The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India is a major exhibition of contemporary art by artists living inside the country as well as in the diaspora inspired by material culture, literature, and spirituality as well as social and political aspects of India. The triad of thematic threads—embodiment and the politics of communicative bodies, empirical perception in the experience of the sensuous, and the imaginary as a social practice—form the central thesis of the exhibition. Of particular interest are the artistic spaces that either incorporate these concepts or operate in a gap or fissure as overlapping metaphoric structures that impact our lives, our thoughts and art. These themes play a role, but with a different weight or emphasis for each of the three specific areas of production represented by the following subheadings:
Social Spheres of Materiality and Beingness with sculpture by Anita Dube, Rina Banerjee, Siddhartha Kararwal, Shilpa Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, Sreshta Premnath, and Thukral and Tagra; Living the Body with photography by Nikhil Chopra, Gauri Gill, Sunil Gupta, Dhruv Malhotra, Pushpamala N., Tejal Shah, Bharat Sikka, and Anup Mathew Thomas; and Embodiment as a Political Weapon with single-channel video by Ayisha Abraham, CAMP, The Otolith Group, and Raqs Media Collective. As India begins to play a more central role on the world economic stage, the work of its artists will become even more widely acknowledged vehicles for expressing aspects of India that are hard to convey outside the terms that art provides. The Matter Within is organized by YBCA and curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Director of Visual Arts.
