India Shining

Four international, trend-setting art curators and consultants are spearheading a movement to show Indian art in a new light By Georgina Maddox

PRIYANKA MATHEW Vice president, Head of Sales Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art, Sotheby’s

For the first South Asian auctioneer in Sotheby’s 265-year-old history, Priyanka Mathew wears the mantle lightly. Auctioneering their Indian sales since 2010, the US-based 36-year-old is credited with bringing many wonderful works to sale at Sotheby’s—her current toppers are VS Gaitonde’s Painting No. 1 that sold last June for over a million dollars, and Bhupen Khakhar’s

American Survey Officer, which also garnered one of the top prices ever for the artist (`2.54 crore). “It was truly an enriching experience, though working in an auction house is demanding—I have to keep my finger on the pulse of art. I have enjoyed working with artists from Pakistan and helped initiate some of the first shows of Pakistani contemporary art in New York,” she says.

Mathew’s focus at Sotheby’s includes working with pre-eminent collections in India and the US, alongside expanding the collector base for modern and contemporary South Asian art. She has also worked closely with collectors in South Asia, and brought to auction the collection of Abraham and Jan Wiesblat, the Manuella and Cleaveland collection, and the Grant Guyer collections.

Surprisingly, Mathew hasn’t studied art academically, even though she was inclined towards it from childhood. She chose finance and worked at Lehman Brothers and then for Goldman Sachs for six years. While working in the corporate world, Mathew continued to visit exhibitions and performances, never quite losing touch with art. Soon, she began craving a bigger slice of the art pie, and when in 2005 was approached to become the director of Aicon Gallery in NewYork, she jumped at the opportunity. “There finally came a time when I felt I needed to pick a direction. My timing was interesting because it happened to coincide with a massive growth spurt in the art market,” recalls Mathew. At Aicon, she hosted important exhibitions like Bombay Boys and

Kaam, featuringartistslikeTVSantoshandBoseKrishnamachariin2005.Under her, the gallery grew into one of the largest spaces exhibiting contemporary art, and opened locations on the West Coast and in London. By the time she left in 2010, Mathew had done sales of over $20 million for Aicon.

Mathew believes that the current economic scenario also affords collectors the chance to acquire great works at somewhat corrected prices. “We are also seeing a changing of the guard and a new generation of collectors.” Currently consigning works for an auction this month in New York, the event features a sublime Gaitonde from ’62, and a strong, disturbing work by FN Souza from ’50s. With a robust market, Mathew may just bring down the hammer on some new records.

PAYAL PAREKH

Director, Payal Arts International

Helming her eponymous art consultancy in New York that is dedicated to advising enthusiasts and promoting Indian talent in the US, Payal Parekh has introduced works by Raghubir Singh, Vivan Sundaram, and Atul Bhalla at international fairs like Paris Photo, and Association of International Photography Art Dealers Show. Focussed on discovering young, experimental artists and established women artists whose oeuvre display a sense of the unusual, Parekh has also sold works of legendary American lensman Robert Frank and Brazilian artist-photographer Vik Muniz.

“I believe that Indian photography is still an untapped gem, and as an independent art advisor, one of my main goals is to create a dialogue between India and New York. As a woman, it is also important to me to place emphasis on the achievements of women artists,” says the 35-year-old art consultant.

Parekh, who started her dealings in Indian art with Indian photography for the New York- based art consultancy Sepia Eye in 2008, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where her mother is a painter and her parents collected antiques and objets d’art. “I spent my entire childhood living with things that were precious and beautiful. Our home was filled with antique furniture and paintings by Jatin Das and Indian miniatures,” says Parekh, who now lives on 57th street in New York City, where dealers such as Pierre Matisse and Peggy Guggenheim established their galleries. Talking about the explosion of Indian artists on the international biennial circuit, Parekh believes there is room for improvement. “I hope to develop a broader understanding of the context in which India plays a vital role in contemporary art by working with younger artists.” Parekh is currently advising Nandita Raman, a promising Indian photographer based in Brooklyn (Raman’s works are in the collection of the Snite Museum of Art, Indiana), and in the past she has supported NewYork-based artist Ajay Kurian, who uses electromagnets, ostrich eggs, and gobstopper candy in his works—Kurian debuted with a solo show in September 2013 at Mumbai’s Jhaveri Contemporary.

This year, Parekh has her hands full with a historical project that she is putting together in Kolkata. It showcases the modern nation of India, circa 1940 to 1970, and features photographer Jayant Patel’s work that captured decisive moments involving dignitaries such as Mahatma Gandhi, British governor of Bengal, Lord Casey, and Jawaharlal Nehru.

