The current exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum is City Dwellers: Contemporary Art from India, which explores modern Indian cities through work drawn from the collections of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan.
In 2011, for the first time since Indian independence, the growth of urban populations exceeded that or rural areas. Indian cities are losing their homogeneity as social and economic disparity continue to increase. This unprecedented movement has not escaped Indian artists, who take great interest in city inhabitants and their relationship with their environment.
What does the exhibition tell us about Indian cities and India in general? That it’s an organized and multicultural chaos combining the past and the present: an ancient religion, Hinduism, with globalization. In Include Me Out II, Vivek Valisini examines the social structures of contemporary India and the conflict between tradition and Western influences in the replacement of bas-reliefs at the entrance to a temple with men and women from the street, tourists, and even the artist himself with his mother.
Two cultures are also superimposed in the work of Manjunath Kamath, who blends Indian and European icons, but treats them like a Renaissance triptych, while Nandini Valli Muthiah depicts Krishna, the blue-skinned God, lost in a luxury hotel room, symbolizing a world he doesn’t understand.
Changes in India can also be seen in the photographs of Dayanita Singh with the series Ladies of Calcutta, which features three generations of Indian women, including the youngest, who has traded the traditional sari for a long dress.
What City Dwellers shows us it that Indian culture likes contrast, the alliance of opposites: the past and the present, the local and the global, the East and the West. It plays with space and time in a “harmonious schizophrenia,” as the writer Pavan Sharma has said.
This exhibition is also the opportunity to present a part of the collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy, a former Microsoft executive who founded the tech company Indix, based in Seattle and Chennai. He is an Indian collector at an intersection of cultures.
EXHIBITION
City Dwellers : Contemporary Art from India
Until February 15 2015
Seattle Art Museum
1300 First Avenue
Seattle, WA 98101
USA
