Legendary artist M F Husain is to surround the exterior of London's Serpentine Gallery with large-scale paintings for a new exhibition entitled 'Indian Highway', that opens on Wednesday 10 December 2008 and runs until 22 February 2009. Delhi-based multimedia artists Raqs Media Collective will curate a "show within a show" inside the Gallery. Performance artist Nikhil Chopra will also present a three-day performance in Kensington Gardens.

Following the remarkable and rapid economic, social and cultural developments in India in recent years, Indian Highway is a timely presentation of the pioneering work being made in the country today. The culmination of extensive research across India, this group exhibition is a snapshot of a vibrant generation of artists working across a range of media.

Indian Highway features artists who have already made an impact on the international art world alongside less well-established practitioners. Some of the artworks in the exhibition have been selected for their connection to the theme of Indian Highway, reflecting the importance of the road in migration and movement and as the link between rural and urban communities. Other works make reference to technology and the ‘information superhighway’, which has been central to India’s economic boom. A common thread throughout is the way in which these artists demonstrate an active political and social engagement, examining complex issues in contemporary India that include environmentalism, religious sectarianism, globalisation, gender, sexuality and class.

To frame and contextualise the work by a younger generation of artists, new paintings will be created specially for the Serpentine Gallery by India’s most acclaimed living artist, M. F. Husain. Depicting the history of India, the series will be presented on a structure around the exterior of the building, purpose-designed by architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Muller.

Indian Highway is curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Directors, Serpentine Gallery, and Gunnar B. Kvaran, Director, Astrup Fearnley Museum, in association with Rebecca Morrill and assisted by Leila Hasham, in consultation with specialists from the region and beyond.

Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery is the inauguration of an exhibition that will continually grow and develop as it tours internationally to different institutions for the next four years. After London, it will be presented at Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, from 4 April to 21 June 2009, where it will change and expand with the addition of new works as well as a section curated by Bose Krishnamachari.

As part of Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery, Raqs Media Collective will invite a number of additional artists for a discrete ‘show-within-a-show’ to provide an additional curatorial voice in the exhibition. Raqs describe the project as follows: ‘We have invited documentarists whose work – over the last two decades – has produced images that intimate and anticipate transformations that are fundamental to the time we inhabit, yet often lie just below the surface of mainstream visibility. Our invitation asks them to revisit these images and produce a “landscape” that provides a unique vantage point from which to think through the present conditions of turbulent anxiety, visceral conflict and unprecedented opportunity. The structure to house these contributions is designed with Hirsch and Müller. It is designed to create a provisionally immersive environment that expresses the state of being “between” things.’

ARTISTS INCLUDE

Ayisha Abraham
Bangalore-based artist Ayisha Abraham (born 1963) creates experimental films that examine narratives of identity, memory and history, representing their inherent complexities by intercutting dislocated images and sounds. Her film One Way, 2007, profiled the life of a Nepali immigrant working as a security guard in her home city, the busy hub of India’s high-tech trade.

Ravi Agarwal
Ravi Agarwal (born 1958) combines social documentary and environmental activism in his films and photography. He focuses particularly on the marginalised sectors of society within New Delhi’s rapidly developing landscape using images of the street, people at work and in labour. More recently, the artist has examined his personal relationship to the environment, such as in the series Immersion. Emergence – 24 Images, 2007, where he explores his relationship to New Delhi’s Yamuna River by recording himself wrapped in a shroud by the riverbank.

Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective, formed in 1992, comprises Jeebesh Bagchi (born 1965), Monica Narula (born 1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (born 1968). Their work locates them on the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory, often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. The Collective have exhibited widely in international exhibitions and recently curated The Rest of Now and co-curated Scenarios at Manifesta 7, 2008.

Sheela Gowda
Sheela Gowda’s (born 1957) process-based practice, which includes paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations, blurs the boundary between fine art and craft. Her materials are chosen for their symbolism. Substances such as cow dung, incense, threads, fibres and ceremonial dyes are used as subversive political statements, which straddle their everyday presence both in urban and rural India. This history of manufactured found objects, such as tar drums and plastic sheeting, recycled by India’s migrant workers, is further extended towards a nuanced reading.

Sakshi Gupta
Sakshi Gupta (born 1979) recycles scrap-materials, often with industrial origins, to produce sculptures that transform the meaning of the materials to provoke spiritual contemplation. This emphasis on materiality results in an evocative and ephemeral lightness and fragility. Through this engagement with material weight, Gupta’s works can be understood as a commentary on the contemporary world – highlighting the shift from the economics of heavy industry to the weightless age of information and technology.

Shilpa Gupta
Shilpa Gupta (born 1976) uses digital media in the form of online art projects and video environments fused with sculptural and photographic elements. Gupta often invites the participation of viewers in her work, using interactive technology to examine themes such as consumer culture, desire, border and territory vis a vis the internal experience of ‘difference’.

