The early 1990s to the present · Across India, especially Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kochi, and abroad
Contemporary Indian art
Indian art since the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s. Installation, video, sculpture and everyday objects sit alongside painting.
How to recognise it
- Many mediums at once: installation, video, sculpture, performance, photography
- Everyday Indian objects as material: steel tiffins, thalis, bindis
- Personal and political subjects: Partition, migration, labour, the city
- Large biennale shows, notably Kochi-Muziris since 2012
There is no single style here, which is the point. After liberalisation in the early 1990s, Indian artists worked increasingly outside the academic traditions and for audiences abroad as well as at home. Some of the roots go further back. Nalini Malani, born in Karachi in 1946, made her first video, Dream Houses, in 1969, and is counted among India’s first generation of video artists. Her work draws on the experience of migration after Partition, and on feminist questions.
The objects of ordinary life became material. Subodh Gupta, born in 1964 in Khagaul, Bihar, is known for the steel tiffin boxes, thalis, bicycles and milk pails that fill his sculptures; his stainless steel Banyan Tree of 2014 stands at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Bharti Kher, born in London in 1969, moved to India in 1993 and works mainly with the manufactured bindi. In Bengaluru, Sheela Gowda, who studied under K. G. Subramanyan, makes process-led work drawn from the everyday labour of people on the margins. Atul Dodiya, born in Mumbai in 1959, showed at the India Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Exhibitions changed too. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, founded by the artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, opened in 2012 across galleries, heritage buildings and vacant structures in Kochi. Its second edition, in 2014, was curated by the artist Jitish Kallat.
What to look for
With living artists, the work is partly its paperwork. For an edition, an installation or a video, ask exactly what was made, in what number, and what the artist allows when it is shown again. Images of these works are under copyright, so we describe them here rather than reproduce them.