Events

Art exists in a dynamic dialogue with the world it inhabits—a landscape ever-changing, layered with histories, and charged with urgent ecological, social, and existential questions. In a world marked by rapid socio-political and technological shifts, South Asia’s contemporary art emerges as a profound response to the forces shaping and fragmenting our shared realities. ‘Contours of Contemporary’ charts a diverse spectrum of artistic voices that confront the fragility of boundaries—between nature and humanity, tradition and innovation, the self and the collective.  

This exhibition explores how artists navigate the intersections of identity, history, and materiality. By engaging with issues such as urbanization, environmental fragility, migration, and cultural loss, these artists situate themselves within broader questions of belonging and transformation. The show emphasizes how contemporary South Asian artists move beyond the lens of colonial art history, instead crafting alternative narratives that mirror the complex contours of modern life in the region.

Artists like Aninda Singh and Pratul Dash probe humanity’s troubled relationship with nature, presenting visual metaphors for ecological crises. Others, like Sudipta Das and Chandan Bez Baruah, explore displacement and cultural memory through materials steeped in fragility and nostalgia. Meanwhile, the works of Harisha Chennangod evoke the tension between structure and chaos, negotiating spaces of change and resistance.  

The exhibition also highlights a resurgence of traditional forms reinvigorated by new idioms. Chetan Solanki’s use of natural pigments and miniature-inspired practices, alongside Sanket Viramgami’s reimagined mythologies, subvert established paradigms while reaffirming the value of cultural heritage in contemporary contexts. While Yogesh Ramakrishna uses humor and drama to critique socio-political paradigms. Thus, each work becomes a fragment in the mosaic of contemporary human experience. The use of unconventional mediums—resin, natural pigments, or even digital prints on matchboxes—demonstrates the unbounded creativity of this collective, each artist pushing their chosen medium to its expressive limits. 

Ultimately, ‘Contours of Contemporary’ delves into the shifting aspirations and anxieties of our times. It interrogates how artists confront the values of their societies while fostering critical reflections on humanity’s role within precarious ecosystems and fractured histories. The exhibition is a contemplation on “contours”—the boundaries we trace and the spaces we inhabit, whether physical, emotional, or conceptual. By traversing these contours, the works prompt a collective inquiry into the connections and disconnections of our contemporary moment, urging viewers to reimagine relationships with themselves, others, and the world.  

LATITUDE 28 forays this exhibition as a challenge to assumptions and fosters a deeper engagement with the dynamic and ever-evolving narratives of South Asian art. By mirroring these transformative waves of culture and history, the exhibition becomes a space for inquiry and engagement. It invites viewers to reflect on the contours of their own lives as they traverse the layered, evocative works on display.

Viewers familiar with Pratul Dash’s oeuvre will discover a startling change in his present solo exhibition. The artist is associated with a lush-hued figurative style combining politically engaged realism with Daliesque reverie. In contrast, his creations of the past three years are monochromatic semi-abstract landscapes, frequently constituted by tiny circular forms, painstakingly drawn, reminiscent of blood cells seen under high magnification. The new compositions, epic in scale, conjure night skies, caverns and grottos, cross sections of mountains, aerial views of alluvial tracts, and the earth seen from outer space. 

Figures do appear, including motifs used in previous paintings such as an ostrich with its head buried in the ground, but are dwarfed by their surroundings. Since these figures carry the political heft of paintings like the enormous six-panel canvas 24×7: A Global Discourse, their relative inconspicuousness could signal the marginalisation of inconvenient truths in an era marked by polarisation and weaponised disinformation. However, it would be an injustice to dismiss the intricate, exquisite patterns that dominate each painting as mere distractions from real issues represented by the figures. The foregrounding of the background, as it were, suggests that the artist is placing the present moment and immediate social concerns within a bigger picture involving nature’s sublimity, which is undiminished by humanity’s depredations. These two readings are contradictory yet simultaneously valid – like alternate orientations of a Necker cube – and taken together capture some of the complexity of signification generated by the show.

– Text by Girish Shahane

The optics of illusion that makes two dimensional lines appear to have movement or suggest a three dimensional space – where the conjuring of a visual tactility seduces the eye. My work is about the conflict, as it is about the calm. I identify with a politics that regards human life and the dignity of its preservation as important. Many of the works in this exhibition come from texts that I extract from my readings – books that are mostly political and historical – and works of fiction from geographical territories which have narratives of the histories of conflict and turmoil. These texts create a journey back and forth in time, sometimes a sense of loss and sometimes a sense of connection. The texts I select from larger passages of writing undergo a series of transformations using Morse code as a method to re-write them. I then inscribe these texts through varied ways. Sometimes articulated via the carbon of graphite pencils making nuanced lines on the paper surface or mechanism of burning the paper using laser – which is fed by instructions via these codes- that then creates burnt marks on paper, or perforations on these layered sheets of gateway paper which become a metaphor to skin; or the rhythm of layered translucent papers that become a palimpsest that suggests the altered. Multiple layers of these codes then transform to become multiple layers of memory on each surface – like a landscape of floating rhythms.

– Ankush Safaya

Throughout history landscapes have been an important visual foundation for artistic practice. Its artistic presence across various cultures and time periods has led to the emergence of landscape as an important genre in art. Though used as an umbrella term or misunderstood as a monolithic practice the diverse forms of artistic expression that engage with the space around them attest to the heterogeneity of this genre. This diversity of practices calls for a curatorial revisit to understand the contemporary artistic engagement with landscape. Though landscape is considered as the representation of an external reality, this exhibition correlates it as an expression of artistic interiority. The curatorial premise of inscape allows us to explore various artistic practices that engage with psychogeography, cultural rootedness, atmospheric pieces, and visual reconfiguring of the spaces. The idea is inspired by the classical Sangam poetic tradition where the five ecozones/landscapes (tinais) were closely integrated with the emotional conditions of the characters.

