Jahangir Asgar Jani
(b.1955)
Jahangir did his Bachelor’s of Commerce from Mumbai University in1977. He is a self-taught artist whose work is primarily concerned with the vexations of being labelled into a group, identity, or affiliation. Jahangir’s life has been a journey from riches to rags, from escapism to self-discovery and awareness, from being unsuccessful to having job security, from a growing restlessness to an encountering of the world, and finally to revelation through art, poetry and film.
The artist’s visual vocabulary makes misalignments and disorientations of religion and sexuality, explicit. Jani summons visible markers of identity to evoke various past and present struggles and triumphs, not for any universalizing proclamations but so that he may speak on his own behalf. In a sense, the artist deconstructs private obsessions and codes of communication, that have been developed consciously or subconsciously due to associations with identity. Thus by using his work as a process of internal inquiry, his works and artistic styles have transgressed the stereotypical and reached beyond the realms of conditioning and notions. Jahangir’s oeuvre shows fluidity, a refusal to be defined and fearlessness that stems from the artist’s innocence and investigations.
Jahangir’s work has been critically written about, by respected authors and cultural theorists in India. He has had 17 solo shows since 1990 and participated in several group exhibitions in India as well as abroad. His short films have been exhibited in festivals in India, USA, UK, Canada, Korea and several countries in Europe. His short film Urmi was awarded Best Indian Narrative Short in 2013 at the KashishMIQ Film Festival in Mumbai. He received the prestigious Max Planck–TISS fellowship in 2012 for a film under the URBAN ASPIRATIONS IN GLOBAL CITIES collaboration. Mapin India has brought out a monograph, Alternate Lyricism, on him. His works are published and written about in several books on contemporary Indian art like the KHOJ BOOK 2010, and Twentieth Century Indian Sculpture and Articulating Resistance, Art and Activism. He was a visiting Lecturer at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris in 2003, and has been invited to National and International seminars, residencies and camps.
He has been conferred the Diversity Leadership Award by the World HRD Congress, USA in 2016 for his work in the field of gender and sexuality diversity through his art practice.
