In the wake of two exhibitions Shanay Jhaveri speaks to Gayatri Sinha of The Met’s new approach to its “blind spot”, modern and contemporary art in South Asia.
Gayatri Sinha: You have joined The Met at an interesting time, when it has a much more expanded program on India/South Asia.
Shanay Jhaveri: The Met has always had an engaged relationship with South Asia, with over ten departments collecting from the region. The emphasis has been on the pre-modern and classical. Sheena Wagstaff who joined the museum in late 2012, is responsible for expanding the remit to include Modern and Contemporary from the region. My responsibilities include collection building and curating exhibitions of work from and related to the region. However, this is not exclusive of my participating in a broader and more considered discussion of how our department and The Met approaches modern and contemporary art.
GS: How does the department date the modern and within that, South Asia?
SJ: The Met has for itself over a period of almost 150 years established a fairly defined chronology for itself. It has 17 departments and the Modern and Contemporary department is amongst one of them. Following the museum’s logic and periodization, the departments remit begins around the turn of the twentieth century and carries up to the present. How we locate the modern within that and modern art from the non-West (complimentary to my position are dedicated curatorships for the Middle East and Latin America) is something that we as a department continue to discuss and debate. Our conversations are of course informed by much discourse from within the field about where and how we understand the modern and modernism.
With specific regard to South Asia, and India, the simple but very provocative question that Geeta Kapur has proposed “When was modernism” and the subsequent dialogue that has ensued has guided my thinking and approach. Furthermore, I arrived at the museum just as the Met Breuer was opening its doors to the public in the Spring of 2016. Sheena inaugurated the museum’s exhibition programme with a retrospective of Nasreen Mohamedi, which in a sense set the tone for how I would continue forward. Nasreen’s retrospective also stood testament to the department’s commitment to reconsider a received art history where the modern, its periodization and definition has for the most part been oriented to a Western context.
The show did receive unanimous praise but I think that there were some people who suggested that it was a vision and aesthetic-vocabulary that has more of a familiar resonance with Western audiences. I don’t think that it is fair because if one were to fully engage and understand Nasreen’s practice, you see how she evolves her idiom from a whole set of eclectic vantage points.
GS: That’s true, including the Islamic inspirations in her work, Sufism and its innate spirit of refinement.
SJ: Modernist architecture as well. Her being sited out of Baroda.
GS: But this was also the forgotten modernism of Baroda. I think Roobina Karode of KNMA has done a good job of excavating or of at least putting them together sequentially, abstract artists Nasreen Mohammedi, Himmat Shah and Jeram Patel, the fact that they have come together, one retrospective after another and there may be more.
SJ: With an emphasis on abstraction as well. Such a contemporaneous re-engagement with this part of the modernity project of Baroda, taking place in India, courtesy in part of the shows that Roobina has done, as indicated by you, has been for me personally stimulating to witness and even experience, in being able to see these works of art in the flesh, which one has only heard about or seen in poor black and white reproductions. Baroda, of course, has always occupied a prominent place in our received art history, and those practices that are known remain of import, but now orienting them to another set of aesthetic and ideological positions seems necessary and from a more fulsome picture perhaps inform curatorial and art historical agendas going forward. I know that it is having an impact on my thinking, and activities at the museum.
GS: What is the approach and the nature of the commitment towards building a contemporary South Asian collection?
SJ: When I arrived at the museum, our holdings of work from the region were modest. Sheena had begun to acquire work and this included Zarina, Rasheed Araeen and Anwar Jalal Shemza. She had also facilitated a very generous gift of Krishna Reddy’s work. Immediately to my mind this group of artists represented something specific, each having lived outside of the region for most parts of their career, and also the deferred, more fulsome recognition of the significance of their practices within the region. The transnational and the cosmopolitan are ideas that are oft invoked when thinking about these artists, and terms that I was actively investigating as an independent writer and curator.
When I was asked to join the museum I was quite immersed in doing academic, more discursive work. I had programmed film, I come from a background in film studies and curated three exhibitions that involved real, physical artworks. It was the show at the Palais de Tokyo called Companionable Silences (2013) that really was a manifestation of what my preoccupations were at that moment. The show looked at Paris as a site where a number of non-Western women had passed through in the early part of 20th century and what did it mean in terms of their understanding or evolution of a modernist language.
It went from the early twenties to the sixties and it wasn’t comprehensive. It was a proposition really to think of two things. One is to decentre Paris because these women passed through Paris, so they took something and went away. How do you think of these sites within a transnational artistic practice and secondly who were these women? What were the circumstances that facilitated their ability to be in Paris? They were privileged or wives or daughters or sisters of people who had the ability to travel at that time. How did they choose to engage themselves and present themselves within the community there? I oriented it firmly around Amrita Sher-Gil because she became the entry point into that history, building the show around Self-portrait as a Tahitian….
