Meet the power women shaping South Asian art

South Asian art is at a pivotal point in its history. No longer token exotica on the international stage, it’s making a definitive grab for its full potential. And a battery of young, sophisticated, incredibly intelligent women — artists, curators, business minds,  philanthropists — are leading the charge. There’s evidence of it in the world-class art practices they employ, the efforts they’re making to intensify  curatorial dialogue, in their steady presence at prestigious fairs and exhibitions, and their deep, personal belief in the power of art to change the world. But the most important fallout of their influence in South Asian art is that its geography is slowly ceasing to matter. If these women are any indication of where the region is headed, we’re in for exciting times.

Zain Masud, 32, Curator

“I think of myself as a gallerist of gallerists,” says the international director of this year’s India Art Fair (IAF) — its most successful edition yet. On her watch, the modern and contemporary art behemoth got noticeably leaner, slicker and more focused. Galleries were carefully vetted for their South-Asia quotient, collectors were courted with glossy incentives and a nifty new film vertical was introduced. “It’s important that the international market sees us as a way to keep its finger on the pulse of the region,” she says. The Saudi-Pakistani Londoner is a bit of an overachiever. She has art history degrees from Oxford and SOAS, worked in Paris, London and Dubai (as assistant fair director of Art Dubai from 2009-14), moved to Moscow and back for love (with now-husband writer and curator Brendan McGetrick, who she calls her "intellectual mentor"). Being a woman, she says, has been an occupational leg-up: "Especially in the regions I’ve been working in like the Gulf and India — these societies made women custodians of a nice, benign thing like the art sector, without realising its soft power. And now we have so many incredible women in the arts."  

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Photographs: Keiran Perry, Nayantara Parikh, Manasi Sawant, Siddhartha Hajra, Jimmy Granger. Styling: Nidhi Jacob, Kallol Datta, Make-up and hair: Sonam Kapoor, Saher Ahmed, Donald, Hsaio. Assisted by: Moumita Sarkar, Vaani Kapoor. Inputs: Sharmistha Ray. 

Aparajita Jain, 35
Gallerist and philanthropist

“I believe great content always finds buyers,” she says. It’s why she founded Seven Art Ltd gallery in 2008, right on the heels of the Lehman Brothers collapse, and is now more certain of it than ever with Nature Morte. While the Delhi gallery is considered by most as the starting point of contemporary art in India, curatorial co-director Peter Nagy will readily admit that it’s been bringing up the business end once the mother-of-two came on board in 2013. Jain’s education in psychology and her family background (she grew up in a business household and is married to restaurant tycoon Gaurav Jain) synthesise to give her a canny sense for gaps in the market. A good example is her NGO Saat Saath Arts, which awards an annual grant to international curators so they may burrow deeply into South Asian art. “They were constantly saying they didn’t know how to navigate Indian art, and I thought, well, I know my country and I know how to work it,” she says. Most recently, Jain has been appointed to Harvard University’s South Asian Arts Council, which facilitates a research-based exchange between the university and the region. How does she maintain that elusive work-life balance? “It’s a real struggle for me,” she says candidly. “And I’m working at it every day.”      

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Meenakshi Thirukode, 34
Curator

Since she took over as curatorial director of Exhibit 320 and its project space 1After320 last year, the Delhi gallery’s programming has become more cohesive, with a definite nod to young South Asian female artists. It was the two-and-a-half years she spent in Mumbai learning to make films, producing theatre and working on the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival that were Thirukode’s tipping point into the art world. “I felt all these disciplines were connected, but I couldn’t find a language to articulate it,” she says. She signed up for an art education at Christie’s, New York in 2006, and went on to work as a gallery manager, co-found the public art initiative Project for Empty Space (2010), as well as script and star in the autobiographical Isha: A Tell-All Tale (2012), a part-performance-part-film project. A lot of the work, she says, was informed by her subconscious awareness of being an outsider and a person of colour. The feeling hasn’t abated back home in India. “I’m a self-sufficient, divorced woman with tattoos. I’m very much an outsider still.”  

Inputs from Sharmistha Ray

Priyanka Raja, 35
Gallerist

Priyanka Raja wakes up at 4.30am daily and spends the next 17 hours tending to her two boys (aged four and seven), the family’s handloom textile business, a “heavy” social life and running Kolkata gallery Experimenter with husband Prateek. The risk they took starting a gallery “away from the hyper-commercial imperatives of the Indian art market” — this was right after the great art slump of 2008 and neither had much formal curatorial experience — has paid off. Experimenter is now synonymous with cerebral, avant-garde programming, including the now-critical Curators’ Hub (2012), an annual conference geared at refining Indian exhibition-making. Many stars of South Asian contemporary art including Naeem Mohaiemen, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Raqs Media Collective and Bani Abidi have hung, performed, been installed and projected here. Is she planning her next acquisition for the Rajas’ well-profiled personal art collection? “We have no money,” she laughs. “It all goes to the programme. Just today I heard that one of our artists will show at NGMA, and we will do all we can to support him. And there goes my next art buy!” 

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Prajakta Potnis, 35, Artist

At her solo exhibition When The Wind Blows at Project 88 earlier this year, Potnis showed a photograph of worn mixer blades inside a frost-matted freezer — it’s the most apocalyptic either quotidian object has ever looked. In another projection, we simply watch the circular movement of a washing machine dryer on loop with an increasing feeling of panic. Potnis’ own “disorienting” experience of being completely unable to make sense of the German instructions on a washing machine during a residency in Berlin (2014), was the starting point for this work. “I wondered how something so familiar could feel so alien.” The JJ School of Art alum’s ability to consistently mine the mundane for big, scary questions about time, memory, alienation and mortality, have won her inclusion in Younger Than Jesus (Phaidon, 2009), a directory of the world’s best young artists, a Sanskriti Award (2010) and exhibitions at the Queens Museum, New York and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (to name a few). Now she wants to give back: she’s keen to work with schools to develop teacher training programmes because “you never really meet Picasso unless you go to art school. And that’s really sad.”        

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