Elephants, spicy food and the Silicon Valley — that’s how Americans, on most occasions, describe the word ‘India’.
NEWARK: Elephants, spicy food and the Silicon Valley — that’s how Americans, on most occasions, describe the word ‘India’. But a lot has changed since the Western media put that picture of a man with a moustache and turban on the front page of their magazine.
With a view to update Americans about the fast-changing political and cultural Indian overtones, the Newark Museum in New Jersey is holding an exhibition on contemporary India.
The exhibition, titled ‘India: Public Places, Private Spaces’, opens on Wednesday and will have a 15-week run till January 16. The exhibition will feature works of 28 photographers and video artistes including Raghu Rai, Tejal Shah, Shilpa Gupta, Pablo Bartholomew, Atul Bhalla, Ram Rahman and Vivan Sundaram.
“This Indian exhibition is going to reach an American audience that would have never seen anything like this before. The exhibition will get them out of the idea of elephants and the regular tourist brochure images of India. It makes people aware that India is changing at warp speed,” Zette Emmons, Newark Museum’s manager of travelling exhibitions, told DNA.
Over 1800 art lovers who attended the soft opening and dinner on Saturday were riveted by the work of 28 Indian artists. Manhattan art critics raved at dinner about Navjot Altaf’s edgy ‘Lacuna in Testimony’ created in 2003, which sits boldly at the entrance of the exhibition. The spectacular three-channel video installation with 72 mirrors was created a year after the blood-washed Gujarat riots.
Just beyond Altaf’s installation are Raghu Rai’s famous huge photographs of Indira Gandhi, her funeral pyre and women left widowed by the anti-Sikh riots that followed her assassination.
Pablo Bartholomew comes up with a classic portrait of Indian immigrant and entrepreneur Somen ‘Steve’ Banerjee who started the Chippendales nightclub with male dancers best known for being shirtless.
The portrait frames Banerjee leaning comfortably against his Los Angeles club bar with a male Chippendale dancer in spandex glory in the background.
New Jersey businessman and art collector Umesh Gaur initiated the project nearly four years ago. “He got Delhi-based Gayatri Sinha, an independent curator and Paul Sternberger, associate professor of Art History at Rutgers, together and proposed it to the museum,” Emmons said.
“We liked the idea because a photography and video exhibition on this scale had never been done before in North America. And, it is appropriate because New Jersey has a large Indian American diaspora,” Emmons added.
Over the years the Newark Museum has presented a number of exhibitions on India. This exhibition comes on a week when Indian art is under the spotlight at almost a dozen auctions in New York.
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