother (1993), which juxtaposes a portrait with a scene of grotesque communal affray. There is a general movement throughout the exhibition as the forms available to artists expand. Early rooms focus particularly on painting and drawing, albeit in a variety of styles. Two of the most interesting artists on display, Sunil Gupta and Bhupen Khakhar, deal with queer life. Gupta’s Exiles (1987) photo series captures moments of cruising during a time when homosexuality was criminalised due to a colonial law. Gupta places reflections on the status of gay men beneath his pictures, as if they are captioned thoughts of the people depicted within. Khakhar captures orgiastic encounters in landscapes redolent of Quattrocento painting, with an explicitness that remains acute today.

Sunil Gupta, India Gate, 1987, from the series Exiles, 1987. © Sunil Gupta. Courtesy the artist and Hales London and New York.

Gradually, mirroring the shift elsewhere, installations, mixed media and film become more prevalent. Rummana Hussain evokes domestic and religious violence with broken terracotta pots. Sheela Gowda piles the floor with cow dung, both a valuable fuel and associated in Hindu customs with purification. The locally specific connotations of these objects are placed into the international language of contemporary art. Indeed, throughout the exhibition we see the tension between the local and the global, the traditional and the “modernising”. Jangarh Singh Shyam, a member the tribal Pardhan clan, use his ink drawings to reinterpret oral traditions, while Jagdish Swaminathan’s early 90s geometric paintings placed Tantric inscriptions and local crafts into big canvases that would not look out of place in a transavantgarde exhibition.

Sudhir Patwardhan, Construction Woman Washing Her Face, 1998. © 2024 Sudhir Patwardhan. Courtesy of The Artist and Vadehra Art Gallery.

Where lies the boundary between containing tradition and using it as a mode in contemporary art? NN Rimzon’s The Tools (1993) takes a meditating figure from temple architecture that symbolises non-violence and inner peace, then surrounds it with a ring of broken agricultural tools. The threat of force is here, but so is a sense that industrialisation is rendering all these things useless. The exhibition ends with three paintings from 1998. One, by Sudhir Patwardhan, shows a construction worker washing her face. But as she holds her hands to her temple, her gesture could equally be one of despair at her country’s head-spinning transformations.