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Arshia Dhar profile imageArshia Dhar

Confined to our screens during the fortuity of the past 3 years, the art community in India has now come back to claim its lost ground, with a sweet vengeance

Why the Indian art community has become more robust since the pandemic abated

Confined to our screens during the fortuity of the past three years, the art community in India has now come back to claim its lost ground, almost with a sweet vengeance

On 5 May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to COVID-19 as a global health concern. It marked a watershed moment in modern history, where one could officially label their days as belonging to the pre- or post-pandemic era.

During the pandemic, economies came to a screeching halt, the plug was pulled on several businesses, and artists without their audiences and patrons faced the music more than most others. A report titled ‘Impact of COVID-19 on India's Creative Economy’ published by the British Council in collaboration with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and The Art X Company in July 2020 mentions the following observation: “The range of sources of income reflect the mixed economy approach of the creative sector, with only 11% of income from private and government grants, 5% from online crowdfunding and 10% from philanthropy.” Broadly, the data indicated that approximately 74 per cent income, of the surveyed organisations and artists, is likely to have stopped or been curtailed during COVID-19. The numbers are indicative of the dire straits in which the arts found themselves, especially in India where every penny and resource was being—and justifiably so—redirected to handle the ongoing health crisis.

However, now is as good a time as any, when we are inching back into a new world that has weathered a fortuity unlike any we have seen before. Six months into the official conclusion to that chapter, we take stock of how the artistic landscape has evolved to coalesce idioms of the new and the old.

Art festivals, today, are more than just one-dimensional demonstrations of an artist’s offerings—they are spaces engaging curators, practitioners, collectors, and scholars who traditionally bore the reputation of being high brow, and thereby unintelligible to the everyman

Art festivals, today, are more than just one-dimensional demonstrations of an artist’s offerings—they are spaces engaging curators, practitioners, collectors, and scholars who traditionally bore the reputation of being high brow, and thereby unintelligible to the everyman

The first edition of Art Mumbai was held in November at Mumbai's Mahalaxmi Racecourse

The first edition of Art Mumbai was held in November at Mumbai's Mahalaxmi Racecourse

A burgeoning gallery culture

In 2020, the world seemed to have definitively migrated to the online realm, with the arts, artists, even patrons conversing in novelties like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that had, for a very brief moment, become the buzzword to reckon with. Needless to say, it died a natural death, and was followed by the proliferation of more art offline. “The confidence people gained during those months spent indoors allowed them to come back and engage more with the arts. There was more education during this time. Plus, there is more being put into building infrastructure that was either treated awfully before the pandemic, or was being built during the pandemic,” says Dinesh Vazirani, co-founder and CEO of Mumbai-based auction house SaffronArt, which organised Art Mumbai—the city’s first art fair—earlier this month that had over 53 participating galleries.

“There were multiple galleries that opened up in the past year only in Mumbai—like Gallery 47-A, Art and Charlie, Gallery XXL, and even the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)—which also points to the fact that there are much less speculators in this field now. People have used the time they spent inside to come back with more confidence, and the art market is doing better than I have ever seen it perform in the past 23 years I have been in the industry,” adds Vazirani.

Clearly, the purpose and vision of white cube spaces in art are evolving, including for museums, which, in a time now gradually being left behind, used to be weighed down by connotations of antiquity and stagnancy. It made them inaccessible, even intimidating for the everyman, where objects were best left untouched, and consequently, unexplored. However, over the past decade, those definitions have changed, as museums today, like the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi and Noida, The Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru, or even the Bihar Museum in Patna, are playing host to more movement and fluidity within their premises. They are more than rigid showcases housing vestiges of the past; they have now blossomed into spaces for performative cultural dialogues that not only preserve history, but allow it to transcend its physical borders as well.

N. N. Rimzon, The Tools, 1993, resin, marble dust, fibreglass and ironCollection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

N. N. Rimzon, The Tools, 1993, resin, marble dust, fibreglass and iron

Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

K. Ramanujam, Untitled, ink and wash on paperCollection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

K. Ramanujam, Untitled, ink and wash on paper

Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

“In the landscape of art, the online plays the role of building curiosity and generating awareness about an event or festival through creative storytelling. However, we must remember art is a tangible experience of the senses and engaging with it in a physical or offline space is essential. These two spectrums of the offline and online world feed into and often overlap with each other,” says Smriti Rajgarhia, director, Serendipity Arts Foundation and Serendipity Arts Festival.

