Across contemporary artistic practice, Urdu text appears as both material and memory — shaped as much by aesthetic inquiry as by histories of linguistic politics, erasure, and shifting cultural perception. Once a language formed through the intermingling of Hindavi with Turkish and Persian influences, Urdu was widely associated with plural cultural worlds. Over time, especially in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition, it came to be framed through increasingly narrower identities, alongside declining literacy and institutional neglect.
These conditions form an inescapable backdrop to the ways the Perso-Arabic Urdu script is encountered today. In contemporary works, Urdu is not only a medium of expression but also a site where histories of marginalisation persist — inscribed, fragmented, or reworked across image, surface, and form.
Shweta Upadhyay traces (@byshweta ) how artists Baaraan Ijlal (@baaraanijlalstudio ), Faiza Hasan (@faiza.hasan ), Saba Hasan (@sabahasanart ), and Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai reimagine Urdu as both language and image, navigating identity, loss, and continuity. Follow the link in our bio to read the full story.
Do we truly see an artwork or do we read it first?
In “Ways of Reading: Unravelling the Use of Poetry in Indian Contemporary Art” for ArteSpace, Gallery Espace’s digital journal, Shweta Upadhyay explores a quiet but consequential question about how contemporary art is encountered today.
In many exhibition contexts, the viewer meets the label, curatorial note, or artist statement before the work itself. How much of what we believe we are seeing is already shaped by what we have read?
Tracing a compelling historical trajectory from K. C. S. Paniker and Gulammohamed Sheikh to Atul Dodiya, Zarina Hashmi, Mithu Sen, Shilpa Gupta, Baaran Ijlal, and Amol Patil, the essay maps artists who deliberately animate visual form through language. The lineage extends back to the synesthetic traditions of Ragamala painting, where text and image operated in dynamic dialogue.
As Upadhyay writes, “Poetry lends rhythmic text, adds elements of sound and shape, besides providing resistance to institutionalised language.” For artists working between literary and visual cultures, seeing and reading are no longer separate acts, they are structurally intertwined.
Read the full essay on ArteSpace, Gallery Espace’s newest platform for long-form writing on Indian contemporary art:
/artespace/ways-of-readingunravelling-the-use-of-poetry-in-indian-contemporary-art/
My longform essay 'Standing their Ground' on the depictions of sacred landscape is out in the India Art Fair issue of Object newspaper. It is the longest piece I have written in some time and I enjoyed exploring works by artists that I had not engaged before like Hema Shironi, Deena Pindoria and Khadim Ali. Their practice helped me redefine the notion of sacred landscapes: The sacred here is neither inherited nor unquestioned. It does not demand uncritical allegiance to organised religion or romantic notions of worship. It settles instead into the everyday, drifting through socio-political, agricultural, cultural, material, and psychic realms. These artists arrive at the holy through acts of friction and reimagination—invented rituals, reconfigured icons, liminal states, and gestures that at times question the very notion of sanctity.
I also dwell on the artistic works of Kulpreet Singh, Himali Singh Soin, David Soin Tappesser, Sahej Rahal's series Ancestors as well as the Goa-based arts collective HH Arts Space.
An excerpt:
FOR THOSE WHOSE lives and labour are bound to land, it is not a distant muse but a site of veneration scored by ruptures—imposed, endured, and resisted.
This disquiet is evident in the work of the Patiala-based interdisciplinary artist Kulpreet Singh. Soot, ash, soil, and stubble sourced directly from farmlands in Punjab give material form to his unease with contemporary agricultural practices. They evoke the scars borne by the terrain and the people who cultivate it. “As a farmer, my relationship to soil is sacred,” Singh told Object. “I use visual poetry to reflect on the issues of land, so that it can be read again and again—like poetry—and become part of cultural memory.”
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You can get the issue at the India Art Fair, 2026. It was a great experience to work with the diligent editorial team of Journey of Objects.
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#art #contemporaryart #indiaartfair #artists #artcriticism
2025 was a great year for reading, writing and looking at art. Here are some of the art books that I was able to buy this year for our home collection. I bought a lot of literary fiction, non fiction and poetry books as well, but that list is too long for this post. I had bought Sahej's book a few years ago. The plan was to meet and take the book, which could not happen for various reasons - so this year he mailed this gorgeous book. I found Icons by Gordana Babic, which has reproductions of 64 full copper plates of European icons and Christian cult paintings, for 200 rupees in a books by weight sale. Le Grande depicting Le Corbusier's life and art weighs several bricks but Hari was sold on it the moment he saw the image of Le Corbusier painting a mural in the nude!
