Ashutosh: Congratulations on the opening of your new show ‘Out of Place: Journeys in Indian Art’ at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum in Mumbai.
How was your journey as an artist, researcher and educator before you started working as the curator & director at JNAF?
Puja: In the early 2000s, when I completed my Bachelors and Masters degree in Fine Arts from Baroda, the concept of a curator was still in its nascent stages. As artists living in Baroda, we would come together to work on collective projects, residencies and exhibitions. I wrote about my artworks, for fellow artists’ exhibitions and reviews for art magazines.
In the next few years, I developed an abiding interest in pedagogy. In addition to my studio practice, I simultaneously taught for seven years at art colleges, depending on where I was living at the time. This included Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, Delhi College of Art and an architecture college in Bombay, the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture. Therefore, I had a chance to look at art-institutions from close proximity. I became deeply interested in the agencies and institutions of knowledge as they try to provide structure and context to the vast world of Art from their own vantages. To explore this further, I applied for the role of curator at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad (BDL) Museum where I worked from 2013-2019.
My work at the BDL Museum gave me an opportunity to research the art and design collections of colonial India spanning the 1800s-early 1900s. The institution has been a visionary in engaging history with contemporary art in India, through its exhibitions programme. It was a grounding experience for me to be a part of the initiative and also helped me understand the dynamics of working in a museum. Exploring textile histories, I co-curated an exhibition with the museum’s director of contemporary artists in juxtaposition with the museum’s collection. I also managed the art history and criticism course offered by the BDL Museum, and was a research writer for a recent publication on the museum’s collection, edited by Museum Director, Tasneem Mehta.
In January 2020, I was appointed Director of the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation which functions as the Modern and Contemporary art wing of the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai.
Ashutosh: You have been active as an artist and curator. How has artistic practice shaped your curatorial practice?
Puja: Some of the recent shows I’ve curated circle back to the contexts I was exploring as an artist. For instance, ideas of place/displacement that I explored in my own artwork have persisted in the current exhibition, ‘Out of Place: Journeys in Indian Art’. Curating this exhibition has given me the chance to research resonances in several artists’ works and present them together as a conversation.
As an artist, I have experimented with oil paints, acrylic, watercolours, gouache, sculpture, printmaking, film, photography, book-making and pottery. A familiarity with artistic processes aids in being sensitized to the artistic labour and the aesthetic decisions in an artwork. As students in Baroda, we were fortunate to have thought-provoking seminars, workshops and classes by veteran artists/art historians visiting from outside and within the city. A background of studying art and working as an artist feeds into most aspects of curation, from conceptualisation to logistics of exhibition-making, to identifying the medium in artworks, and care of artworks.
Further, Art offered a way to connect with world cultures and engage in interdisciplinary discourses. In addition to studio practice, some of us participated in a project where writers and artists came together to collect and illustrate regional oral stories, recording these microhistories while providing an alternative to mainstream literature. I took up an independent project as a researcher for a book on object design and cultural histories in India. We also wrote editorials around issues for local papers. Through art, we developed a consciousness to reflect and intervene in present society, and these experiences carry forward even in conceptualizing exhibitions.
Working full-time at an institution has taught me new skills-administration as well as being able to relate exhibitions and artworks to our wide and varied audiences. I think my perspectives have broadened in re-looking at artists who I may not have connected with as an artist.
Ashutosh: What kind of challenges do you face as a curator, in putting together works of artists and artistic practices?
Puja: Each exhibition can be seen as a deep-dive into a subject, presenting challenges and opportunities to research, learn and present art practices. We have a rich history of art in the country with a multitude of conceptual, stylistic and regional sensibilities from the ancient, pre-colonial, and colonial, to the modern and contemporary. As a curator, it is interesting to peruse history through the artistic expressions of the time, while addressing gaps and finding connections through visual languages.
I believe art history is also a product of its times, so one of the challenges is to read through the specific biases of the period and find the scope to reevaluate, discover and rediscover practices through fresh perspectives. For example, in the case of artist Nasreen Mohamedi, there is a mystery that surrounds her life and work, since she rose to prominence much after her death. Mohamedi has usually been portrayed as a reclusive and solitary genius. While planning the Nasreen Mohamedi exhibition, part of my research was built by collecting oral stories from those who knew her, as well as by studying related archives and the artist’s own diary notes. The research revealed how connected Mohamedi was with others and involved in the art initiatives of the time, both as an artist and as an art teacher. Therefore, in Nasreen Mohamedi: The Vastness, Again & Again, the exhibition that I curated, I wanted to set up conversations within Mohamedi’s own works and with the important art centres of Bombay and Baroda, by including artworks by her peers. Archival material such as letters and photographs displayed the camaraderie she shared with colleagues and students which precipitated a mutual exchange of thoughts and concepts.
Ashutosh: Usually, how do you start conceptualizing an exhibition?
