HAVE I EVER OPPOSED YOU? NEW ART FROM INDIA AND PAKISTAN
18 March – 22 May 2010
Contact person during exhibition: Laura Gowen + 41 79 330 1754
Images of the Exhibition
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Waseem Ahmed (b. 1976, Pakistan) More info
Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Pakistan)More info
Abir Karmakar (b. 1977, India)More info
Nalini Malani (b. 1946, India)More info
Kanishka Raja (b. 1970, India) More info
Rashid Rana (b. 1968, Pakistan) More info
C.K. Rajan (b. 1960, India)More infos
Aji V.N. (b. 1968, India)More infos
Faye Fleming and Partner are proud to present an exhibition of 7 emerging artists from India and Pakistan, juxtaposed with the work of an internationally recognised artist from an earlier generation, Nalini Malani. The exhibition is timed to coincide with Malani’s retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, and will explore several of the central themes of her work – themes that retain a vital currency in the work of artists from the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s.
The title of the current exhibition quotes the response of Mahatma Gandhi to the British Governer-General Lord Mountbatten – on the day of the vote for Partition of India – during which Gandhi controversially observed his day of silence. Mountbatten said that he hoped Gandhi would not oppose the Partition and Gandhi wrote his reply on a scrap of paper: "Have I ever opposed you?".
The inclusion of artists from both India and Pakistan attempts to reflect the impossibility of viewing contemporary art developments in either country in isolation – the visual heterogeneity of India itself, a vast and sweeping country – makes any reduction towards a national common denominator impossible. The shared history of India and Pakistan, tragic and violent in political and human terms, is also a shared history of visual culture. Artists in both countries often reference aspects of the tradition of Persian and Mughal miniature painting and this source of reference and inspiration is clear in the work of C.K. Rajan, Kanishka Raja, Ambreen Butt and Waseem Ahmed.
The selection of works for this exhibition does not have the ambition of representing all the most significant Pakistani and Indian emerging artists. The dialogue we would like to set between Malani’s work and this group of next generation emerging artists from India and Pakistan aims to draw out the issues of displacement, confrontation and opposition, both in terms of politics and sexuality, that face South Asia (and the world at large) with ever-increasing urgency.