until Sunday January 05 2025

Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street
EC2Y 8DS London
United Kingdom

Contact
https://www.barbican.org.uk

Featuring artwork by over 30 Indian artists, this major exhibition is bookended by two transformative events in India’s history: Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in 1975 and the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998. The fraught period between these years was marked by social upheaval, economic collapse, and rapid urbanisation.

Within this turbulence, ordinary life continued, and artists made work that distilled historically significant episodes as well as intimate moments and shared experiences. Across a range of media, the vivid, urgent works on show – about friendship, love, desire, family, religion, violence, caste, community, protest – are deeply personal documents from a period of tremendous change.

This is the first institutional exhibition to cover these definitive years, with many works never before seen in the UK.

Photo: Bhupen Khakhar’s Grey Blanket. Photograph: Estate of Bhupen Khakhar