With the emergence of “AI art” and artists, or prompt-writers bringing alternate realities to life, the tactility of an artist’s vision may have felt the threat of dilution for a hot minute. However, as physical events, like Rajgarhia mentions, reclaim their fleetingly lost ground, access to art is beginning to stare at a certain democratisation.

The democratisation of art

The ongoing Madras Art Weekend (MAW) in Chennai, currently in its second year, has an extensive programming that focuses on voices from the margins and the youth, who go beyond the “ten names we see in every art festival and event,” says Upasana Asrani, founder and chief-executive, MAW. It’s overwhelming, she says, to see the usual suspects every time, when it’s the new guards who are championing conversations on intangible and tangible legacies alike. “We, at MAW, believe art shouldn’t be confined within the four walls of the gallery. So we have collaborated with the Shiv Nadar Foundation who have an art bus and an art mandi, where underprivileged children display their art. This makes a massive difference to the lives of people involved,” says Asrani.

Ladies Who Lift by Karthika. Image: Madras Art Weekend

Ladies Who Lift by Karthika. Image: Madras Art Weekend

Art festivals, today, are more than just one-dimensional demonstrations of an artist’s offerings—they are spaces engaging curators, practitioners, collectors, and scholars who traditionally bore the reputation of being high brow, and thereby unintelligible to the common man. It’s what Rajgarhia aims to accomplish through the upcoming Serendipity Arts Festival, whose sixth edition is slated to be held in Goa in December. “Our curatorial approach always looks at the subject through a lens that would involve people. For instance, our culinary arts curation this year, put together by chef Thomas Zacharias and the Locavore team is advocating ‘Doing Good Through Food,’ looking at all the ways in which we consume and educate ourselves about food with a focus on the local and the sustainable—whether it is through ‘Zero-Waste Cooking,’ or ‘A Know Your Desi Vegetables’ installation, or a variety of educational workshops and talks on topics such as solutions for human-animal conflict, and climate-first futures with millets,” explains Rajgarhia. Art, of course, is meant to engage all senses and not just the visual and aural, including the taste buds within its purview. Democratisation, therefore, has to be a holistic deal.

In this regard, gallerist Mortimer Chatterjee weighs in. His newest venture, Gallery 47A—established in association with Baro Market—opened in Mumbai’s Khotachiwadi in March 2022, while we were still reasonably in the throes of the pandemic. But the need for such a space was never a question in the minds of the founders. “There had been a sense of loss during the pandemic where people had missed out on this collegial and communal way of experiencing art. It’s about building tastes and exchanging them in a collective way, and taking that away is doing damage to the arts,” says Chatterjee, adding that he observed a groundswell in this aspect over the past year. Art, after all, is as much about the community as it is about the individual. 

It’s also a trigger for extensive dialogue, which, according to Kolkata- and Goa-based artist Radhika Agarwala, is now seeing a positive thrust in the direction of even spurring resolutions for real-world issues. Agarwala’s practice, largely sculptural, deals with subjects of the cyclical nature of our environments. “From a historical lens, we have understood and celebrated art restricted within the classical representation or the white cube format, emphasising on aesthetic and social value but since the pandemic, this has largely changed. And I think this is a positive departure and beginning for the Indian landscape,” she says. According to her, artists are now doing meaningful interventions focussing on real issues that “the human race has been experiencing post pandemic. Climate change and preservation of our earth, identity and sexuality, separation and homecoming, culture and community connection are some of the most complex issues that are being addressed". But what has really shifted paradigms? “We are thinking of solutions and repair rather than representing its problems,” the artist points out, underlining the fact that art not only mirrors society, but also serves as a mirror for it.

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Arshia Dhar profile imageArshia Dhar
Arshia Dhar is a writer-editor whose work lies at the intersection of art, culture, politics, gender and environment. She currently heads the print magazine at The Hollywood Reporter India, and has worked at The Established, Architectural Digest, Firstpost, Outlook and NDTV in the past.

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