GS: That’s the work that was quite conspicuous in documenta 14…
SJ: Yes. The goal for me was to take that picture back to Paris in 2013 (coincidentally the centennial year of Sher-Gil’s birth) after it had been painted there in 1934 and to stage a reckoning in terms of asking this question about how have perspectives changed and has the conversation moved forward in terms of the modern gaze on the female, the gaze on the other, also the kind of conviction with which she (Amrita) stages that confrontation.
GS: Does she stage it with conviction? One of the criticisms about that work is that atthis time in the West there was a lot of this kind of staging in any case. It was very much the modish thing to so, to dress yourself up seen as a“foreign”andseeitmore as an amusement. The work represents the semi nude non Western Indian body against a Far eastern backdrop.
SJ: There is a looseness to her referencing.
GS: Apart from the looseness, it is her chosen context. She chooses to put herself into a still further Eastern Orient with the suggestion of painted Chinoiserie, given the fact that it was one of the greatest commercial exports into Western Europe. How significant is this?
SJ: I think these being her choices is significant. A self-determination, which one sees in a number of the women artists I had in the exhibition such as Tarsila Do Amaral and Saloua Radou Choucair. The question of agency also comes into play, and how the self is organized and projected is something I was quite curious about. In my PhD I was examining cosmopolitanism and ideas of self-fashioning and my three case studies were Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Bhupen Khakhar and Raghubir Singh. Finding a resonance between my own thinking and the departments as lead by Sheena was important when making the decision to join the museum. The fact that I was effectively being handed a blank slate with regard to South Asia was another decisive component.
GS: How do you identify particular contexts in the building of a regional art history?
SJ: The museum advance into acquiring and exhibiting art from the region is belated and that is a fact which cannot be ignored or disregarded when formulating a collection or exhibition programme. This needs to be acknowledged and in some manner must impact how the museum orients itself to modern and contemporary art from the region. What I feel that I am able to do in this process is to be able to stand back and simultaneously reconsider a global art history and a regional art history. Is it about searching for points of connection and intersection? That is one way of setting up an entry point, but that cannot be at the expense of occluding the particular contexts in which art was made, in very determined and conscious ways. The challenge is how can I through the choices I make, and the department makes in terms of what we acquire and programme achieve or articulate this conundrum.
GS: What can be the insertions or interjections which re-reading will necessitate and bring out? But to come to the point that you mentioned about the women passing through, a number of important artists came to the United States in the early 1960s, under the JD Rockefeller III Award. There is this sense of passage and perhaps recent return as in the case of Gaitonde. But the fact that museums like The Met or MoMA didn’t acquire these pieces at that time, and that even now, they don’t rest in the West. Is that going to be one of the things you will address?
SJ: It is crucial that museums accept and admit to what have been their blind spots. For the Met modern and contemporary art from South Asia is one such blind spot, the museum did not acquire those works in the moment in which they were being made, and this is for many reasons. The objects the Met has always acquired from South Asia have been historic. There was no kind of engagement with the modern and contemporary. As the curator tasked in the present I feel it is necessary to address and answer to this past, and going forward be wary that in the process of this redressal the current collection building strategy does not lapse into a ‘catch up modernism’ or one intent on plugging holes or gaps, but acquisition decisions are made with numerous other considerations, art historical, but also practical. There are just certain things that I won’t be able to acquire for the museum, and that is fine. It is a reality that needs to be accepted and recognized. The collection we are in the process of assembling will be contoured by and around other kinds of concerns, which may not always follow pre-established modes and models of museum collecting. We are as a department still asking questions and that is at the core of our mission.
GS: Do you see this as a Saidian moment in the history of collecting in the West? Said argued in ‘Orientalism’ that ancient India is good modern India is not so good in the eyes of the West. It’s not an area of engagement and we see that reflected in collection making…
SJ: Yes I think that has been a position held and we are here to have a reckoning with that history.
GS: That is from the curatorial position?
SJ: Can any curatorial decision in a place like the Met be made and not be motivated by an understanding of art history? At least that in part has motivated my decision to make my first group of acquisitions to be works by K.G. Subramanyan, which I made in June 2016 prior to the opening of documenta 14 and his passing. Subramanyan to my mind is necessary as an orienting factor because not only does he straddle Santiniketan and Baroda but is also a pedagogue. One could radiate backwards and forwards in collection building and also group artists through not just formal affinities but also think about community
GS: It is interesting because Subramanyan isn’t easy to slot. He’s a bit of a lonely tower, like an Amir Khan of Indian contemporary art. Who do you put around KG Subramanyan becomes a moot point. I think what he is doing with particularities like what he does with the figure of the woman suggests multiple misogynies. What he does with the figure of the goddess and the desacralization that that suggests. There is an embedding of a number of these ideas which make him a very valuable artist. It’s a very particular kind of modernity which you will not find in a Husain or a Souza.
