A newly opened Mumbai exhibition claims to be the primary to deal with the connection between Indian and Arab modernism. The Sharjah-based Barjeel Artwork Basis has lent greater than 40 works to the exhibition Resonant Histories (till 16 February 2026) at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) museum, bringing collectively its assortment of Arab artwork with Indian works from town’s Jehangir Nicholson Artwork Basis (JNAF).
The present’s curation is designed to deliver out beforehand unrecognised visible resonances between Indian and Arab artists, who rode the identical aesthetic and ideological currents within the shadow of empire. The mesmerising, mountainous faces of the Syrian painter Marwan Kassab-Bachi, for example, grope independently in direction of the identical undefinable reality because the ghostly heads of the celebrated Bombay grasp Francis Newton Souza.
However the resonances transcend the visible. Within the exhibition’s opening show, Visions of Freedom, artists and intellectuals grapple with the darker facet of liberation in a world partitioned by colonial powers. Daring black drawings by the socialist painter Chittroprasad Bhattacharya depict the brand new residents of unbiased India dying of starvation on streets paved with the riches of empire.
In the meantime, a taught, brooding canvas, in inexperienced oil so darkish it may very well be black, depicts the bloody 1971 Indo-Pakistan struggle. It’s the work of the Indian artist Krishen Khanna, who grew up in what’s now Pakistan, and celebrated his one hundredth birthday in New Delhi this 12 months. A centenary exhibition of his work is presently on present close by, on the Nationwide Gallery of Trendy Artwork (NGMA) Mumbai.
These works are positioned in dialogue with work like Ready, a 1970 canvas by the Syrian painter Abdul Qader Al Rais, which depicts the suspended lives of a few of the Center East’s thousands and thousands of perpetual refugees. And Al Fiddaiyoun (1969) by the Syrian artist Naim Ismail, through which the keffiyehs of Palestinian guerrillas kind geometric flares on the canvas. Because the Barjeel’s curator Suheyla Takesh factors out, these works are simply as related at this time.
The exhibition additionally hints at direct cultural alternate between artists from vastly totally different backgrounds. For example, within the cultural hinterland of the Non-Aligned Motion—based through the collapse of the colonial system to deal with the independence struggles of the peoples of Africa, Asia and past—Arab artists would journey to India, the place they’d drink within the aesthetics of the subcontinent. This led to works like The Lotus Lady (1955), through which the Egyptian artist Nazek Hamdi adapts the visible language of Bengali folk-art.
“We put works from the Bengal Faculty subsequent to Hamdi, as a result of the look and subject material are strikingly comparable,” says JNAF’s director, Puja Vaish. “We wished to create an artwork historic discourse via this exhibition.”
Nonetheless, initially, Vaish explains, there wasn’t a lot materials to construct on. “So we see this exhibition as a place to begin for additional analysis. That is how a whole lot of artwork historical past or collections are constructed—you give a single instance and that opens up a gateway for extra work to be completed. We hope that’s the kind of synergy that will likely be created.”
General, Resonant Histories makes a robust begin in creating this synergy. Nonetheless, a really regional exhibition should interact with works by South Asian artists from exterior of India. Ismail’s 1969 Al Fiddaiyoun, for example, may very well be hung subsequent to works from the identical 12 months by the Pakistani and Bangladeshi artist Zainul Abedin, who toured Palestine, Syria, and Jordan on the invitation of the Arab League.
The watercolour sketches of Abedin’s Freedom Fighter sequence depict the identical uncooked dynamism, with figures and shapes appearing out liberation on the web page. Abedin went on to make use of the identical visible vocabulary he had perfected in Palestine in his native Bengal, which by this time had spawned a liberation battle of its personal—a reminder that, in post-colonial societies, it isn’t simply the artwork that resonates.
Resonant Histories, CSMVS museum, Mumbai, till 16 February 2026
