Art of Modern India on View at Institut Valencia d'Art Modern (IVAM) |
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| Sunday, 14 December 2008 21:55 |
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The exhibition addresses issues concerned with the history, culture, art and social reality in India from the late 18th century until the present day. The exhibition, divided into an introduction and five chronological historic areas, comprises a tour of the “colonial” past and the “global” present of India by means of texts, documentary objects, archive material and artistic proposals. India Moderna tells the story of modernity rooted in a rich solid artistic tradition that dates back to the Exchange between Europeans and Indian society and the influence they exerted upon each other. As the curator of the exhibition, Juan Guardiola, points out, “The major thesis of the exhibition shows that modernity was not only an artistic practice in the Western World, but occurred on an international scale, so we can speak about several simultaneous modernities, all of which nourish and configure a global modernity”. The catalogue of the exhibition reproduces the works displayed and contains six essays by the specialists John Falconer, R. Siva Kumar, K.G. Subramanyan, Deepak Ananth, Geeta Kapur and the curator of the exhibition, Juan Guardiola, and also publishes an anthology of 68 texts written by authors like Mark Twain, Rabindranath Tagore, Henri Michaux, Salman Rushdie, Le Corbusier, Jack Kerouac, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shashi Tharoor and Arundhati Roy.  Modernity. The Bengala & Shantiniketan schools At the turn of the century great interest in their cultural heritage began to spread among the Indian people. A cultural movement known as the “Bengali renaissance” was born in the late 19th century. Social reformers and intellectuals from the Indian bourgeois elite were at the head of this movement. It was in this renewal of traditions as cultural ideology of nationalism that the Bengali school appeared in the first decade of the 20th century. It was followed by the Shantiniketan school as the major centre of influence in modern art in India befote it gained its independence. Global India. The Dispersión of a multicultural subcontinent Today India is undergoing spectacular economic growth which has turned it into an up-and-coming power on a global scale. Economic reform has inundated the country with consumer goods and brought about the emergence of a prosperous middle class. In the field of computer technology India has become a world leader in the development of software, but despite such great progress, unemployment and poverty still exist along with the threat of nuclear armament. This last section narrates in the present tense the reality of India in an international context where the Exchange of ideas, commodities and people has done away with the concept of culture as national heritage. The exhibition is structured in six sections. The first two are dedicated to colonial India and can be seen in Sala Pinazo; other four, focusing on India as an independent country, can be viewed in Galería 3. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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