By Ranjit Hoskote.
Art in America Column: Atlas Bombay (extract)
If you think of South Asian art today, you likely focus on the subcontinent?s metropolitan centers; on the gallery scenes in Bombay, New Delhi and Bangalore in India, and on artists? circles in Karachi and Lahore in Pakistan. Not surprisingly, it?s the artists who work in these populous, kaleidoscopic hubs of activity, transiting between there and West Europe and North America, who are most often selected by curators to embody the specificity of their place and time.
But where, I suspect, many curators are not yet looking is several thousand miles away from South Asia?s metropolitan centers, in the northeast of India and in Bangladesh, at the geographical edge where the South Asian subcontinent shades away into the Himalayan foothills of Tibet to the north and the tropical lushness of Burma and Thailand to the south. Continue reading “River Bloom”