Other Stories

The present exhibition takes Rasheed Araeen’s The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain as both a historical point of departure and a critical proposition. Presented at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1989, this ground-shifting exhibition marked a defining conjuncture in the articulation of global modernisms, establishing a foundational account of the contributions made by artists of African, Asian, and Caribbean origin to postwar art in Britain. The conceptual framework of AINA Gallery’s programming over the past decade owes an immense debt to this exhibition, as well as to Araeen’s broader curatorial and critical interventions, which insisted that modernism be understood not as a singular inheritance emanating from a few privileged centers but as a contested and dispersed field.

The present exhibition does not attempt to restage The Other Story or to reproduce its historical and geographical parameters. Rather, it takes Araeen’s project as a critical aperture through which to reconsider the present. This line of inquiry unfolds through a constellation of practices that illuminates the uneven yet interconnected geographies of postwar and contemporary art. At its historical core are five participants from The Other Story—Rasheed Araeen, Avinash Chandra, Aubrey Williams, Anwar Jalal Shemza, and Francis Newton Souza—whose presence anchors the exhibition in Araeen’s original intervention while opening it onto a broader field of aesthetic and political relations. The inclusion of Ernest Mancoba further indexes the artistic ecologies that conjoined Asia, Africa, and Europe, not through a seamless narrative of affinity, but through discrepant colonial histories, migratory trajectories, and formal propositions.

If The Other Story focused on artists whose lives and practices were connected to Britain, the present exhibition introduces another crucial node in this transnational formation: New York, the city in which AINA Gallery (previously known as Aicon Art) opened its doors in 2002. It does so by foregrounding the work of Mohan Samant, Krishna Reddy, and Zarina Hashmi. At the time Araeen’s exhibition was presented in London, Samant, Reddy, and Hashmi were living in New York, where they contributed to a vibrant cultural milieu even as their work remained at a slight remove from the dominant narratives of the city’s art world; Francis Newton Souza too had relocated to New York in the mid-1960s. The inclusion of Samant, Reddy, Hashmi, and Souza then conceptually repositions New York not as a supplement to the British history invoked by The Other Story, but as a parallel site in which the creative and discursive horizons of modern and contemporary art were actively negotiated.

Inclining into the present, the exhibition extends its arena of historical inquiry into the generational afterlives of The Other Story, placing its foundational figures in dialogue with artists whose mature practices emerged in the decades that followed. Rekha Rodwittiya, Surendran Nair, Veer Munshi, Sujith SN, Faiza Butt, Khadim Ali, Peju Alatise, Victor Ekpuk, Rachid Koraïchi and Saad Qureshi—artists represented by AINA Gallery—occupy distinct regional, political, and formal positions. Yet their works converge around many of the conditions that have reconfigured the artistic field since 1989: displacement and belonging, gender and the body politic, racial and communal violence, and the unstable relation between cultural inheritance and contemporary life. This moves the exhibition beyond the commemorative logic of historical recovery and toward a more complex account of transmission, rupture, and revision. The question is not only how an earlier generation was excluded from dominant histories of modernism, but how subsequent generations have inherited, expanded, contested, or refused the categories through which creative identity and artistic significance continue to be assigned in the present.

Within this expanded genealogy, the presence of Ernest Mancoba, Aubrey Williams, Peju Alatise, Rachid Koraïchi and Victor Ekpuk is not supplementary but constitutive. For such juxtapositions resist any assumption of South Asian art as a self-contained regional formation, and instead situates AINA’s project within longer, entangled histories of Afro-Asian exchange, decolonization, migration, and diaspora. Such collocations do not presume a unified aesthetic or political position but disclose a field structured by uneven but intersecting histories. In this respect, the exhibition recalls the international scope of Araeen’s critical project while addressing a present in which artists and ideas circulate within overlapping regional and transnational networks.

Such an exhibition must necessarily turn a critical lens towards its site: the AINA Gallery. Over more than two decades, the gallery has developed a program that is situated between historical recovery and contemporary production, moving across South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and their diasporic formations. AINA therefore appears here not simply as an exhibition’s venue but as one of its subjects: an institution that is fundamentally implicated in the processes through which a field is assembled, narrated, and made visible. The exhibition therefore implicitly considers the very institution of the art gallery as a site that is neither neutral nor merely custodial but fundamentally imbricated in acts of staging that serve to produce a genealogy for the present.

- Atreyee Gupta, Curatorial Advisor (Professor, UC Berkeley; Co-Editor (with Okwui Enwezor) “Postwar Revisited,” Haus Der Kunst, Berlin)