All the things you think of when you hear the words ‘art’ and ‘museum’ together in the same sentence, are absent when you visit the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. It’s inside a mall, a couple of minutes from one of the busiest shopping-eating-chilling hubs in South Delhi. There’s nothing subtle or boring about it – even before you enter, you’re greeted by a gigantic mushroom cloud of utensils, Subodh Gupta’s Line Of Control, towering 36 feet above you.
However, museums as Indians know them are usually state-funded and slightly academic – what is, then, a ‘private, philanthropic’ museum, which KNMA is? Founder and chairperson Kiran Nadar explains, “Basically, a museum is a place of learning, intended to expose people to various tracks of cultural activity and art, in various forms. The state has certain responsibilities (to build museums), but in America – let’s take that as an example, since it has the maximum number of private museums – most museums are not state-funded, and are comprised of collections of various people who’ve collected through their life and then donated it to form a private museum, which is how this culture of private museums started. Our thought was that I had a collection, and I felt I should do something meaningful with it, not just put it into storage.”
“And from that came the idea of setting up a private museum along the lines of what is in abundance in the US, thereby fostering the arts and sharing the collection with people,” says Nadar. “Basically, I also get to see my own collection, which I wouldn’t if it were in storage! I felt that art dissemination and art knowledge translation was what something we could do.” To that aim, it’s also “not for profit,” she says. “The collection has been deemed to the museum, and entry is free. We do school outreach programs, workshops – whatever we can do to foster the arts, we try to do.”
Nadar has stressed that she’d like to see ‘sustained dialogue’ and ‘visibility for modern and contemporary Indian art’ – but doesn’t Indian art have visibility globally already? Or is it that the Indian is less aware of Indian art than the rest of the world? “It has limited visibility – I wouldn’t say less or more – but Indian modern and contemporary art, compared to, say, Chinese modern and contemporary art, is definitely on the backburner. Chinese collectors are definitely more (in number), and it has a more sophisticated, larger collector base. In India, that base is very small. Because of that base being small, the dialogue with art is also much less. You don’t find a museum being part of people’s activities on a regular basis. If you go to any western city, you find that people visit museums in the normal course of things – if a show opens, the common person, not just the art connoisseur or art-interested – will go and visit. But in India, that hasn’t happened. Even at the NGMA – take a show like Anish Kapoor’s – it got visibility, it got footfalls, but again, I feel they could have been much more. The wider audience did not go in the numbers that they should have,” she says. “There is a gap in the dissemination of knowledge to people, which needs to be bridged so that they decide that a museum is not a stultified, boring, moth-eaten place. It is vibrant, like going to an exciting movie. It has the same kind of stimulating possibilities. Therefore, people have to get interested in doing this, they have to go to a museum once in six weeks, once a month; it has to become a part of their to-do list. India has such a great heritage of art, and it’s a shame that culture is not disseminating further.”
Art is anything but ‘elitist’, says Nadar, and she’d like people to learn that through the various outreach programs that the museum does. “When we have a school project, we try and tell the kids to bring their parents. Normally, it’s the parents who bring the kids, but the reverse might happen if the kids become interested. The dialogue with the lay person is important. Unless the lay person gets interested, it’ll remain ‘elitist’, and the aim is to keep it for everyone,” she asserts.
One of the few instances when ‘everyone’ does get to hear of art is when Indian works are snapped up at exorbitant prices in global auctions. Is that one of the reasons people think it’s elitist? “Prices do have a curiosity value. It’s like a 100 crore film, but people are not going to watch it just because it’s a 100 crore blockbuster, they’re going because of the entertainment value of the movie. That is what we want to inculcate. The curiosity of a painting going at a certain price is always going to be there, it always has an ‘awe value’, but if that value can be translated into people saying ok, this artist’s work is showing at the museum, then there should be a natural curiosity of people going to see that work. But when you have a show, you can’t always have trophy works to lure people. The aim is to show work which is part of a theme. Like this show (Is It What You Think?), it has a work on the Babri Masjid, which has a historical perspective. Even though there are no trophy works, there is a Nalini Malani retrospective. The show has a social ambit, social messages that are very strong. We want people to feel motivated to see and relate to these works,” she says.
Nadar starting collecting art ‘for herself’, but that changed when she set up the museum. “Initially, it was completely subjective to what I felt I should buy, and that stays – if I feel a work is important, I’ll buy it. But today, I look at it in more depth, I look at the collection as a whole, and if I’m collecting Indian art, then I look at gaps in my collection. If someone asks, are you buying this for yourself, I tell them there’s no ‘self’ left at all, unfortunately – it’s all for the museum. I’m still emotional about art, but I don’t buy as impulsively as I did. I study a lot more before I go in and get a work,” she says. She’s also planning a third building for the museum, an iconic structure in Delhi with the ‘destination value’ of the sort that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has.
The museum has three ongoing exhibitions currently – one is Chapter 2 of Nalini Malani’s Retrospective (1964 – 2014) – You Can’t Keep Acid In A Paper Bag. The second is Unfinished Portraits, which features in-depth oeuvres of 16 Indian artists from the KNMA Collection. The exhibition displays a contextual history of Modernism in India, its ideological moorings at Santiniketan with Nandalal Bose, Binode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, Krishna Reddy, Somnath Hore and Ganesh Pyne from Kolkata, two artists – FN Souza and MF Husain from the Progressive Artists’ Group (Mumbai), and Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Arpita Singh and Bhupen Khakhar from Baroda and Delhi, and also contextual photographs of Madan Mahatta, Richard Bartholomew and Ida Kar. The third is Is It What You Think? – Ruminations On Time, Memory and Site, a group exhibition showcasing the work of 17 artists. The exhibition is intended as a compliment to the three-part retrospective of Malani’s work.
Nadar says that this momentum started last year with their Nasreen Mohamedi retrospective last year, the largest retrospective of her works in the world, with 138 works. On Is It What You Think?, she says, “This particular show has 17 different artists with their perspectives on war, on various things that have happened socially in the Indian fabric. There’s a perspective this year – society has slightly greater awareness. We’re showing Amar Kanwar’s video installation on rape, but it’s a burning subject, with the Badaun rape, Nirbhaya… Bengal to UP, everywhere it’s a malaise, and it’s incomprehensible how depravity of this kind can exist. And yet these artists have talked about it in an earlier period of their lives. There is a great social fabric to this show and it mirrors society in more ways than you’d expect. Babri Masjid (demolition) on one level happened many years ago, but today again, the issue of a Ram temple might emerge. There are issues to be seen and to be connected with.”
But the Modern masters remain closest to her heart, because “that collection is completely from the KNMA collection, it’s part of what I have collected. It’s a very intimate show because all the works are small and paper works, and it’s I suppose easier to comprehend for the lay person, because it’s translatable into a figurative rendering. It’s very dear to my heart because all these small works I collected out of complete passion for the art, at the stage when I was buying for myself,” she says, smiling fondly.
