The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) explains the aims of its ambitious India-centric project.

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) hosted the first solo exhibition in Europe of Nasreen Mohamedi, as part of a wider program tracing alternative modernisms.

Mohamedi’s practice can be seen in relation to an earlier generation of Indian abstract artists such as V.S. Gaitonde, and from an international perspective to works on paper by Agnes Martin or, through its invocation of utopian abstraction, to Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists.

This exhibition (March-June 2009), curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, brings together for the first time Mohamedi’s rarely seen drawings, paintings and photographs with unique archival material from her studio, and provide the occasion to further position her practice both within the history of Indian art and in relation to an international avant-garde. The exhibition includes important loans from the Sikander Family Collection, Mumbai, India, the Glenbarra Art Museum Collection, Japan, and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai.

In conjunction with the exhibition, OCA hosted a panel discussion on Mohamedi’s work, examining it in relation to the context in which it was made, as well as its reception internationally. Speakers included Deepak Ananth (art historian), Rasheed Araeen (artist and editor of Third Text), Anita Dube (artist and art historian), Ruth Noack (critic and curator of documenta 12), Suely Rolnik (psychoanalyst, curator and critic) and Daniel J. Rycroft (art historian).

Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes – Reflections on Indian Modernism (Part 1) was part of ‘Reflections on Indian Modernism’, a comprehensive program of public projects and residencies organized by Gopinath and Watson for OCA and CoLab Art & Architecture, Banglore, India. This program aims to revisit recent Indian art history, recuperating legacies of avant-garde practice and archiving lesser-known bodies of work that slip between genres and schools.

Curator Suman Gopinath is the founder and director of CoLab Art & Architecture, Bangalore. Grant Watson is a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA), Antwerp, Belgium. Gopinath and Watson have been collaborating on exhibitions of modern and contemporary Indian art since 1999.