Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE

Source Australian Art Reviews
Continuing the annual ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage, a new exhibition of work by leading New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen will open on 22 April 2023. Mithu Sen (b. 1971) was born in West Bengal, and is one of India’s most renowned contemporary artists, with a prolific body of work recognised through awards, exhibitions, and performances at prestigious forums across the globe. Mithu Sen explores myths of identity, and their intersection with the structures of our world, whether social, political, economic, or emotional. Sen works fundamentally as a performer, tangling with politics of language, disciplining of bodies, conventions of society, and polite impositions of the art world.
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Vivan Sundaram, 79, Dies; a Pivotal, and Political, Figure in Indian Art

Source The New York Times by Holland Cotter
Vivan Sundaram, an artist and activist widely credited with spearheading a transition in modern and contemporary Indian art from European-inspired abstract painting to multimedia forms addressing social and political realities in his country, died ‌on ‌March 29 in New Delhi‌. He was 79. The cause was a brain hemorrhage following a long illness, said Esa Epstein, a curator who, with Sepia International, organized two of Mr. Sundaram’s United States exhibitions. The product of a comfortably elite upbringing (he described it as “colonial”) in northern India, Mr. Sundaram studied art at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara), then enrolled in the Slade School of London in 1966 on a scholarship. The four years he spent in England changed his life.
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Caste-pital

Source E-flux Journal by Sajan Mani
I begin this oral history with Dalit social reformer Poykayil Appachan, born in 1879 in Kerala, India. An upper-caste family enslaved him from birth. Although this family was Syrian Christian, not Hindu (India’s castes originate in Hinduism), the fact of their religion did not shield Poykayil from the terrors of slavery. The reality of the caste system in India is one that encompasses everyone and everything. Christianity, too, has actively reproduced the mechanism of caste. Poykayil worked in the enslavers’ fields from a young age. While laboring there one day, he found a human skeleton. His response was to start singing. He sang with deep pain about the plight of his grandparents, who were killed in those same fields. Caste slavery used up the bodies of human beings who were compelled to plough the fields like bulls. Poykayil’s song was never written down anywhere, but has survived through oral practice.
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Vivan Sundaram (1943–2023)

Source Artforum
Pathbreaking artist and activist Vivan Sundaram, who transformed the landscape of Indian contemporary art, died March 29 in New Delhi following a brain hemorrhage. He was seventy-nine. Through a practice that encompassed installation, photography, illustration, sculpture, video, and painting, Sundaram investigated social and political themes as well as those relating to popular culture and to issues surrounding perception, memory, and history. A great believer in communication and collaboration across practices, Sundaram was of the opinion that art could effect social change. Vivan Sundaram was born in Shimla, India, in 1943. His father was Kalyan Sundaram, a civil servant and independent India’s first law secretary and second chief election commissioner; his mother was Indira Sher-Gil, the sister of pioneering painter Amrita Sher-Gil.
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This Dior exhibition in Mumbai celebrates the visionary talent of Indian artists Madhvi and Manu Parekh

Source Architectural Digest by Gautami Reddy
“Not many know this but Christian Dior was a gallerist before he was a designer,” shares Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior’s women’s collection, who commissioned a series of paintings by the legendary Indian artists Madhvi and Manu Parekh to be transformed into monumental embroidered backdrops for Dior’s 2022 Spring-Summer runway show in Paris. “The runway show only lasted 10 minutes, but these masterpieces will continue to live on and be celebrated for their representation of the power of Indian art, culture and creativity,” Chiuri adds at the opening of Mul Mathi, an exclusive Dior exhibition in Mumbai, which brings the 22 tapestries seen at the Paris show to India for the first time, accompanied by a selection of paintings by Madhvi and Manu Parekh that inspired the project.
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At the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Isha Ambani Piramal’s Art House proudly champions India’s emerging artists

Source Vogue India by Sadaf Shaikh
Last evening, at the launch of the much-talked-about Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, photographers were veritably disoriented from turning their cameras this way and that as celebrities descended on the red-in-spirit-but-actually-green carpet in droves. Borrowing from the unique South Asian idiosyncrasy of cultural plurality, Sangam/Confluence, the opening show co-curated by American curator Jeffrey Deitch and leading Indian cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, will showcase works by Indian artists Bharti Kher, Bhupen Khakhar, Ranjani Shettar, Ratheesh T and Shantibai, who shed the shackles of form and medium to devise their own languages of art-making. International artists Anselm Kiefer, Cecily Brown, Francesco Clemente, Lynda Benglis and Raqib Shaw, on the other hand, delve deep into their respective practices to forge an inextricable connection with India. To top it all off, there is also an impressive collection of public artworks on display, ranging from a gargantuan Pichwai painting to Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama’s famous Clouds.
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