The Past is a Country: Indo-nostalgia in Contemporary Art

Mussarat Arif was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972. She graduated from Karachi School of Arts in 1996. She started exhibiting work the same year in Sadequain art gallery. Her work focuses on traditional South Asian identity through Islamic geometric symbols. Her work also encapsulates traditional clothing of Pakistan like ‘Ajrak’. She has exhibited her work in Pakistan, USA, Italy, Saudia Arabia, Hong Kong, Dubai, Qatar, Singapore, UK and Malaysia. She is one of the pioneers of the revival of calligraphic South Asian art in Pakistan with more than 40 shows under her name. Her work is also included in the public collection of Larson Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. and Pakistan National Council of Arts in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Mussarat uses various mediums to express her spiritual pursuits. Her body of work is reflective of her Pakistani-Muslim diasporic identity. Her works are strongly influenced by history - both from her personal memories and her culture. Even her choice of mediums such as leather, copper, brass, wood, rilli, and thread has symbolic significance. The idea of connections, ones that stem from the yearning for her cultural and spiritual roots is woven into her body of work.

Mussarat’s work invokes a sense of yearning for answers through her mark-making. Every stitch or line she creates is one that is born from her values, a reflection of herself embedded in time - both past and present while inviting her viewers to step into their own spiritual search. The poetics of the process of creation is of significance to Mussarat. Working with tactile mediums such as sculpture, using metals, fabric, or thread, act as a means of physically manifesting the imprints of the artist’s feelings. With each piece, her yearning for home and the introspective quest for answers is molded into her art, inviting the viewer to lose themselves in these connections with time, memory, and what spirituality means to them. It is important for Mussarat to shed light on these questions but not dictate the individual’s experience of them. She ultimately leaves the interpretation of the answers to the viewer.

Vikrant Bhise (b. 1984, Mumbai, India) is a visual artist who lives and works in Mumbai, India. An alumnus of the L. S. Raheja School of Art (2010) and The Sir J. J. School of Art (2011), Mumbai, Vikrant’s artistic practice iterates his commitment to the revolutionary spirit inherent in the Ambedkarite consciousness. At the forefront of the struggle against caste-based domination and its vertiginous implications on land, liberty and labour, he is committed to the expression of social justice, the realisation of enduring reform through activism, and the remembrance of struggles against caste, class and gender-based oppression. Working across monumental scrolls and multi-panelled paintings as well as smaller works with ink on paper, Vikrant’s iconography is informed and deliberate in its radicality. His selected solo exhibitions include Human, curated by Katharina Domscheit-D'Souza, Jehangir Art Gallery (Mumbai, 2019) and Sense and Sensibilities: A Reflective Realisation, curated by Dr. Y.S. Alone, Anant Art Gallery (Noida, 2024). He is the recipient of a National Award by Lalit Kala Akademi for the series Impressions, in 2018.

Sanié Bokhari (b. 1991) is a mixed media artist born in Lahore, Pakistan. She earned her BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. She was awarded the prestigious President’s Scholarship at RISD and completed a fellowship at the RISD Museum. Her work has been exhibited globally, including at Canvas Gallery in Karachi, Harper’s Gallery in Los Angeles, and Aicon Gallery in NYC. Bokhari has participated in numerous residencies such as Vermont Studio Center and NARS Foundation. Her work has been featured in publications like Fad magazine, Arte East, and G5A: Imprint, and acquired by collections including the Nion McEvoy Foundation, as well as private collections of Dr. Fadi Braiteh, OJ Prakash, and Rahul Sabhnani.

Bhasha Chakrabarti has been based in Honolulu, New Delhi, New York, and now New Haven. She is interested in exploring how artwork, even when grounded in local materials and symbols, can speak to issues beyond the local by situating her practice within global conversations around race, gender, and power. By crossing many genres, she engages art-making as a mode of discourse and her work generates dialogues between subaltern tropes and feminine forms of labour from the global South and the agendas of resistance movements of marginalised communities in the global North.

Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu) graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2022. The artist has exhibited in solo and group shows at Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Jeffery Deitch (New York & Los Angeles), Hales (New York), Experimenter (Kolkata), M+B (Los Angeles), and Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore). Chakrabarti is the recipient of the 2023 South Asia Artist Prize (SAAI) awarded by University of California, Berkeley. She was a semi-finalist in the Smithsonian’s 2022 Outwin-Boochever Portrait Competition and was awarded a Beinecke Research Fellowship in 2021 and the Fountainhead Residency in 2020. Bhasha Chakrabarti currently an artist in residence at the Hampi Art Labs in India.

Shyama Golden (b. 1983, Texas) is a Sri Lankan American artist with a background in painting and graphic design. Her oil and acrylic paintings use figuration to explore the complex and layered ways identity is experienced, per- formed, and reinforced. Her work has been featured on covers for The New York Times, LA Times, and Netflix Queue, as well as various book covers such as Shruti Swamy’s Archer, Fatimah Asghar If They Come for Us, and Akweke Emezi’s PET and BITTER. Her work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (NYC and LA) and Trotter & Sholer in NYC.

Hamid Ali Hanbhi (born 1989, in Jacobabad) is a Pakistani contemporary artist. He is currently working as an artist and an educator in Lahore. Hanbhi studied at The National College of Arts Lahore in Pakistan. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with a distinction. He works in various mediums including; drawing, painting, sculpture, videos and large-scale installations. He started his career by painting cinema boards, billboards and truck art at Ideal Arts in Jacobabad. Hanbhi’s body of work includes recreation of cinematic visuals. Using his power of imagination, he extracts new meanings out of existing frames to prolong brief moments in them. The visual arc of this series ranges from romantic scenes, war and political imagery to landscapes from fantasy worlds. Juxtaposition of multiple stills from multiple films is the core of Hanbhi’s work. His idea is to create a dialogue between contrasting images while reliving those distant locations and time through the very act of painting. Hanbhi is a multidisciplinary artist and his works have been featured in Imago Mundi, Venice Biennale Italy (2016), Karachi Biennale (2017), He did multiple solo Exhibitions including called Out of Sight at Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2020), Confirm Jannati at O art space Gallery, Lahore(2022) and several group exhibitions, Before the end of time at Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2022), Dar amad at O Art Gallery, Lahore (2022), Uncurated at Full circle gallery, Karachi (2022), RECLAIM at O Art Space, Lahore (2021), NIC at O Art Space, Lahore (2021), IF YOU HAVE TEARS, at Canvas gallery kachi (2021), Virtual Reality, at O Art Space, Lahore (2021).

Mohd. Intiyaz, born on June 6, 1995 in Jharkhand, India. At an early age, he developed creative skills and grew, he witnessed various social situations and family experiences that impacted his memories and artistic sensitivity.

Between 2013 and 2019, he studied Visual arts at University of Jamia Millia Islamia (new Delhi, India), where he obtained a master's degree in painting with maximum distinction (MFA Grant), a specialty that drives him to develop the first stage of his career in pictorial expression, achieving numerous recognitions in the academic field. Throughout his life, Intiyaz has been in the middle of various social situations and family experiences that had a lasting impact on his memories and artistic sensitivity. His artwork often sheds light on crucial childhood events related to migration and marginalization. Realizing many of these hardships were not unique, but often a shared reality, he started to question why injustice is overlooked as a societal norm—and why it is so hard to talk about it openly. While camouflaging high tension citizen crises, each artwork presents us with an underlying question regarding labor, production, protest, and identity.

​Experience that has meant expanding his artistic knowledge exponentially and also investigating new ways of conceiving art with a contemporary approach. Currently, he has worked as a Graphics Designer in the area of ​​art and culture in New Delhi. In creative terms, he is exploring new expressive devices to continue developing his artistic work.