In a rambling (and ultimately self-rejected) concept note to his series Somewhere in Northeast India, Chandan had opined that one purpose to his landscapes was “to see the insight terrain of the marginalised or the subaltern, and to situate Postmodern landscapes as encountering Romantic theory”. The truth of Chandan’s statement is evident when looking at the work. Meticulously carved upon medium density wood-fibre matrixes, these woodcuts nonetheless spring from the digital photographs which Chandan has earlier captured for reference. The artist’s inspired translation of these photographs, and highly skilled hand-craftsmanship, is astounding. The photorealist style he painstakingly employs is complicated by the chaos of the scenes; a chaos unlike the orderly compositions one might expect in more traditional and Pictorialist vocabularies, yet which holds a graphic beauty of its own. Devoid of human figuration or wildlife, Chandan unashamedly subscribes to the notion of the solitary observer, or, as the American photographer Ansel Adamas once put it,

To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, ‘There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.’ Yet, there are many more than two people in these woodcuts. There are multitudes. Chandan’s stark, mountainous undergrowth exists within ecologies and geographies of history, culture, and contemporary conflict.

Rahul Kumar entered the corporate would just 20 years back, when he was coerced by his family to get a ‘life’. He is a Fulbright Scholar with a Masters in Arts from USA and a Charles Wallace fellow. A recipient of scholarships from the India Foundation for the Arts and the Ministry of Culture (Government of India), his art works have been auctioned at Sotheby’s, London and are part of significant collections, including the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Rahul was the founding team-member of an art venture incubated by NDTV, where he was also involved in television programming on art. Safety out-of-the-rat-race, he is now living his dream, writing on visual arts, curating art shows and residencies He is the Editor (Arts) – STIR, a global publication on art, architecture, and design. Rahul served as the Consulting Editor – Arts Illustrated and writer for MINT-Lounge. He has been published with Vogue, Canvas Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, TAKE on Art, Indian Quarterly, mondo* Arch, Open Magazine, and Scroll.

Through collections and assemblages of her now-iconic doll-like paper sculptures, Das dives into personal history and family narratives to explore themes of exile, refuge and temporariness of life. Meticulously crafted from layers and layers of handmade Hanji paper, her chosen medium is fragile, yet resistant. A quality that reflects the tenacity of the unnamed people whose stories she seeks to tell. An unsuspecting medium, paper has long been a hidden protagonist in the narratives of placelessness. Without paper, one has no form of identification. Without identification, one loses the freedom to move from place to place. One loses their proof of belonging.

Explore with her how the artworks of 16 artists across 4 countries of South Asia were woven together in this exhibition.

This exhibition examines the oxymoron of ‘contemporary history’ through the phenomenon of mythopoesis commonly understood as the power of myths to engender or modulate reality. The concept of the ‘contemporary’ as the fleeting ‘nowness’ is at odds with history taken to mean the documented past. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the instant the duration of the contemporary is registered, it seizes to be of the present and passes into the domain of the past. On the other hand, mythical thinking appears to operate from the vanishing point of an unspecified past, if not the pre-historic, from where it continues to guide the present. Its hold and influence is partly due to the patina of seemingly incontrovertible timelessness and veracity acquired through the repeated practice of collective belief over an extended period of time. Whilst the hauntology or the point of origination of myths is subject to uncertainty, their teleology remains firmly rooted in the present such that old myths are periodically revived and refitted to the demands of the contemporary. One way to create contemporary mythologies then is through speculation, a prognosis of the moment that is to unfold in the near future or is the projected outcome of a present continuous.

‘Cartography of Narratives’, showcased works by 16 artists from the Indian subcontinent and beyond. What does civilisation contain but disjointed lived experiences of passing temperaments. Through evidential remnants, phantom memories and oral narratives, contemporary mythopoesis issues out of empirical notions, experiences and sustained gestures. Interspersed with the physical, the architectural and the natural, the ‘Cartography of Narratives’ becomes a mapping of the lived, imagined and the oneiric, that clutch within its framework, hints to aspects of reality. The panorama is structured on a network of consequences, with possible contingencies determined by their causal relationships. Fact and fiction become ambiguous entities. While history can be viewed in the light of factual evidences of a recent past, mythology, contained within fictional configurations, harks back to primeval times. What amount of truth lies in contemporary reiterations of these historical chronicles, without an element of fiction? While history on the one hand is selective, on the other, as a result of repeated iterations, it becomes a fabrication over due course.

In a world where academic and even popular discourse has moved beyond Saidian concepts of Orientalism and Othering to a new and broader terrain that encompasses “whiteness”, “privilege”, and “cultural appropriation”, the foreign white artist in Asia finds his or herself in ever more uncomfortable political/philosophical positions. For those of us who make an attempt at art making (I consider photography intrinsically linked with the other arts), the knowledge that we will probably trespass a critical line of “correctness”, intentionally or unintentionally, is always there. As an artist-photographer who has lived and worked in India for well over sixteen years, a large part of my concerns have been with navigating, responding to, or combatting what sometimes seems as an insurmountable outsider-ness both within and beyond the Indian art scene. This “outsider-ness” extends to geographies elsewhere aside from India, where both white and non-white curators question the validity of a non-Indian claiming membership in the “Indian artist club”, bringing up the issue, rightly or wrongly, of racial identity as a signifier.