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Business acumen and intellect are the two greatest talents of the art world in India. A report from the rapidly developing subcontinent.I have been visiting India regularly for fifteen years and have seen a considerable transformation take place in the art world there. The commercial gallery sector has seen the most dramatic changes in recent years, particularly in the rolling out of world class exhibition space for Indian artists to show their work. Older galleries such as the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi and Chemould and Sakshi galleries in Mumbai have relocated to new premises, and have now been joined by numerous younger ones, including Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Chatterjee & Lal, Experimenter and Gallery Ske, to name but a few. Whilst in Delhi, the commercial galleries are far flung, in Mumbai, there is a concentration in the city’s southern tip around Colaba and the CST train station (formerly Victoria Terminus), which along with nearby arts institutions such as the NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art) makes for an arts quarter that is reasonably accessible by foot. Whatever you think of the impact of this sector on the art world in general, what is striking about it is its professionalism and international outlook. During the recent boom, new galleries like Bhodi Art also financed large-scale projects from artists with a previously unavailable level of resources and pushed prices up. While this has stalled somewhat during the last few years of financial uncertainty, with a re-energised Indian economy growing at an average of eight percent per annum, confidence has now returned. Internationalism has come in a number of guises. The commercial galleries have begun to show and develop a market for the work of artists from outside of India, something almost unheard of ten years ago, and they are increasingly active in promoting their artists abroad. Major art fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze have been tentatively introducing Indian galleries, sometimes as one-off invitations and special projects, while others such as ARCO in 2009, have made India a guest of honour showcasing individual artists, galleries and organising related events. Asian art fairs such as Shanghai and Dubai feature Indian galleries as a matter of course. Now that Delhi’s own art fair, the India Art Summit, approaching its third year, it can claim initial success in terms of visibility and momentum, sales, and the ability to increasingly attract galleries from outside of India.

Artists’ initiatives

By comparison, the not-for-profit sector is fragile, providing fewer opportunities for artists to develop their work outside of a commercial context. Much of what there is has at some point been self-initiated by artists and kept going with funding from outside of India, through international agencies such as the Ford Foundation. KHOJ, for example, began as a series of artist workshops and has developed into a critical component of India’s arts infrastructure, and the hub for a network of artists across South Asia, providing a space for research, experimentation and discussion through residencies, workshops and publicly-sited projects as well as housing an archive. Also in Delhi, FICA (Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art), supported by Vadehra Gallery as a not-for-profit wing of its organisation, has began to play an important role in organising an artistic programme as well as working internationally, and Sarai (at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) provides a discursive space and an archive of material relating to visual culture in India as well as giving small grants to artists and academics to undertake research, and it has plans to set up studios in different parts of the city.Despite its being heavily weighted towards the commercial sector, Mumbai has a community of artists busy with more socially engaged practice, ranging from the now discontinued Open Circle Arts, who organised an artistic programme for the World Social Forum when it took place in the city in 2004, to CAMP, a loose affiliation of artists who have initiated a space dedicated to new kinds of artistic production and distribution, to Majlis, an interdisciplinary arts initiative with its roots in the woman’s movement of the 1980s. Bangalore is an interesting case in point, furnished with only one or two commercial galleries, and with few other spaces in which to show their work, several generations of artists in the city have taken it upon themselves to organise their own projects. This currently includes several long-standing and building-based organisations such as 1 Shanthi Road, which hosts exhibitions, events and residencies; Bengaluru Artist Residency One (BAR 1), a residency programme which also provides an important meeting place for the city’s arts community; and a host of more ephemeral projects, some of which involve direct interventions in the public domain.Another Bangalore initiative is COLAB Art & Architecture, which previously ran out of a space and now functions as an agency, collaborating with organisations such as the Goethe Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, on programmes in India and abroad. Cultural agencies such as the Alliance Française, the British Council and Max Mueller Bhavan constitute an important resource in the major cities where they are located, although being multi art-form, the emphasis on the visual arts is dependant in most cases on who is director or arts officer at any given time.

New building

In terms of the state, there is a wide network of government-run institutions across the country, including major museums which hold collections and mount temporary exhibitions, situated in the five metropolitan areas as well as in some provincial centres, such as Lucknow and Chandigarh. The most important is the NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art) which has branches in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. On the whole, artists don’t consider these institutions as a relevant option for their work. Often run by people who are not directly involved in contemporary art, and bound up in red tape, they tend to be slow-moving and inaccessible. They do, however, represent something of an untapped resource, both in terms of their collections, some of which are extensive, as well as the centrally-located and spacious exhibition spaces that they have to offer.The Mumbai branch is housed in a majestic building made up of ascending concentric galleries around an inner staircase leading to a domed gallery, and the other two have recently opened brand-new extensions. These museums do occasionally mount important shows, and change may be at hand, what with a growing awareness even at the government level of the dynamism of contemporary Indian art, and the appointment of new curators and artists’ boards in certain key institutions. This could potentially promote a different institutional culture that connects these institutions more closely to the art scene.Other government agencies, such as the Lalit Kala Academy in Delhi, provide a space that artists can hire to show their work (something which has been common practice in India, although recently less so) as does the Jahangir Gallery in Mumbai, managed by the Bombay Art Society. A new development has been in the area of private museums. These are often owned and run by collectors and galleries as a not-for-profit wing of their organisation. The Devi Art Foundation located in Gurgaon, a rapidly developing satellite city outside Delhi, is housed in a dramatic, purpose-built structure, with a collection (although this is principally installed in the office spaces), temporary exhibitions of work by artists from South Asia, and an educational programme. FICA still has the long-term aim of opening an art museum in Delhi and is currently considering what kind of institution this might be, and plans are underway for the opening of the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art, in a building designed by Herzog & de Meuron slated to open in 2013.

International attention

While Indian artists have become a staple feature of almost every international biennial, India has no formal representation at the Venice Biennial, and this will probably continue to be the case, as this seems not to be on the government’s agenda. When in 2005 the curator and gallerist Peter Nagy, along with curators Julie Evans and Gordon Knox, mounted the exhibition iCon: India Contemporary in lieu of an India Pavilion, and as a way of showcasing the recent artistic developments in the sub continent, they did so with private support. However, the recent surge of interest in contemporary Indian art has given rise to a string of group exhibitions in major museums and art institutions internationally that frame the work on display within a specifically regional/national context. What is important now is to follow this interest up with both historical and monographic exhibitions (a good example was the exhibition of Amrita Sher-Gil at the Tate Modern in 2007) that give an historical background and present Indian artists’ work on its own terms. Finally, the area of publishing, both in terms of monographic catalogues, art historical books and art journals, is changing in response to recent developments. In terms of journals, nothing has emerged in recent years which is of the same calibre as the interdisciplinary and now defunct Journal of Arts and Ideas founded by Geeta Kapur and others, although ART India has provided a durable reviews journal under a variety of editors, and a crop of websites such as www.artconcerns.com provide unregulated commentary online. What has grown in recent years is book publishing, with galleries now regularly producing monographic publications of their artists, as well as a series of readers and art historical and contemporary surveys being produced by organisations including Khoj and the School of Art & Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. The Khoj Book: 1997 – 2007, Contemporary Art Practice in India (Harper Collins Publishers, 2010) in particular, consolidates much of what has happened over the last ten years. With lead essays by key figures from the Indian art world as well as interviews with artists, it is a good option for somebody who has just read this brief account of the art world in India and is looking for something more substantial. Grant Watson is senior curator and research associate at Iniva in London. He was invited by the Max Mueller Bhavan (the Goethe Institute in India) to participate in a study in 2009 on cultural spaces in the five Indian cities where this organization is located.