Noormah Jamal is a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary artist. She graduated from the National College of Arts Lahore in 2016, majoring in Mughal Miniature Painting. And earned her Masters in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute, NY in 2023.

Her work centers around identity and the personal baggage that people carry. Her image making and sculptures are deeply rooted in the oral histories of her people and family.

Some of her notable shows include, Space in Time at Rietberg Museum in Switzerland and at Canvas Gallery Karachi; Sites of ruin at Twelve gates gallery in Philadelphia and Poetics of relatability at Aicon contemporary in NYC.

Her work has been featured in various publications and media including Hyperallergic, the Herald, the news Pakistan, the Karachi collective and the Aleph review.

She was an artist in residence at VASL Karachi, for the Taaza Tareen 2019 cycle and was awarded the Imran Mir art prize in 2019. Currently she is a member of the Elizabeth foundation for the arts, Manhattan studio program and is an artist in residence with the Children’s museum of the arts in NYC and Project art.

Misha Japanwala is a Pakistani artist and fashion designer, whose work is rooted in the rejection and deconstruction of shame attached to one’s body, and discussion of themes such as bodily autonomy, gender based violence, moral policing, sexuality and censorship.

As a Pakistani woman familiar with the historical objectification, commodification and control exerted on marginalized bodies by societies and systems enveloped in patriarchy, Misha’s work aims to create a new historical record and documentation of people — one that is on our own terms, and rooted in honesty, resistance and hope.

Through molding the body to create casts that are worn as sculptural garments, Misha’s artistic practice blurs the lines between fashion and fine art, clothing and nudity, and asks viewers to see the body exactly as it is. Her practice is an insistence for bodies to occupy physical space, emphasizing the notion that our bodies shouldn’t need to prove anything other than being allowed to simply exist.

Misha’s calligraphic work takes the form of silhouettes of the body intertwined with Urdu script — often in an effort to reclaim words and ideas that are used as weapons against oneself and the body they inhabit.

Misha has exhibited work in Pakistan and the US. Her work has been photographed for and written about in various international publications including The New York Times, Vogue, The Guardian, Vice and Document Journal. Misha’s pieces have been worn by people such as Cardi B, Lupita Nyong’o, Lil Nas X and Joy Crookes. She was an honoree on the Forbes Under 30 list in 2021.

Her work continues to be an explorative, radical and shameless celebration of people and their bodies.

Sivasubramaniam Kajendran is born in Mullaitivu in 1988 and survived the war and the tsunami of 2004. He graduated in Fine Arts (Art History) from the University of Jaffna in 2014. He was awarded the prestigious UNESCO scholarship of the Madanjeet Singh Institute for South Asian Arts (UMISSA) and graduated with a Master in Art and Design from the Beaconhouse National University (BNU), Lahore, Pakistan. Kajendran served as a temporary assistant lecturer and visiting lecturer at the Art and Design Unit and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna. His practice involved several mediums such as drawings, paintings, installations, photography, performance, video-based performances, and digital works. Kajendran has exhibited works both locally and internationally. His first solo exhibition “STRANDED” was held in Jaffna in 2016. This was followed by his second site-specific installation “ESCHEW” staged at Thondaimanaru beach, Jaffna in 2019. He has also participated in group exhibitions including “Absent of the present, Nomad” at Art and Culture Center, Islamabad, Pakistan in 2019, “Visual Art Exhibition”, Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2019, “Of the Moments” at 12.0 Contemporary, Islamabad, Pakistan in 2020. His works are also in several personal collections all over the world.

Russna Kaur (b. 1991, Brampton, Ontario) is a painter currently living and working in Richmond, British Columbia. Kaur completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Waterloo (2013) and a Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019).

Is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Painting Prize (2020) and the IDEA Art Award (2020). She was awarded the Gathie Falk Visual Arts Scholarship (2019), the University Women’s Club of Vancouver Graduate Scholarship (2017), and an Audain Faculty of Art Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2018).

