India Inside Out

India is at once an easy and impossible place for an artist to capture. It’s a colorful, extroverted, open-hearted culture on the one hand, and on the other, it’s a place where visual cliches lurk around every corner, waiting to trap any artist who tries to escape from them. India: Public Places, Private Spaces, an ambitious exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, confronts this paradox head-on with work that turns easy assumptions about India and Indian art on their head.

“Everything you can say about India is true and false—simultaneously,” author Suketu Mehta writes in the forward to the show’s catalog. “India is an assault on the senses; its best visual artists attempt to mediate that assault.” The artists in this exhibition walk that line skillfully.

Organized by New Jersey’s Newark Museum, India features photography and video art by twenty-eight Indian artists, each one offering a different take on the complex and often contradictory world of contemporary India.

Robert Jacobsen, curator and chairman of Asian arts at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, says that viewers will recognize many of the themes threading through this show since many of the artists do not shy away from social commentary. “Art from India over the last few decades has taken on issues familiar in the West—gender, globalization, poverty, religious conflict.”

Navjot Altaf’s large-scale video installation Lacuna in Testimony, which references a period of recent violence in Gujarat that left thousands of Muslims dead or homeless, is an example of a familiar theme tied to a highly original vision. One minute you are gazing out at the calm blue of the Arabian Sea. The next minute, the sky and sea are awash in red. “A piece like this expresses both sides of religious diversity in one work,” says Jacobsen. Which is no small feat—this is the MIA’s biggest, most important show of the fall. Oct. 26–Jan. 18, 2009. Minneapolis Institute of Arts