SJ: That’s exactly why I felt he was crucial for me to use as an orienting factor and the works that we have acquired and were brought to me were not the works that you mentioned actually. The 60s works just before post New York where you actively see the engagement with the paradigm of Western painting and how he starts to ungrid that, the play with figuration and abstraction, that would be a way of bringing him into context at the museum. Subramanyan clearly means something for the Indian works in the collection, but it has to also stand by the rest of the museum’s collection, and this is something, which cannot be forgotten. These works that were adding with a particular logic that reverts back to the region also exists at the Met in other parallel tenses and conditions and this needs to be always kept in mind. Following him, my next group of acquisitions has been Mrinalini Mukherjee. We have three works by her in the collection, from each period of her practice, a fiber, ceramic and bronze. Now to compliment her and keep Subramanyan in mind there are other artists I am pursuing. As you can see my advance has been of exploring and formulating a grouping of works around affinities such as pedagogy,but also friendship. I also want to cuts across generations.
GS: You’re thinking around Arpita, Nilima those kinds of artists…
SJ: Perhaps,Ican’tbespecific atthis moment as we are still in the process of securing some of these acquisitions. Complimentary to this consortium is another trajectory to explore, and Nasreen becomes a starting point. She in fact sets up many trajectories to follow. How do we think through this idea of a minimal non representational vocabulary in relation to the region and to bring that from that moment to the present? Also, the specter of the transnational and cosmopolitan we discussed earlier as embodied by her. The Nasreen work we have in the collection is a gift from Zarina. As you know, they were good friends, and when I met with Zarina and she realized that the museum did not have a work by Nasreen in its collection, she very generously agreed to gift us a work that Nasreen had gifted her when she came to stay with her in New York. The work carries in it a gesture of enduring friendship and we are thrilled and very fortunate to have it.
Our collection as it evolves, is perhaps questioning what would be ‘the comprehensive collection of South Asian Modern and Contemporary art’. Is that even possible? There are limitations with the early part of the 20th century because just for the museum to acquire those works is not possible because it’s that they are national treasures and finding comparable work outside the country is not possible. Also, it is about finding the right works and in many cases these are already in private and public collections.
GS: Given the difficulty in acquiring modernist works outside the region, how do you build up a representative collection?
SJ: Building the collection is a gradual process and a fair amount of my time in the first year at the museum was trying to articulate how this will begin to manifest, ideologically but also practically. Also, adding works to the collection is one thing, but it is in my mind essential that the region is represented consistently at the museums through exhibitions or major gallery displays. Each carry a value and importance, and be ensuring that this happens the region remains animate in our audiences mind, and maybe they are able to follow some of these thought processes we are trying to follow and make manifest. Since 2016, we have had a show by an artist from the region, it was Nasreen first, then Raghubir Singh (which was organized by my colleague in the photo department Mia Fineman) and now in 2018 a collection display of an immersive installation by Ranjani Shettar that has joined the museum’s collection that I have organized and the Huma Bhabha roof commission which I have curated. Ranjani’s work is a gift from the Tia Collection and is the first of a group of works by four women artists, a cross regional and cross generational group that will be joining the collection over the next two years and will be on view. Concurrently, I am planning by a solo exhibition of another female Indian sculptor at the Met Breuer in the summer of 2019.
GS: Do you acquire what you show?
SJ: We show what we acquire. During my first year and half at the museum there was no work from the region on view in our galleries and with Ranjani’s display this has been addressed, and next year the department is collectively working towards a major rehang that will include a number, but not all of our recent acquisitions and gifts from the region. However, before that in the Fall of 2018 we are going to showcase another gift I have brought in and this is by the Bangladeshi artist Rashid Choudhury. It is gift from Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, and marks quite a historic moment, as it is the first work of Bangladeshi art that will join the Met’s collection. Another work that we have acquired is Nalini Malani’s In Search of Vanished Blood which was in a previous documenta and we are working towards presenting that at the museum in quite a unique and special way that will be a collaboration between two departments. Nalini’s work is a more ‘contemporary’ work, that is, made more recently and allows for us to initiate another trajectory of collecting.
GS: The ‘contemporary’ in the region is also diverse. Is there a philosophy or approach to guide your acquisitions?
SJ: I think that you need to collect contemporaneous works that are actively dealing with its political reality. They help to orient the historic works to the present, and vice versa. Our engagement is not purely historic but extends into our fraught present times and I feel strongly that we need to be part of this conversation through what we acquire, but also exhibit.