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Burrard Arts Foundation (2020) in Vancouver and received the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency (2020) in Port Townsend, Washington.Has exhibited works nationally at institutions including the Remai Modern (2023), Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (2022), and Kamloops Art Gallery (2021).

She was commissioned to create work for the Boren Banner Series at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2021), and has shown internationally in Mumbai, IN (2023). Russna Kaur’s work is held in numerous collections including the RBC Art Collection, Audain Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, and the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art.

Shradha Kochhar (b. Delhi, India) is a textile artist and knitwear designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Best known for her home spun and hand knitted ‘khadi’ sculptures using ‘kala cotton’ - an inherently organic cotton strain indigenous to India, her work is at an intersection of material memory, sustainability and intergenerational healing. Focusing on generating a physical archive of personal and collective south asian narratives linked to women’s work, invisible labor and grief, the work is large scale and exists as sculpture beyond whispers over generations. Kochhar received her MFA in Textiles from Parsons School of Design, New York. She is a Dorothy Waxman Textile Excellence Prize Finalist and was awarded the John L. Tishman Environment and Design Award for Excellence in 2021. Her work has been shown at the Melbourne Museum, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Mana Contemporary and New York Public Library. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, Crafts Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and others.

Utkarsh Makwana, born in 1989, holds a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Through his paintings, Makwana questions the everyday realities he comes across. The artist draws inspiration from miniature traditions creating multifaceted layered narratives through his paintings. His prime concern is the depiction of a story in each work, like a traveller documenting his journey in an imaginary world. One can also find historical and mythological references in his works.

Makwana’s visual interpretations are arresting due to his choice of colours and well-thought-out compositions. The Vadodara-based artist uses his skill to lead the viewer to behold fabulous territories that they would often miss and encourages them to frame their narratives within his art. His artworks navigate through philosophy and comedy while also touching upon the wonder one gets from the mundane. His work then becomes the point of interaction between the ordinary and the invented realms for the viewers.

Represented by Akara, Utkarsha Makwana has had two solo exhibitions with the gallery- ‘Yes, Blue! But Which Blue - Utkarsh Makwana’, 2023 and ‘The Wonder Journal’, 2019. His group shows include ‘Let Me Tell You A Story… Part II’, Curated by Luiza Teixeira De Freitas, Akara Contemporary, 2023 and ‘The First Contemporaries’, 2022. He has also been part of India Art Fair (Delhi) 2018 – 2024 and Art Dubai 2024.

He is a recipient of the prestigious Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship Award (2012).

Anoushka Mirchandani (b. 1988, Pune, IN) is an India-born, San Francisco-based artist. Mirchandani’s practice examines her experience as an Indian, Immigrant, Other, Woman. Her work probes ancestry, womanhood, cultural and sociopolitical environments through a diasporic lens, exploring the micro-tensions and identity transformations that are part and parcel of assimilation in a foreign land.

Her solo shows include Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2023) UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2023) Rhodes Contemporary Art, London (2021) and Glass Rice, San Francisco (2020). Mirchandani’s group shows and fairs include BODE, Berlin, curated by Dexter Wimberly (2023); Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC, curated by Amoako Boafo and Larry Ossei-Mensah (2022); The Armory Show, NYC (2023-2022) Mirchandani was awarded the SFA Grant by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2022-23. She has participated in multiple residencies including The Wassaic Project and Silver Art Projects’ Digital Residency.

Asad Ali Qulander, born in 2000 is a Lahore-based visual artist a captivating portraitist, and a graduate of the National College of Arts with a BFA in Painting (2024). Light and its profound influence are the cornerstones of Qulander's practice. He explores how light shapes a portrait, transforming it into a nuanced exploration of identity.

Focusing on human subjects, Qulander seeks to capture the transformative dialogue between light and everyday scenes. This interplay reveals hidden expressions, fleeting emotions, and introspective moments. He infuses his subjects with theatricality, drama, and mystique, inviting viewers to discover the inherent beauty in ordinary encounters.

