Group show
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998
5 Oct 2024 — 5 Jan 2025 at Barbican Art Gallery
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 is a major group exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, presented in 2024. The show brings together a wide range of works created between 1975 and 1998, a period of profound social, political, and cultural transformation in India.
Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper, the exhibition examines how Indian artists engaged with questions of identity, modernity, and nationhood during this turbulent era. From the Emergency of the mid-1970s to the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, the works on view chart the evolving imagination of a nation in flux.
The Barbican's presentation offers international audiences a rare and expansive look at a generation of artists whose work has often been underrepresented in global art histories.
Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper, the exhibition examines how Indian artists engaged with questions of identity, modernity, and nationhood during this turbulent era. From the Emergency of the mid-1970s to the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, the works on view chart the evolving imagination of a nation in flux.
The Barbican's presentation offers international audiences a rare and expansive look at a generation of artists whose work has often been underrepresented in global art histories.
About the venue
Barbican Art Gallery
The Barbican Art Gallery in 1995 commissioned a wall hanging from Salah El Din M. El Ozy (q.v.) in Cairo for use in a temporary exhibition as part of the Africa95 programme. Subsequently it was offered for sale to the Ethnography Department of the Br