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: What kind of challenges do you face as a curator, in putting together works of artists and artistic practices?
Ashutosh: Usually, how do you start conceptualizing an exhibition?
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?
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.
Image Courtesy: Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) Collection.