Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India

Globalization, Fundamentalism, Place, and Desire

Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni: Lakshmi, from the series Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs, 2002-03; manual photographic print on metallic paper; 27 2/1 x 22 3/4 in.; collection of the artists.

Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India presents the work of thirty-six artists and three collectives from both urban and rural India. The artists in this selection come from a wide range of contexts, and their work spans professional, material, and disciplinary boundaries.

While embracing these diversities within the frame of a single exhibition is significant to this project, the viewer will not find here a survey of contemporary Indian art. Rather, Edge of Desire is hinged on a particular—and necessarily partisan—perspective on recent history. I have chosen to ground the exhibition in the interplay of two binaries: historical processes of globalization and fundamentalism; and ideational forces of place and desire, primary factors in a complex of relationships through which human beings engage with the world.

India is notoriously a multiverse of often-conflicting realities. Extreme conditions routinely coexist here, famously manifesting sensory overload, for seasoned inhabitants as well as visitors. The nation's recent history has been dominated by forces that seek to regulate this plurality: the twin exigencies of economic globalization and political fundamentalism have distinctly altered relations of power, cultural identity, and aesthetic values both within and between communities. The role that the artist may play in this situation shifts constantly between that of sham/shaman and witness/confessor. Some works play with “faking it,” casting the self as pretend representative of ideas or communities. Others rely on the dream of life-transforming action. Occasionally, they essay the more earnest role of the witness, blessed with a faculty of vision that pierces through the veils of history. It is also this assumed, illusory, elusive vision that allows artists to play the role of confessor and healer, or of the fool who speaks the truth, albeit through subterfuge and humor.

Edge of Desire is certainly about a certain period—roughly 1993 to 2003—in India's recent history. More important perhaps, it is about artists making art in difficult times; it is about artists harnessing myriad traditions from different parts of the world; it is about artists responding to immediate realities with organic fluidity and passion. The exhibition offers an invitation to enter into dialogues and arguments, through a selection of work that is as polymorphous as it is sensual, challenging as well as uplifting. The questions that the artists represented here are concerned with are not only significant in India; they have something to do with the purposes of art in the world today.

Chaitanya Sambrani
Exhibition Curator

Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India is co-organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and is curated by Chaitanya Sambrani.

The Berkeley presentation of Edge of Desire has been supported by the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley and by Ginger and Moshe Alafi.