SHANAY JHAVERI

Independent curator

Touted by many as one of the hottest new curators on the Asian art scene, Shanay Jhaveri has to his credit several exciting exhibitions. In 2013, he put together Companionable Silences at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, which showcased selected works by non-western women artists on identity and Western authority; the 2012 Questions of Travel, part of the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, was a film programme about travel and displacement; and

Outsider Films on India in 2010, a series of movies that highlighted how the country was viewed by non-Indians, premiered at theTate Modern and also resulted in a book of the same name. “Presenting, Amrita Sher-Gil’s Self

Portrait asTahitian (1934) in my exhibition Companionable Silences has been a highlight of my work,” recalls the 28-year-old Jhaveri who also has two books on art and cinema to his credit. “It was a great privilege to show this work in Paris during her centenary year.”

Based in London, Jhaveri says his projects aspire to engage Indian art with a more nuanced and international perspective. “I am always striving to orient the present to the historical, while testing the imagination in doing so,” he says. Jhaveri is a strong voice of the Indian diaspora, but he writes and curates seamlessly to include a holistic view of the country, juxtaposing the nation with other countries and their histories.

According to Jhaveri, who has done an undergraduate degree in Art Semiotics from Brown University, New Jersey, and studied History of Art and Architecture at LS Raheja School of Architecture, Mumbai, it was the first decade of the 21st century that saw an unprecedented number of exhibitions of contemporary Indian art internationally. “They seemed to be content to let India’s newfound place within a global order motivate them, not making any attempt to think of the past, or even how the national exhibition format can be evolved. However, there have been a few progressive and important exhibitions l ike India

Moderna and the Santhal Family (both 2008), and more recently Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes (2013) and The Body in Indian Art (2013), which have been driven by a dedicated engagement to historical knowledge.”

Currently studying the art practices of Bhupen Khakhar and Raghubir Singh, both of whom he finds very inspiring, Jhaveri’s next role will see him as a contributing editor to London’s Frieze Art Fair. “I will be writing on Indian art regularly as well. In spring, Afterall [the London-based publishing house that focusses on contemporary art] will publish my newly completed text on KP Krishnakumar and the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association,” says Jhaveri.

MYNA MUKHERJEE

Director, Engendered

Based in New York since 2007, with a recent chapter that’s opened in New Delhi, Myna Mukherjee’s Engendered is the only organisation in the Capital that brings art and human rights together comprehensively. Dedicated to an in-depth understanding of gender issues by generating a discussion around art, Mukherjeehascuratedseveral trend-setting exhibitions, including the 2012 Pardha at the Lincoln Center, New York, and the 2013 Resist in NewDelhi.InNewYork,she was the first to combine traditional classical dance with contemporary art and performance, bringing a new reading to age-old myths of Indian culture, like that of Chitrangada, or a recontextualising of the Devi and the Vamp.

Mukherjee, 38, premiered the Engendered festival at the Lincoln Center in 2008, which brought together “the best in contemporary South Asian cinema, visual arts, and performance”. Her aim was to change the monolithic, marginalised notion of South Asian art that stayed confined to the realm of ‘exotic’ or ‘multi-cultural’. “It was a very static and slightly ghettoised representation of either the ‘quaint miniatures’ or the angstridden combative diasporic art that prevailed. We wanted Engendered to be a space where South Asian art could be pushed into the mainstream. The way to do it was to be as specific as possible; it would make its comprehension that much more universal,” she says. Since then, Engendered has shown at some of the most mainstream US art hubs like the Asia Society,Tribeca Film Center, and even the educational department of the MOMA.

“Our space remains both political and aesthetic,” says Mukherjee who is currently in India to incubate an art project.To this effect, Engendered has also raised the issue of Muslim identities in times of Islamaphobia, by inviting artists from Pakistan and Afghanistan to shape their own representations.The Delhi chapter’s Resist exhibition, which showcased some of city’s top artists in a protest against the rape of the paramedical student, also explored new narratives.

Mukherjee, who holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, gave up her career as a financial management consultant on Wall Street to pursue the arts in the US where she has lived for 19 years. Trained in Odissi from a young age, in the States she reinvented the old tropes of the form to establish Nayikas, New York’s first feminist classical Odissi dance theatre company. “Dance has taught me about my body, both personalising and politicising it. But most of all, it taught me that the generation of new knowledge is and must be part of our relationship to our own art forms,” she says.

Mukherjee is excited about Engendered’s Delhi counterpart. “We came here during the economic slump and were not affected,” she says. “What we see now is a correction with the market back on its feet. Once it is stable we will see growth with longevity not based on an inflated sense of economy,” she says.