I love all these books, some bought on impulse, some after careful deliberation, and some after endless fantasizing.
My interview with Anju Dodiya about her show 'The Geometry of Ash' is out in Mint Lounge today. It was great to talk to Anju about books, Giotto's frescoes, the act of collecting gestures from various sources and mangled olive trees of Gaza. She told me that while reading Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, she realised that the novel’s fragmentary, constellation-like form matches her multi-panelled works that form the crux of her latest show at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. From discussion about Chopin’s preserved heart to disgruntled housewives, 'Flights' uses crisp interconnected narratives and fictional histories that create a complex, non linear reading experience. Dodiya's large fabric-on-board works with compartments or rooms coincidentally deploy this technique to create a fractured landscape marked by loss and unrelenting renewal. It evokes a post-apocalyptic landscape, a landscape of remains, fragments, and residues in the aftermath of destruction. But though there is violence, both covert and overt, there are also these gestures of hope in the form of women reading, women depicted before the unfolding of a traumatic moment, like in the case of Daphne, that gives them a moment of respite, a possibility of an unlived life or perhaps a different future.
The use of charcoal with watercolour gives unpredictable stains and an ashy hue to her works. There are also smaller works on paper in the show, which Dodiya calls ‘peripheral drawings’, and the interspersing of smaller and larger works create a visual rhythm, inviting different ways of seeing marked by an interplay of closeness and distance from the artworks. The show closes on the 26th of December.
#anjudodiya #art #contemporaryart #giotto #olgatokarczuk #artinterview #artists
Last night we gave a talk about our moon book at a branding event of a new dating app called The League. Held at Ministry of New, it was both a talk and a dating event attended by young men and women who were looking to bond over shared artistic sensibilities. Sanah Rehman of @opencallindia moderated the talk and asked probing questions about selenophilia, balance of control and vulnerability and how our book explores the notion of absence referring to the Sontagian idea of a photograph being a pseudo presence and a token of absence.
The audience was rapt and responsive - one person asked whether the moon looks better from Bombay than from Delhi? Somebody else asked which poet has written the best poem about the moon? Another question was would we have used dating apps if it were de riguer in our time and I said who knows now that we know Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji met on Hinge!
After the talk, a girl came up to us and teared up saying she felt she had come today because she was meant to discover our book. Later, I learnt she was @rytash . This left us speechless - I am often asked if the book is autobiographical and I deflect the question by quoting Mary McCarthy who said she puts real plums in an imaginary cake. After the event the audience were given a prompt to write their individual feelings about the moon .I would have loved to have read their replies. I was reminded of what Aranya Padil, (@tivramadhyam ) a poet and the editor of ArteSpace (who also shared the last poem in this post) said that the moon book can be a community project for people to express their relationship to the moon 🌕
In Rigoberto Gonzalez's words,
"The luna moth has no mouth, we’re told. But
neither does the moon. It dies of the opposite
of neglect, which is overindulgence, and nary
an utterance of objection from its moon glow.
The moon perishes from too much attention,
such vanity, such self-centeredness.
It doesn’t
need a mouth because poets and lovers
are its spokespeople, an entire publicity machine
at its disposal to sing its praises, punch-drunk
and, truth be told, pernicious. Enough already,
babbling bards and lovesick turtledoves, the moon
gets plenty of play."
My article 'Ways of Reading: Unravelling the Use of Poetry in Art' is out in ArteSpace today. ArteSpace is a new e-journal of the arts founded by Renu Modi and edited by Aranya Padil. I am happy to have contributed to its launch issue with an essay that touches on my favourite topics, art and poetry, and ways of writing into art. I show how art and poetry converge and interact in some of the works by Atul Dodiya, Baaraan Ijlal, C Douglas, Amol Patil, Shilpa Gupta, Mithu Sen, and Zarina. The use of poetry is further contextualized within the larger framework of incorporation of text into art and I discuss the Madras Art movement, 'Alphabet stories' by GM Sheikh, floating text in VS Gaitonde's works.