Puja: Working in museums for the past ten years has greatly shaped how I think about curating. With an expanded reference of history that museum collections hold, I am interested in looking at related collections and how concepts in art evolve through time. Further, engaging with a wide demographic of visitors on a daily basis, I think it is important to connect audiences and art, by attempting to demystify art practices, make them more relatable through interdisciplinary contexts. However, conceptualising an exhibition is case-specific. For instance, the CSMVS Museum’s centenary last year presented an opportunity to think through the existence and contexts of the Museum. I was keen to plan a contemporary art exhibition that would speak to the underpinnings of the Museum, by addressing notions of time, history and record-keeping. I found potential in artist Sahej Rahal’s practice as it delves into complex inquiries of history and myth-making with playful lightness. For the show, taking references from an actual archaeological site, Rahal conjured entire worlds by imagining the archaeological remains of a post-human civilization, through a prolific display of sculpture, drawing, writings, performance and an artificial intelligence programme. The preparation and display for this exhibition became a collaborative effort with the artist. We researched the history of the museum, its ancient civilizations’ collections as well as modes of display, which echoed in the exhibition. The exhibition invited viewers as ancestors of a lost future civilization to build their own stories by connecting objects in the show. Titled Ancestors, the exhibition explored the blurred lines between fact and myth in building narratives. It foregrounded the subjective process of archiving, bringing to mind inclusions/erasures in history. An artificial-intelligence programme that reacted to sound saw many visitors engaging with the technology. The exhibition was meant to be playful, thought-provoking and interactive. Through Ancestors, we were able to have open and insightful conversations with the visiting public about complex and contested issues.
Ashutosh: How do you bring in the process of combining artistic and social practices in your curatorial practice and open up wider discussion on artists and their practices?
Puja: Individual accounts and experiences when seen alongside others, become part of a larger collective memory. For instance, the exhibition Zamin: Homelands commemorated renowned artist S.H. Raza’s birth centenary, which coincided with 75 years of Indian Independence. Thinking of this dual occasion, I explored Raza’s landscapes within the context of his own experiences around Independence and Partition.
Seminal works presented turning points in Raza’s practice. Letter exchanges alongside specific artworks showcased the ongoing thought in relation to the time and significant events. The exhibition traced Raza’s oeuvre as a landscape artist, a diaspora artist and as an artist in pursuit of an Indian modern sensibility.
Exhibitions that we present at the JNAF come alive through interactions with visitors. Community engagement through diverse programming of workshops, talks, public walkthroughs help us learn and present exhibitions that might find relevance in the present.
Ashutosh: I thought the ideas of ‘merging’, ‘splitting ways’ and ‘threshold’ are at the center of your current exhibition, Out of the Place at JNAF. It’s interesting to see how the exhibition opens the viewer to different forms of moving in and moving out of the space. Your exhibition also enables building the dialogic relationship between the art, the artist and the milieu. What kind of research went into putting together different visual expressions and possibilities of engagement across time and space?
Puja: The idea for this exhibition took seed through thinking about how our worldview is shaped by the places that we live in and those that reside in us through lineages of ancestry, history, culture, language and politics. Affiliations to a site are connected to individual trajectories as well as histories of place which are diverse, conflicting or contested, depending on where we find/locate ourselves. In the face of an increasingly divided world, it seemed pertinent to explore our syncretic cultures and how connected we are, through our shared pasts, travel, migrations and trade.
I started by researching the JNAF collection that covers almost a hundred years of art-making in India, tracing the itinerance in art styles that evoke an engagement with varied places. The show includes works from the JNAF as well as borrowed contemporary works covering a period between 1925-2022. The exhibition is set up to assess how visiting a place in actuality or through its art impacted image making. Further, research on individual pieces reveal an experience of a site within its socio-political, cultural and historical contexts.
The research involved studying periods of history and art history in India, collating it with individual artist’s practices and the considerations in each of the presented artworks.
An aspect of the show is to study how artists have imagined figures as subjects of place – a traveler, a hermit, a migrant, a refugee, figures at war and so on – in context to temporal realities.
Ashutosh: The exhibition has been structured around six thematic areas and thirty three artists. What is the anchoring principle behind this bringing together different themes and artists?
Puja: ‘Out of Place: Journeys through Indian Art’ considers moments of transit as thresholds to think about the shifting relationships with the sites that we inhabit. The exhibition links artworks from pre-independence to the 2000s that reflect on the meanings that places hold in our lives. Accordingly, I have curated the exhibition through different sections as points of entry to the question of place and belonging: home, travel, exile, migrancy, aesthetic lineages, trade and cultural exchange. A section focuses on the new mobility that came with independence. It traces aesthetic lineages that evoke different places in a quest for an identity for Indian Art in the wake of a newly independent nation. In another section, biographical works are presented, through which experiences of exile take on diverse understandings. This section includes works by Arpana Caur, Zarina, MF Husain and Jitish Kallat. In the section ‘Home’, selected works are presented within the context of dual belongings, at home and outside with others. Home as a place of love, comfort, security, personal belief and ritual, often jostles with social, cultural and religious norms. Works by artists such as Arpita Singh, Atul Dodiya, Bhupen Khakhar and F. N Souza are placed together to contemplate these complexities of being and belonging. A consideration of the nomadic existence of India’s migrant labour, is set up in the section on migrancy, by multiple artists across generations, including Sudhir Patwardhan, Krishen Khanna, Navjyot Altaf, Suresh BV among others. Another section features disjunctures in the histories of places, such as war and disenfranchisement and the effects on human life. Trade, economics and political dominance have made people travel/migrate to far away places, which have rendered both, the travellers and the places, altered. An imagination of foreign lands and our relationship to them features in the section, ‘World’ through works by Nilima Sheikh, Archana Hande, Vivan Sundaram.
I believe there are many conversations that can be generated around or through art, beyond the specific work, its aura or its monetary value. Being in the Museum space, this sort of community engagement becomes important. Through the JNAF, I hope to facilitate a connected research-based framework for exhibitions, education and outreach programming, bringing the collection into conversation with relevant current local and global art-historical discourses. There is immense scope within the field to explore Indian modern and contemporary art through transcultural and comparative contexts from regional/locational perspectives, to create a platform for critical dialogue.
