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The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998

Curator Tour with Shanay Jhaveri

,Art Gallery
woman stands in front of a painting, taken from inside a colourful installation

Join Shanay Jhaveri, curator of The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998, as he leads a tour of the exhibition.

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.

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Art Gallery

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