Subodh Gupta
Subodh Gupta (born 1964) uses found objects that are recognisable icons of everyday Indian life – stainless-steel kitchenware, bicycles, scooters and taxis – and elevates their status to art works. Working across a full range of media, he draws on his own experience of cultural dislocation, through migration from rural to urban areas, and highlights the threat to the traditional way of life resulting from India’s rapid modernisation.

N. S. Harsha
N. S. Harsha (born 1969) is celebrated for reworking Indian miniature painting as a platform for a powerful social and political commentary. His large-scale and intricate canvases depict a multitude of figures all animated in unison and wittily combine details from everyday Indian life with images drawn from world events. His practice also includes sculptures, installations and community-based collaborations.

M. F. Husain
M. F. Husain (born 1915) is one of India’s most respected artists. He started his career in 1937, painting hoardings for the popular Bombay cinema. As a founding member of the avant-garde Progressive Artist Group in 1947, Husain was anxious to forge a new vocabulary in Indian art and he created a new style in painting, which was a brilliant synthesis of tradition and modernity. He continues to produce colourful and provocative canvases, incorporating themes from Indian religion, history and culture.

Jitish Kallat
The practice of Jitish Kallat (born 1974) combines painting, photography and collage as well as large-scale sculpture and multimedia installation. His work reflects a deep involvement with Mumbai, the city of his birth and derives his visual language from the immediate urban environment - 'the dirty, old, recycled and patched-together fabric of urban India'. Wider concerns include India's attempts to negotiate its entry into a globalised economy, housing and transportation crises, city planning issues, caste and communal tensions and government accountability.

Amar Kanwar
Amar Kanwar’s (born 1964) poetic and contemplative films explore the political, social, economic and ecological conditions of the Indian subcontinent. Interwoven throughout are investigations of family relations, sectarian violence, gender and sexuality, philosophical and religious questions, and the processes of globalisation. His multi-channel video installation The Lightning Testimonies, 2007, incorporates accounts of sexual violence at moments of conflict in the history of the Indian subcontinent.

Bharti Kher
Working across sculpture, photograph and painting, Bharti Kher (born 1969) explores issues of personal identity, social roles and Indian traditions but also, from a broader perspective, 21st-century issues around genetics, evolution, technology and ecology. Kher uses the bindi as a central motif in her work to connect disparate ideas. The bindi transcends its mass-produced diminutiveness and becomes a powerful stylistic and symbolic device, creating visual richness and allowing a multiplicity of meanings.

Bose Krishnamachari
The works of Bose Krishnamachari (born 1963) range from multi-coloured abstractions and realistic figurative paintings to mixed-media installations, examining ideas including cultural history, memory and canonisation. His installation Ghost/Transmemoir, 2006-08, explores themes of impermanence and transition in the city of Mumbai.

Nalini Malani
Nalini Malani (born 1946) first received international acclaim for her figurative and politically charged paintings and drawings that raise issues of race, class and gender. In the 1990s, her practice began to encompass video art, multi-media installation and the use of shadow play. She sources subject matter from different histories and cultures, including episodes from both Western and Eastern literature and myth.

Kiran Subbaiah
Formally trained as a sculptor, Kiran Subbaiah (born 1971) works in a range of media, including assemblage, video and internet art. A common approach of his practice is the subverting the form and function of objects, through which he questions the relationship between use and value, highlighting contradictions inherent in everyday life. Irony, deadpan humour and a crude aesthetic provide Subbaiah with simple binaries - functional/defunct, action/reaction and cause/effect to tease out his ideas and observations.

Tejal Shah
Tejal Shah (born 1979) works in video, photography and performance. Her work is primarily concerned with issues of gender, sexuality, class and politics, such as the video I Love My India, 2003, which focuses on the ignorance and lack of understanding of the genocide against the Muslim minority in Gujarat in 2002. In the video installation What Are You?, 2006, the artist critically deals with historical and social constructs of gender and focuses on India’s Hijra (transgender) community.

Dayanita Singh
Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is best known for her photographic portraits of India’s urban middle and upper-class families. These images of people working, celebrating or resting show Indian life without embellishment. Her latest work such as Blue Scenery Series, 2006-08, has concentrated on depictions of places. The dissemination of her photography as mass-produced and disposable objects such as wallpaper, books, calendars and postcards is a driving force of her recent practice.

Ashok Sukumaran & Shaina Anand
Ashok Sukumaran (born 1974) and Shaina Anand (born 1975), an architect and a film-maker are co-founders of CAMP, a collaborative venture linking independent artistic research and software-based activities at ‘infrastructural scales’ in Mumbai. CAMP is a continuously changing acronym, thereby repopulating the remit of its own activities. Together and with others, the artists examine the forces between individuals, communities and technologies, producing inventive projects with media such as electricity, cable TV, CCTV, film and the internet.

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