Aicon is pleased to announce Politically Charged, an exhibition of artists exploring overlapping themes of power, gender, and the environment. While there is no doubt that the politics and policies of the United States reverberate around the globe, it is vital to make space and time for alternate perspectives. Opening days after the 2024 US presidential election, the exhibition offers a moment to reflect on socio-political issues through a South Asian and diasporic lens. Politically Charged brings together a diverse collection of works from the 1970s through 2024 by Zainul Abedin, Mequitta Ahuja, Khadim Ali, Sher Ali, Rasheed Araeen, Farida Batool, Atul Bhalla, Anindita Dutta, Vibha Galhotra, Somnath Hore, Shehnaz Ismail, Ranbir Kaleka, Veer Munshi, Rekha Rodwittiya, Anupam Sud, and T. Venkanna. The exhibition’s goal is not to provide a comprehensive overview of political South Asian art but to present a diverse array of artists openly embracing politics in their practice.

Hore and Abedin were of the generation directly shaped by the Bengal famine of 1943, the lingering effects of which can be seen in both of their works. A tragedy caused by policy failure under British rule rather than natural factors such as drought, the famine killed between 1.5 and 3 million people in eastern India. In his seminal “Wounds” series starting around 1972, Hore took white paper casts and then slashed, cut, and otherwise marred their surfaces to reflect the unhealed wounds he saw in society. In contrast to Hore’s abstract compositions, Abedin’s social-realist figurative works, like Untitled Figures (1970) from his “Famine” Series, confront viewers with the collapsed figures of an adult and child.

At the same time as Hore and Abedin, Rasheed Araeen was producing works and polemical texts that challenged Eurocentric definitions of modernism. In Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto (1975-76), Araeen looked at how colonialism allowed Western art and institutions to flourish while preventing what he called the “Third World” from developing its own version of contemporary art. He asked three key questions, which find some answers in Politically Charged: “How are Third World people trying to enter the modern era or/and create their own contemporary history? If their voice is muted or not heard at all, what are the underlying causes? And what are the actual alternatives open to them?”

There is a unique phenomenon in political art that shows up all over the world, South Asia included, and that is the use of prints as a central medium. Anupam Sud, a founding member of the GROUP 8 printmakers, employs etching and intaglio to craft her scenes about human sexuality and gender politics. Sud’s prints can be direct and easily decipherable, like Emancipation (1988), or highly symbolic, like Composition (1970-71). Farida Batool’s lenticular prints force viewers to engage with works from multiple perspectives. In her 2006 works Love at First Sight and Ecstasy, Batool shows the Euphrates River in Iraq. In one, the river is seen by day through a target; in the other, exploding artillery lights the same scene by night.

Batool is one of the artists in the exhibition who slides between more than one of Politically Charged’s three themes. In her large-scale installation, The Garden As It Is (2023), she marries questions about power and how it affects the environment. Two imposing steel and barbed wire trees stand before a video of South Asian parrots. By using barbed wire, Batool takes on what she calls the ‘neo-normalized’ aesthetics of the material in urban space and transforms life-supporting trees into symbols of colonial division and border violence.

The subjects of forced migration and shifting borders are more readily apparent in the photographs of Veer Munshi and Atul Bhalla. Munshi was one of many Kashmiris forced into exile in the 1990s during a wave of violence by radical Islamic militants. In 2008, he returned to his devastated ancestral home of Srinagar to begin work on his series of photographs of the abandoned and ruined Pandit houses, turning them into un-manipulated monuments of history. Bhalla’s Nostalgia I & II (2020) memorialize the ports of Gujarat in a more painterly way through the addition of superimposed figures and areas of bright color. Gujarat, famously known as the birthplace of Gandhi, was also the port where some of the first indentured laborers boarded ships. These works also cross over into environmental concerns, with rising silt levels caused by climate change impacting the region’s shipping-reliant economy.

Both Vibha Galhotra and Anindita Dutta employ found materials in their sculptures. In Jezero Delta (2024), conceptual artist Galhotra combines ghungroos, fabric, wool, and steel to create an image of Mars as seen by satellite. Part of a larger body of work called “Life on Mars,” Galhotra is drawing attention to the folly of looking to Mars as a future home for humans rather than focusing on strategies to reverse climate change on Earth. (Ranbir Kaleka’s Duratrans lightbox, Conference of Birds and Beasts (2024), shows the future of our planet should we do nothing to combat the destruction of the environment.) In her series “Sex, Sexuality, and Society,” Dutta’s sculptures made from thrift store finds of female-gendered shoes and garments examine the duality of sexual violence and pleasure. She embraces the history and symbology of the materials to present multi-dimensional narratives of the female experience.

American politics and policy come to the forefront in the works of Mequitta Ahuja and Khadim Ali. In her 2024 painting, America Makes Me, Ahuja shows a celebratory embrace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni. They are superimposed over a chess board, drawing parallels between the couple and how the king and queen pieces operate, with Clarence more restricted by his position and Ginni able to move freely and with impunity to accomplish their goals. Ali’s engagement with the US comes from his position as a Hazara refugee living in Australia. In his 2020 collaborative work with Sher Ali, It Was Not Like This Ever, the artists use a snakes and ladders board as the base to critique the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Alongside Dutta’s multifaceted sculptures, expressions of gender politics and sexuality appear in the works of Rekha Rodwittiya, T. Venkanna, and Shehnaz Ismail. Venkanna’s erotically charged paintings question traditional gender roles and make private acts public, enticing viewers to grapple with their sexual desires. Rodwittiya’s works from the late 1980s and ‘90s are acts of defiance against the patriarchy. They portray androgynous women in dramatic scenes to present women as protectors of society against backgrounds of destruction, violence, and degradation. For Politically Charged, Ismail created a new work that carries on her practice’s focus on the revival of Pakistan’s indigenous textile crafts.

Politically Charged celebrates the diverse ways South Asian and diasporic artists engage with politics. By presenting concurrent and equally important realities to the Western dominated perspective, the show aims to encourage viewers to broaden their understanding of contemporary socio-political issues. The exhibition is curated by Pam Gendron.