India Exposed

India is often described as overwhelming to the senses, a place so intense and colorful that the substance of the country and its culture often gets lost beneath the dazzling surface. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ new exhibition of contemporary Indian photography and video art explores this paradox with a highly diverse collection of work that provides plenty to attract the eye while bypassing and often subverting the visual clichés about India that are so engrained in our collective psyche.

India: Public Spaces, Private Places, organized by the Newark Museum, is the MIA’s first foray into contemporary Indian art. The exhibition focuses on photography and video art from twenty-eight Indian artists arranged into four broad categories: street life, the collision of public and private, personal identity, and the experience of immigrant Indians.

Robert Jacobsen, MIA curator and chairman of Asian arts, describes the show as equal parts style and substance, brimming with irony and humor, serious subject matter, and even some whimsy. The thread holding it all in a state of creative tension is the social, economic, and political upheaval caused by globalization. In this increasingly uncertain world, “people are left creating new identities for themselves in a hurry,” says Jacobsen. The work in this show captures the growing pains of an ancient culture emerging as a major contemporary power.

Such tensions can produce interesting juxtapositions, as the photographs of Shahid Datawala aptly demonstrate. In his large-scale black-and-white images, billboards of Bollywood heroines in the throes of ecstasy populate the background of otherwise banal street scenes. The reason: “For millions of Indians, wherever they live,” says Datawala, “a major part of India derives from the movies.”

The exhibition includes a number of large-scale video installations, including Shilpa Gupta’s untitled interactive video featuring life-sized images of the artist dressed in a variety of costumes, each of which can be made to pose according to the will of the viewer. “In a capitalist society, we enjoy being programmed,” says Gupta. “We find instant satiation and loss of memory in turning ourselves into puppets: Everybody bend, don’t talk, don’t see, don’t hear. Gandhi said so.”

Navjot Altaf’s Lacuna in Testimony, another ambitious video installation, takes things in an entirely different direction. The image on the screen fluctuates between a calm blue and an ominous red seascape. Altaf’s inspiration for the installation was the 2002 communal riots in the Gujarat state, during which Hindu fundamentalists went on a violent rampage against the largely Muslim population following an incident in which Hindu pilgrims died when a railway coach caught fire. Altaf spent time in the city of Ahmadabad talking with members of the affected communities.

“Lacuna in Testimony is about attempting to listen to the testimonies and to question whether one can enumerate and describe these events, as they remain opaque when one truly seeks to understand them,” says Altaf. “Testimonies contain lacuna, the threshold of the distinction between inside and outside, which I see as a connection or a dialogue.”

American viewers will find particular resonance in the portraits of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew. Born in Chennai and living in the United States, Matthew co-opts a visual cliché to clever ends. She takes portraits of Indian–Americans in poses that mirror Native Americans in vintage photographs, labeling them with phrases such as Noble Savage/Savage Noble and Red Indian/Brown Indian suggesting an unexpected kinship.

“The way that nineteenth-century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives is similar to the colonial gaze of the nineteenth-century British photographers working in India,” says Matthew. “In every culture there is the ‘other.’ I challenge the viewers’ assumptions of then and now, us and them, exotic and local.”

Through Jan. 18. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls., 612-870-3131