WAG lands exhibition of Indian, Canadian contemporary art

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This article was published 03/04/2019 (2385 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg is one of three stops on a summer national tour of 20 internationally recognized artists from India and Canada.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery will host Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada from May 11 to Sept. 8. Featuring more than 100 pieces of art, the show represents a watershed in the city’s artistic profile.

It was organized by the National Gallery of Canada with the Art Gallery of Alberta, and Edmonton and Toronto are the only other cities to land stopovers.

The WAG jumped at the chance to host the exhibit.

“Fortunately we have an excellent relationship with the National Gallery of Canada and we have a very good relationship wit the Art Gallery of Alberta,” says WAG director and CEO Stephen Borys.

Vision Exchange is a first for Manitoba and it was an important cultural fit because it reflects an immigrant population that has chosen to put down roots here and contribute to the city’s growth.

“Winnipeg has one of the largest South Asian, East Asian populations, and this is a chance for us to expand the conversation with the community. In this case we are expanding the dialogue about culture, about society, about geography, history and politics,” Borys adds.

The collection draws from the National Gallery and from private collections and artists in Canada, Delhi and Mumbai.

Old Kildonan Coun. Devi Sharma will serve as honorary patron for the Winnipeg stop. She is Winnipeg’s first Indo-Canadian city councillor and her patronage signals the show’s importance to Winnipeg.

“Winnipeg’s South Asian community continues to grow and Vision Exchange is a unique opportunity to come together to share stories and reflect, while also celebrating the art and culture of the land,” Sharma said in WAG’s announcement.

Divya Mehra, one of the 20 artists whose work will be shown, is from Winnipeg. Mehra’s body of work focuses on the long-term effects of colonization and institutional racism, a topic that will be familiar to gallery visitors from a Canadian context.

India, like Canada, was a British colony. It was partitioned into Pakistan and India in 1947 when the British Rai relinquished its nearly century-long hold on the subcontinent under the Indian independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, whose non-violent brand of civil disobedience inspired similar human-rights movements around the world.

“That was the thing that struck me. All of the discussions we’ve been having at the WAG, addressing the issue of colonialism and giving voice to it, as soon as I read about the history (in India) especially of partition, I realized this is another country, in a different but similar way, with a colonial legacy,” says Andrew Kear, the WAG’s head of collections and exhibitions.

Part of that legacy plays out in a comical but bittersweet way with one of Mehra’s works: a 2.5-metre-high bouncy castle in the shape of the Taj Mahal. The site is a tomb built in 1632 by an emperor to pay homage to his favourite wife and, for centuries, it was regarded as a holy site venerated for its architecture. Today’s pilgrims are mostly tourists who pay homage to the love story of the once powerful ruler for his lost beloved.

“We’ve probably shown Indian artists here and there in the past, but in terms of a real focused look at contemporary art in India, this is the first one. It’s a response to a group of artists and a demographic we haven’t addressed,” Kear says.

The exhibition was organized by Art Gallery of Alberta chief curator Catherine Crowston and National Gallery associate curator Jonathan Shaughnessy. It launched at the Edmonton Gallery and moved on to the Art Museum at the University of Toronto until March 23.

The show features a framework woven from an interdisciplinary collaboration among painters, sculptors, photographers, writers and filmmakers that ran from 1969 to 1972 in Delhi and Mumbai, then still known by its colonial name, Bombay.

The National Gallery of Canada described the exhibition as interweaving political, cultural and social themes with three overlapping arcs: the reframing of historical narratives from non-western perspectives; the issues of sovereignty, shifting borders and relationships with the land; and the realities of exile, migration and diaspora.

The other artists featured in the show include Ashim Ahluwalia, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Atul Dodiya, Gauri Gill, Tanya Goel, Shilpa Gupta, Sunil Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Reena Saini Kallat, Amar Kanwar, Bharti Kher, Akbar Padamsee, Jagdeep Raina, Raqs Media Collective, Dayanita Singh, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Vivan Sundaram, Thukral + Tagra and Rajesh Vangad.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca