“The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998”

The statement is an elegant summation of the Barbican’s autumn exhibition, “The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998.” Organized by head of visual arts Shanay Jhaveri in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, it consists of paintings, sculptures, and installations made by Indian artists during a period in which the “given colours of life” were particularly fiery. Two pivotal events set the bounds of the show. Nineteen seventy-five marks the year that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in the wake of criminal charges against her and amid widespread social unrest, imposed a national state of emergency. Invoking a colonial-era law, she suspended the constitution over a two-year period, consolidating her power, silencing dissent, and subjecting the population to controversial policies like forced sterilization. Nineteen ninety-eight, the show’s endpoint, was the year of the Pokhran nuclear tests, during which the country detonated five bombs over forty-eight hours to demonstrate its nuclear capabilities on the world stage. Billed as evidence of India’s rising power, the event was also a painful signal of how far India had strayed from the nonviolent ideals that defined its independence struggle. The intervening years were signposted by profound ruptures—communal violence, political assassinations, the 1984 gas disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal that killed some twenty-five thousand people—as well as by public reckonings with caste, gender, and urbanization. 

This period of extreme flux, during which the veil between the sociopolitical and the personal wore increasingly thin, was notably galvanizing for artists. But as the nearly 150 works at the Barbican argue, what emerged was not cohesive. Instead, artists gravitated toward a multitude of formats, media, and approaches: Some turned to biting reportage or satirical indictment, others to quiet interior explorations or quests for entirely new forms. The curators, appropriately, refuse to shoehorn the artists into a singular story. The effect is kaleidoscopic: We’re allowed to experience how, in this destabilizing slice of time, the artists’ output was accordingly dynamic. What stitches the sprawling array of works together is a lively atmosphere of feeling, searching, grappling—a collective effort to visualize the “ambiguities and possibilities” coursing through a nation trying to make sense of itself.

Take, for instance, Gulammohammed Sheikh’s 1975 painting Speechless City. In this suggestive work, fragments of an urban landscape rise from a land drenched in blazing orange. A group of boxy, unadorned houses appear abandoned; doors and windows are flung open, revealing darkness within. Above them, densely packed clusters of apartment buildings and shopfronts float like islands in a blazing sea, their windows and doors also opening into black holes. There are no people in this unnerving place; the only signs of life are dogs, cattle, and birds roving freely through the deserted buildings. Painted during the Emergency of 1975–77, Sheikh’s work exudes silence and loss; the depopulated city speaks to a people shorn of agency. And yet the effect isn’t flatly defeatist: There’s seething energy in the flood of orange, and the abundance of animals suggests that the natural world always has a capacity to reassert itself. 

For his series “The Indian Emergency–II,” 1976–77, Vivan Sundaram finds a more pointed way into the same period,using graphite, pen, and ink to craft scathing images that read like psychoanalytic political cartoons. He casts Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay—her loyal right-hand man—as grotesque, Arcimboldoesque robot-villains in The Pair, and probes their relationship in the fragmentary, ghostly Oedipal Bed, both 1976. Figure from History–II, also 1976, depicts an ominous godlike sovereign spilling across the page, reminiscent of the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 Leviathan. In a similar register, Rameshwar Broota’s 1977 work Reconstruction presents a consortium of politicians in a barren meeting room as apelike creatures; all are faceless and indistinguishable except the central leader, who wears an arrogant smirk.

Individual and political upheavals often mirror each other, symbiotically expressing the same afflictions and desires. As the exhibition continues into the 1980s, a decade of feminist and anti-caste movements, we see artists turning their imaginations toward intimate realms. Many tried to explicitly reveal taboo worlds—as in Savindra Sawarkar’s disquieting etchings of Dalits (the so-called untouchables at the bottom of the caste hierarchy), Sheba Chhachhi’s portraits of anti-dowry demonstrators (representing a movement that peaked in the early ’80s), and Sunil Gupta’s images of gay men posing alongside major Indian monuments (thanks to an 1861 colonial law, homosexuality was criminalized until 2018). These bold, activist works are useful documents of a charged era and potent reminders of unfinished battles. 

However, the artists who plumbed more oblique, intuitive aspects of interior lives produced some of the show’s most poignant and revelatory works—art that embraces ambiguity and beauty alongside volatility and proposes that the imaginative realm is a vitally transgressive space. Nilima Sheikh’s ethereal painting Before Nightfall, 1981–82, finds a sensuous visual language for the shrouded domain of motherhood, unleashing its delight and mystery into a hypnotic, swirling frieze that collapses boundaries between her domestic sphere and the verdant, animated world outside her door. With an enveloping palette of mustard and vermilion and fluid movement between figuration and abstraction, the painting feels like watching rural India speed past from a train window.

A surreal, mysterious mood persists in Arpita Singh’s 1985 painting The White Peacock, where people and domestic objects somersault through the air, freed from their conventions as a graceful, long-tailed bird seems to anoint the space with new potential. And in Two Men in Benares, 1982, Bhupen Khakhar concocts a fantastical scene of nude male lovers reaching for each other against the backdrop of devotional rituals in India’s holiest city. The lovers dominate the saturated, jewel-toned canvas, standing illuminated as if by moonlight while religious figures do their work—spiritual and sexual fulfillment amalgamated. Here, as in many of these works, dreaming is a radical act, an opportunity to rewrite the rules and propose a world more beautiful and free than this one.

Sometimes, though, a nightmare intrudes. In 1992, groups of Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Masjid, a mosque they asserted had been built atop the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The demolition ignited communal riots across the subcontinent, during which some two thousand people were killed. The events shook the soul of the nation and made a mockery of the postindependence dream of a secular India. For many artists, this violence was a clear pivot point, and the question of how to respond became existential. Several works on display showcase artists grappling with this moment of crisis, reaching for new forms, materials, and approaches to reflect a fraught climate without becoming propagandistic. 

After the riots, Rummana Hussain abandoned figurative painting and began making installations out of shattered terra-cotta pots. Composed of the broken vessels and piles of red powder and rubble, the five works, spread across a dim corner of the gallery, evoke mangled bodies and a fractured society; they force the viewer to walk through an aftermath. Sheela Gowda also set aside painting in favor of more visceral interventions. In an untitled work from 1997, hundreds of needles strung with thread and twisted into red ropes become oozing, disembodied organs. In Untitled (cow dung), 1992/2002, piles of bovine excrement—a material with sacred associations that’s also used as fuel and fertilizer—spill through the space like eroded, collapsing buildings. N. N. Rimzon’s installation The Tools, 1993,is especially haunting in its stark ambiguity. A meditating figure stands in the center of a large circle of iron shovel heads, axes, and picks. Juxtaposed with the serene devotee, the objects seem to vibrate with destructive menace—or, perhaps, with creative potential. 

Given the curators’ assertion that the sociopolitical environment was inextricable from artistic production during this period, it is a surprise to find context entirely absent from the walls of the Barbican. The artworks are arranged in loosely chronological fashion, but the themes and political events that would ordinarily appear in wall text are confined to a thick magenta brochure. On a practical level, it is inconvenient to refer to a book while moving through the show—so you probably won’t. This is a daring and demanding curatorial choice, especially given the range of styles and mediums on display, and their equally diverse backstories. It challenges the viewer to encounter these varied artworks unmediated, to wander around and alight upon what catches the eye, to engage emotionally and instinctively instead of relying on an overly signposted map. It seems to say: History is full of circularity, contradictions, and confusion; exhibitions can be, too. 

It’s refreshing to see an institutional show trust in the implicit power of artworks to produce feeling and meaning, and trust in the audience to find their own way through. Dozens of these pieces—Meera Mukherjee’s intricate lost-wax sculptures, Sudhir Patwardhan’s sumptuous tableaux of rural-urban migration, Nilima Sheikh’s enormous painted tent, Anita Dube’s uncanny clusters of eyes—are indeed visually seductive and deeply captivating. But it’s the more subtle or conceptual works, like Jagdish Swaminathan’s abstract canvases that reference tribal techniques and political theories, that truly come alive within context, and as a result could easily be overlooked. Because the curatorial approach allows the viewer to engage as little or as much with dates and descriptions as desired, many will feel at sea, or will leave without a grasp of the history that produced this adventurous art.