26 LEAD ESSAY
Which circuits bind the museum, the market, the nation and modern/contemporary art? KAVITA SINGH teases the connections.
SPECIAL REPORTS
34 MEERA MENZES visits the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and assesses some
of the challenges involved in converting a private collection into a public
museum.
34 At the Devi Art Foundation, AMIT S. RAI finds Pakistani artists effectively exploring themes mirroring the Indo-Pak dialectic in Resemble Reassemble, as Deeksha Nath finds Korea-based L. N. Tallur, Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur ahman and four Sri Lankan artists involved in The One Year Drawing Project succeeding in varying degrees in their ventures.
SPECIAL FEATURES
43 SUSAN S. BEAN discusses the involvement of the Peabody Essex Museum in developing an audience for contemporary Indian art in the U.S.A.
46 ALEXANDRA MUNROE and SANDHINI PODDAR focus on the Guggenheim’s attempts at engaging with Asian/South Asian art to expand the definition and context of contemporary global art.
48 LETTER FROM PAKISTAN
QUDDUS MIRZA takes us on a quick tour of different kinds of museums in
his country and looks at issues of representation and re-contextualisation.
INTERNATIONAL REVIEWS
64 The Empire Strikes Back at the Saatchi Gallery, London, does not quite qualify as a survey of Indian contemporary art, affirms LUCIAN HARRIS.
66 Faces and figures from India come alive in The Indian Portrait: 1560 - 1860 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, discovers JANICE PARIAT.
68 AVNI DOSHI travels across London to catch Bharti Kher giving her Bindis a new twist and Rina Banerjee assembling provocative hybrid forms.
70 Spectrum 2009 at Abu Dhabi uses art as a medium to strengthen links
between the UAE and India, notes ALKA PANDE.
REVIEWS
72 Ant-hills, seed-pods, belly-pods and road-markers signal a new turn in
Madhvi Subrahmanian’s work, observes SHARBANI DAS GUPTA.
73 Chittrovanu Mazumdar re-visits the landscape of his childhood in
Jharkhand in his new photographs and installations,
reveals GEETA DOCTOR.
74 GITANJALI DANG detects old imagery in Anju Dodiya’s new works.
76 ELLA DATTA is enchanted by the timeless metaphors of life explored by
A. Ramachandran in his visually resplendent paintings, sculptures and
drawings.
78 Mrinalini Mukherjee’s bronze sculptures of the organic world fascinate ELLA DATTA.
80 T. P. SABITHA enters K. S. Radhakrishnan’s world of dancing, swirling
and conversing figures.
82 GEETA KAPUR traces Richard Bartholomew’s journey as photographer,
contemplates the pervasive poetics of his artistic pursuits and offers a
layered reading of their contexts.
87 Archana Hande is now Archana Devi Choudhuri the matriarch, discovers
MARTA JAKIMOWICZ as she visits her ‘chamber’ in Bangalore.
88 Gauri Gill’s Notes from the Desert sensitively capture the life of a resilient
community at the edge of ‘incredible India’, observes ANITE DUBE.
92 INTERVIEW
Gieve Patel re-visits the violent worlds captured in some of his works, stops by his Wells and discusses his painterly strategies in a frank Q and A with ABHAY SARDESAI.
INITIATIVE
97 SANDHYA BORDEWEKAR introduces the Sandarbh Residency Programme
and Workshop started by Chintan Upadhyay eight years ago in Partapur,
Rajasthan.
100 LISTINGS