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An excerpt -
"Artist Atul Dodiya’s reimagination of poet Arun Kolatkar’s poems from Kala Ghoda poems (2014) poses the viewer with a dilemma – are the artworks to be seen or read? From The Rat-poison Man’s Lunch Hour to Pi Dog and Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda, long extracts of poems are reproduced with illustrative figures painted in watercolour.From his wanderings, and a table at the Wayside Inn cafe at Kala Ghoda, Kolatkar observed and documented the street life of the city in this collection, which is populated with marginal figures (the rat-poison man, pinwheel boy, hipster queen of the crossroads), stray dogs, cast-off objects and garbage. Dodiya’s terse, emaciated outlines, some of which have a skeletal head or have their bones and innards exposed, are connected to the poems in direct as well as oblique ways. The black charcoal blobs and the ashy hue of the paintings refer to the tormented psyche of the city migrants. “The migrants who come to the city to earn a living end up feeling trapped and marooned in the city as if they are in a Kala Pani prison,” says Dodiya. ..
This tension between seeing and reading through a convergence of poetry/ literature and art is present in the artistic practices of Zarina, C Douglas, Baaraan Ijlal, among others. Poetry lends rhythmic text, adds elements of sound and shape, besides providing resistance to institutionalised language. "
Some images for this post have been sourced online and not featured in the article
My cover story on the changing landscape of documentary photography is out in today's Mint Lounge. Through my essay I have shown how it is expanding its scope and blurring the lines with conceptual photography in its format and feel. At a time when photojournalism has declined, the spaces of photo books and art space have opened up. I also discuss how the simultaneous thrall and doubt over images, and the amalgamation of fact and fiction with the rise of deepfakes and artificial intelligence, require new visual templates in the contemporary moment. I talked to several people for the essay and I have posted works of some of the practitioners whose work I discuss in the essay. Some could not be included due to space constraints.
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An excerpt : "Even before the advent of AI and digital image manipulation, the authenticity of photographs could be suspect. Photographer Gauri Gill says, “I am well aware of how, at some level, it is all an entirely subjective interpretation by the photographer. Even in conventional documentary photography, when I am taking a so-called straight photograph, I make certain artistic choices—I choose what shutter speed to use, which will determine whether the person will be a blur or in sharp focus; or based on what kind of lens I use, will I have the background out of focus or with every detail visible clearly? So, the medium itself is prone to paradox.”
To her, documentary photographs are “fragments of facts”, which also makes them a kind of fiction “because the photograph is very much how I have creatively selected and interpreted particular facts, how I have mobilised the instrument, and my particular interaction with the scene. This is not to say that photojournalism or truth-telling is not relevant, so long as we know that it is only ever relational, and multi-dimensional,” she explains."
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Gauri Gill's work Jannat, Barmer from the series 'Notes from the Desert' on the cover
Full commentary in Newsletter. Excerpt in caption.
Link in bio.
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city of aviaries. every night the birds leave. like lonely trees atop city-mounds. remember that evening, my love? remember when the crow plucked the burning moon from the tip of your lighted-joint. my fingers remember. how you taught me to pass a cigarette - the way you offer a lover, a flower. a firangipani, say, that you picked up on your way back from the grocery store. you always brought back gossip. i miss eavesdropping on this city with you. nowadays, when i sit in the balcony, and look at the moon beyond the jamun tree, and the barapulla naala, beyond the temple terrace where sometimes bhimu used to mock us with his feline nonchalance - I only see you from a distance. this is why i can love you again. more than before. more than your absence.
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My preview of @abulhisham 's show is out in @livemintlounge today. I absolutely admire Hisham's practice which makes strong statements through subtle wraith-like images and delicate brushwork. Through experimentation in space, scale, sequencing and material interventions, Hisham builds and steers the flow of the narrative with a deft curatorial imagination. An excerpt from my piece,
" A man against the wall is a recurring motif. Hisham has painted 45 works of the same image with varying themes—three of these are at the show. The backs of these figures, turned towards the viewers, communicate wary watchfulness as if in anticipation of disruptive gazes or unwanted interceptions. This baleful threat becomes explicit in Distant Horizon, in which a man’s hands are tied behind his back. In Silent Whispers II, five men in front of a wall are in a huddle as if conspiring. “The wall is a global geo-political reality,” says Hisham. “Philosophically, politically, and conceptually, there are many meanings when you see a man facing a wall. I was thinking about borders, about conceptual walls that people create within themselves. If you look at art history, there are paintings with people near the wall as a kind of a death point. So the wall is the site of the last moment of their life. You can also refer to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s memoir Mathilukal in which a prison wall separated lovers.”
