Reboot 2018: India Comes West

A number of Western Canadian shows over the last year featured art from South Asia.

A number of Western Canadian exhibitions over the last year featured art from India and, to a lesser degree, its diaspora.

They included photography from South Asia at the Kamloops Art Gallery, work by contemporary Indigenous artists in India at the Surrey Art Gallery, and prints from an exchange between American and Indian artists with the catchy title, India Inked, at the SNAP gallery in Edmonton.

The most ambitious, though, was Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada at the Art Gallery of Alberta. On view until Jan. 6, it features 140 works – a dizzying array of photography, painting, mixed media, installation and film – by contemporary artists from India or Canadian artists of South Asian heritage. It was curated by the gallery’s director, Catherine Crowston, and Jonathan Shaughnessy, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada.

While shows featuring Indian art have been held in British Columbia's Lower Mainland, particularly at the Surrey Art Gallery, a region with a large Indo-Canadian population, the wider interest of late is due to several factors, including the need to address Canada's cultural diversity and reach new audiences, while responding to the equity agenda of the Canada Council for the Arts.

And, of course, South Asians, are the country's largest visible minority, representing 25.1 per cent of the total 7.7 million Canadians who identified as a visible minority in the 2016 federal census.

Haema Sivanesan, a curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and previously the executive director of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre in Toronto, says such shows are an encouraging trend.

But they are largely organized by Anglo-Canadian curators, she adds, and often do not capture the tremendous diversity of South Asia or the complex realities of its diaspora. She believes there's room to improve the representation and agency of the country's South Asian community in institutional settings. "I think the intention is the right intention," she says, "but there's still work to do to involve South Asian curators as authors." 

As well, minority communities need to explore ways to insert their stories into mainstream discussions about place, culture, history and identity, Sivanesan noted in a recent paper to a South Asia conference at the University of the Fraser Valley.

"What I am exploring is the possibility that art galleries, rather than proposing to represent communities and produce didactic accounts of history, situate questions, explorations, imaginative propositions, so as to approach the exhibition space as a site in which the visitor undertakes a process of inquiry, bringing their knowledge and experiences to the understanding of the work and to the meaning of the exhibition."

In that sense, a small Winnipeg show last year at Cliff Eyland's Library Gallery (L'Briary) offered a different take. In Saadi Saqafat (Our Culture), Hassaan Ashraf, a migrant from Pakistan, worked through the challenges of diaspora and dislocation without translating the art or offering entry points for the public. "The result is a body of work that’s not easily accessible to all," Noor Bhangu wrote in a review for Galleries West, "but one that nonetheless demands our attention."

Meanwhile, the Vancouver Art Gallery is organizing Moving Still: Performative Photography from India, which explores themes of migration, gender, religion and national identity. On view from April 20 to Sept. 2, it's an initiative of the gallery's Institute of Asian Art and is curated by Diana Freundl, associate curator of Asian art, and Gayatri Sinha, an art critic and independent curator based in New Delhi.■