Qulander's artistic journey extends beyond the canvas. participated in multiple group shows in Lahore, Pakistan, and internationally in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Firi Rahman’s (b. 1990, Sri Lanka) work is often concerned with the contentious relationship between humankind and the animal kingdom. He is particularly interested in the interactions between animals and urban environments, and the responsibility societies share in protecting biodiversity. His works, brought to life through his somber and monochromatic style, are an intimate and sensitive engagement with wildlife. Even in their minimalism, the dexterity of his skill and close engagement with the subject imbues it with a palpable quality — compelling an empathetic response from the viewer. Firi earned a Foundation in Art and Design (2012) from City and Guilds at Manchester College in the United Kingdom. He is a cofounder of We Are From Here, a collective project which highlights a deeply interconnected community in Slave Island whose home-base is increasingly threatened by gentrification for state and corporate interests. Firi’s work has been exhibited at the Colombo Art Biennale (2016), and Colomboscope (2016 and 2019). His works belong to private collections in Sri Lanka, Switzerland, India, United Kingdom, and the USA. He was also selected for the Cité Internationales des Arts residency in France (2023).

Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990), lives and works in Kolkata, India. He reconstructs archival materials and oral history into photography, films, alternative archives, and artist books. Bose’s hybrid mode of practice interweaving long-term research and engagement with local communities including his own family history accentuates certain subaltern experiences of the marginalised yet resilient in post-Partition Bengal. Enmeshing fiction and reality, Bose’s work opens up daring realms of memory, desire, vulnerability and identity.

Soumya Sankar Bose was awarded Magnum Foundation’s Social Justice Fellowship for Full Moon on a Dark Night in 2017, was Hello! India’s Emerging Artist of the Year in 2023, and received the Louis Roederer Discovery Public Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles for A Discreet Exit through Darkness in 2023.

Select solo and group exhibitions include Braiding dawn and dusk, Delfina Art Foundation, London (upcoming 2024); A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Experimenter Colaba, Mumbai & Experimenter Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2023); Where The Birds Never Sing, Experimenter Kolkata, (2021); Goethe-Institut's Five Million Incidents; Let’s Sing an Old Song, Experimenter Outpost, Kolkata, (all 2019); Full Moon on a Dark Night, Experimenter, Kolkata, Photo Kathmandu, Nepal; Houston Centre for Photography, Houston, Texas, (all 2018); Chitrabani, Kolkata, & Goethe-Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata, (all 2016); Goa Photo; Delhi Photo Festival, (all 2015), among others.

Manjari Sharma, raised in Mumbai, India, is an LA-based artist exploring Ritual, Identity, memory, and mythology. Expanding her art practice, Manjari has incorporated sound, motion, projection, and collage into her work. Manjari's project 'Darshan' (Published by Nazraeli Press) is a photographic re-imagining of Hindu deities that garnered her wide critical acclaim. Manjari's work has been seen in The New York Times, Vice Magazine, The Huffington Post and NPR, to name a few. Works from her projects have been published, exhibited internationally and her work is in the permanent collection of The MET, MFA, Houston, Carlos Museum, and Birmingham Museum of Art and Santa Barbara Museum of Art amongst various private collections.


Swapnaa Tamhane’s art practice is dedicated to the material histories of cotton and jute, while her curatorial interests explore contemporary art histories from India and the wider South-Asian diaspora in North America. She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, Montreal, where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence. Residencies have been held at KHOJ @ 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, and she was a participant at MarchMeeting, Sharjah, in 2010. She has been supported by SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009), and she was an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes in 2013. In 2019, she was a juror for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently on the board of SAVAC. Her research extends to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, Phaidon Press (2016). She has exhibited her work at Nature Morte, Delhi; articule, Montreal; Sculpture Park Jaipur; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC; and has been commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum, Dundee, Scotland.