Even in works where the faces can be seen, they are partially obscured by garlands, rain, branches of a tree or scars. There is a veil of anonymity as well as a screen of fantasy through which these figures are perceived, othering them into inscrutable subjects haunting the cusp of belonging and un-belonging.
In Gathering, a group of faceless, shadowy pilgrims, are stranded in an indeterminate location besieged by a penetrating blackness. The varying shades of Goya-esque grey charge these tenuous figures with macabre menace. Are they a cohort of ghosts or stunned mourners? Hisham skilfully employs the strategy of spectrality to address sociopolitical concerns of erasure of identity, displacement and discord."
I wrote about 'Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla', curated by Deeptha Achar and Chithra KS @theguildartgallery for @livemintlounge . In this show (which features manuscripts, letters, magazine articles, scrap books, family albums and photos) we encounter Jussawalla in various avatars: as a photographer, an art writer, a publisher, a magazine editor, and a person fascinated with ships, picnics, Superman and Tarzan. But more than anything the show documents the history of the city, thrumming with creative energy, a sense of community and rebellion in the 1970s. I got to write about the Clearing House titles, which ought to be viewed in context of the ‘little magazine’ movement and the establishment of small and independent presses of the 1960s-70s. Jussawalla’s friends, including Kolatkar and Mehrotra, had rallied behind this underground experimental literary scene. In fact, Mehrotra’s little magazine, damn you, stood against tired literary strictures. Even Vrischik, the little magazine helmed by artists Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh, was meant to sting.
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My favourite from the show was a black-and-white photograph by Horace Ove of Jussawalla sitting in the iconic Wayside Inn, Rampart Row, which is part of the archive, and reveals the intense and frayed charisma of the cafe as well as the poet. Now shut, this iconic restaurant has been immortalised by several of Kolatkar’s poems including The Rat-Poison Man’s Lunch Hour in which he imagines the cafe’s walls recalling its various visitors, from Babasaheb sitting alone “with a pot of tea and scribbling notes / dreaming with an audacious pencil/ of a society undivided by caste and creed” to an obscure poet “munching on Welsh rabbit, and thinking of rats dying in a wet barrel”.
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Jussawalla’s obsession for hoarding paper can be glimpsed in Pablo Bartholomew’s photograph of his room, especially procured for this show, in which trunks, newspapers, books, stand cheek by jowl in packed shelves. The show is on view until 15 July.
'I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you' started as a photo-essay and it took us six years to finish the book. Along the way, various magazines published its extracts (including Fountain Ink and Indian Quarterly), but it was receiving the Alkazi Photobook Grant in 2020 that bolstered our resolve to get the book out quick. Here, I would like to underline the importance of grants in the realization of creative projects, not just in terms of financial support, but also by instilling discipline and a deadline.
The book is an ode to love, its various acts of meaning-making, interludes of loss, waiting, and also a tribute to the moon which has served as an eternal, poetic text for lovers. A fictional story composed of fragments, ghost of a plot and a ghostly presence at its centre - the book draws from the genre of gothic romance with subtexts of the supernatural, absent presences, portentous spaces charged with fear and desire, secrets, omens, birds. Like the moon that indexes both absence and presence, wholeness and emptiness - the book's central character is a haunting figure on the verge of disappearance subsequent reappearance.
The book went through several iterations, and initially, I was involved in its conceptualization and as its subject. But one day I took a copy of the dummy and decided to make material, textual and other interventions. The aim was to reflect the inner landscapes – the world of imagination, experience and feelings stored within a body by secreting them on the surface of images through repurposed words, texture of damage, fiction-making.
Both Hari and I were completely in sync in respect to the uncanny weather of the book without ever explicitly communicating about it. We pay homage to several literary and cinematic texts like the opening scene of Jean Luc- Godard’s Le Mépris; The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, from where the idea to inscribe the self within an already existing text came; gothic short stories by Naiyer Masud in which characters often go to sleep and a thin boundary separates real and dream worlds. (Cont in comments)
