Story of the Experimenter

Priyanka Raja of Experimenter is happy. It’s only the second day of India Art Fair, 2018, and the Kolkata-based gallery has placed most of the works in the booth to leading collections. “I think we’re in a good place,” she says.

That statement could well be extended to apply to Experimenter’s track record over the nine years it has been around. For a young gallery located in the eastern metropolis – once an important arts centre, but now more or less a backwater for contemporary art – and one with a very limited, focused programme, Experimenter has now established itself internationally as a leading purveyor of cutting-edge contemporary art.

Consider this – Sahil Naik, 26-year-old sculptor from Ponda Goa has made it to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list this year on the strength of his first solo show – at Experimenter. Naik showed solo recently in an exhibition titled Ground Zero, at Experimenter. Naik has already seen great support for his work and his works have been collected by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Zabludowicz Collection in London, amongst others.

Experimenter’s artists are collected by the most important museums all over the world. A case in point - Naeem Mohaiemen, one of the gallery’s first sign ups in 2008, has been recently collected by the Tate Modern and Sharjah Art Foundation. Experimenter was one of three galleries that hosted the Otolith Group, Turner Prize-winning British art collective. The gallery also represents Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Tunisian artist who created the ‘Flying Carpet’ that’s now in the Guggenheim; French artist Julien Segard; Pakistan’s Bani Abidi; Samson Young, a sound artist from Hong Kong; and has just signed on Canadian artist Moyra Davey. From India, they have on their roster RAQS Media Collective, CAMP and Krishna Reddy, the legendary nonagenarian print-maker, based in Paris.   

The Rajas have come a long way from around a decade ago when they (MBAs with fast-moving corporate careers) decided to start a gallery. The idea was Prateek’s, and the couple decided to take a year-long break from their career and invest their savings in visiting galleries around the world whose programmes they admired.

What sets Experimenter apart, perhaps, is its edgy programming – politically trenchant, aesthetically challenging, medium agnostic, difficult, abstract. It’s art of the times, one that attempts “to address a certain moment”, in Prateek’s words, by artists who’re using their expression to challenge the status quo. “We’re, as people, very politically agile and vocal, and it’s possible that that’s how our eye chooses the artists who,” Priyanka adds.

And, going by their track record, they’ve had considerable success in finding an audience that understands and appreciates. Strangely, however, the couple avers that they have never considered whether the audience would like what they were showing. “It has never been about the viewer wanting to see anything, it’s about the practice that we want people to see. If we went by what the viewer wants to see we’d go by historic data, that’s what the viewer has seen and that is what the viewer has been shown. Our idea is exactly the opposite – to show what we think practice needs to be, what practice is around the world, whether it is film-based, audio-based, ephemeral, a painting or a photograph,” says Priyanka.

Prateek goes a step further. “Selling is not the point,” he says, “It’s part of a process that will eventually happen. What’s important is to be able to have the power to – for want of a better word – choose where you want to ‘place’ the work. So I am very selective about where the work goes.

It’s a strategy that has paid dividends for the Rajas, as they celebrate 10 years of being around and the opening of a second, larger space in an almost 100-year-old mansion in south Kolkata. Undoubtedly, the Indian art world will hear more and more of them in the coming days.