CURATION IN THE ABSENCE OF ART CRITICISM
Rahul Bhattacharya

CURATION came to India as a curse and a charm. Just like steel and glass in architecture, it is/was shiny, ‘new’ and Global. There was also a fundamental vacuum in the pedagogical and discursive aspects of Indian modern and contemporary art. Even until the dawning of the millennia, the academic institutions and the gallery systems had not felt the need to generate meaning and mostly all attempts to generate history happened through books. Ajit Mookerjee’s Tantra Art in 1966 is a very good example of such endeavors. For those who were close to observing, things began to slowly change. Figures like Anita Dube and Geeta Kapur began opening up the relevance of curation in the modern and contemporary context. As Anita Dube and Geeta Kapur brought in curator as the generator and archivist of discourse, figures like Rajiv Sethi and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh were curating art in more public contexts and playing a key role in contextualizing art within the contemporary visual culture.


Geeta Kapur’s Hundred Years: From the NGMA Collection, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 1994; Century Art: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London, 2001 (with Ashish Rajadhyaksha) and Sub Terrain: Artworks in the City-fold, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2003, played a central role in putting curation in the spotlight of Indian Art practices. Already there were younger curators like Alka Pande and Pooja Sood, finding their own spaces within the contemporary art scene, of which Delhi was increasingly pitching itself as the centre. Pooja Sood and Alka Pande emerged to be the first contemporary art curators to develop institutions. Khoj Artist’s Association and the Visual Arts Gallery have developed their rich histories. Those were also the bustling days of postmodernism. Auto-criticism was still fashionable, and one could have debates.

With the collapse of distinctions between curators, gallerists and art dealers, the art scene began to mirror the cultural, strategic and commercial interest of the liberalized urban India, with hardly any room for self-refection or discontent. At a time when young and mid-career artists have been represented in such major International exhibitions as the Asia Pacific Triennale, the Yokohama Triennale, the Kwangju Biennale and the Documenta; and their work has been included in benchmark exhibitions organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the Tate Modern, London; and other leading museums and galleries in the world’s metropolitan hubs. Curation, Art Criticism and disciplines took a very conservative turn.