Bengaluru’s new Museum of Art and Photography opens with an exhilarating show

It is rare for a museum director to cite economic development data while discussing their inaugural exhibition. But that is how Kamini Sawhney, head of the new Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru, decided on Visible/Invisible: Representation of Women in Art Through the MAP Collection. “In 2021, women dropped to 20 per cent of the workforce in India. That is lower than Bangladesh. There was a report from Statista that said that India was the most dangerous country for women across a range of parameters,” Sawhney says. “I felt this is a narrative we need to pick up.”

The resulting exhibition, curated by Sawhney, combines art, sculpture, quilts, movie posters and photography to tackle a monumental paradox in a land of paradoxes. Goddesses are ubiquitous and worshipped widely in the country’s mythology; Indira Gandhi was one of the world’s first women prime ministers in 1966, and many leading politicians are women. Yet inside and outside the home, most women have a de facto second-class status. MAP’s debut exhibition tackles this weighty subject in both exhilarating and depressing fashion.

It begins with three magnificent sculptures of women deified as goddesses, one from 10th-century Karnataka, the province of which Bengaluru is the capital. The most recent work, meanwhile, such as a 1980s bronze by Meera Mukherjee entitled “Mother Earth”, manages to project strength and compassion simultaneously.

In other work, the everyday undermining of the status of women is laid bare. Bollywood movie posters illustrate the widespread sexual objectification of women in popular culture while the early 20th-century work of Bengali artist Jamini Roy exemplifies work that depicts women as Madonna-like mothers, always with a boy child, as in one piece featuring the god Krishna with his foster mother Yashoda. Ingeniously, these works are displayed near a photorealist charcoal work by Rajan Krishnan showing women in silent but reproachful protest, holding up placards saying: “Why this overwhelming preference for a male child?”

Nearby are two photographs capturing another form of deification of women. The first, by Raghu Rai, shows Indira Gandhi surrounded by men seeking to photograph or garland her after she was elected prime minister again in 1980. The other, by Jyoti Bhatt, depicts a gigantic wall mural of Jayalalithaa, former chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, whose male ministers were known to prostrate themselves before her.

These juxtapositions help provide validation for a new contemporary art museum that roams widely across tribal art and photography in a wide-angled thematic exhibition, typically not a strength of Indian museums. Bengaluru, despite its wealth and prominence as a back office to the world and home to start-ups, is especially poorly served by galleries and museums. Unlike MAP, the National Gallery of Modern Art is government-managed but haphazardly curated.

Yet the initial efforts by businessman and art collector Abhishek Poddar to open MAP in partnership with the local government sparked furious protests by local artists six years ago. This opposition centred around Poddar’s background — his family business is in explosives used for mining — and the commerce-heavy board of MAP. Poddar has one of the largest private collections of art in India. Poddar’s love for art started as a schoolboy reaching out to famous Indian artists, whom he subsequently forged friendships with. He has donated 7,000 works to MAP’s total of 60,000 pieces, which range from poster art to textiles to tribal and folk masterpieces as well as contemporary art and photography. Poddar has a reputation for being a relentless fundraiser. “He just keeps at it. In India, you need that,” says one keen observer of the art scene.

Poddar’s family foundation paid for the land that the museum is on and its building was funded by private philanthropists and the foundations of Bengaluru’s famous information technology companies. The five-storey museum is akin to a giant gift box, strikingly dressed in stainless steel panels with a cross pattern that helps reduce the weight of the panels while evoking a very modern take on India’s water tanks. Still, the site area for the museum is just 10,450 sq ft, the built area 33,900 sq ft. As a former art administrator says of MAP, “You could never have an Anish Kapoor exhibition here. The museum needed more space and height.” Yet architects Soumitro Ghosh and Nisha Mathew have succeeded in finding room for galleries, a conservation centre, library and auditorium — as well as a rooftop café with wonderful views of the surrounding greenery and, ironically, the government-run galleries. And Ghosh says MAP will function as “an anchor point that extends into other spaces into the city”.

In a sense, it has already done so. Even before its opening on February 18, it has led workshops with some 9,000 schoolchildren from across the city. Because it was slated to open in December 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic, it built on a partnership with an established cultural venue, the Bangalore International Centre, to hold online talks that showcased different aspects of its collection. It also held online exhibitions, among them one featuring the artist KG Subramanyan, who died in 2016. “Digital has been one of the gifts of Covid. MAP did a great job,” says Suhanya Raffel, director of Hong Kong’s M+, which has collaborated with the museum on workshops.

Yet for all that, the experience of art in a physical space is unparalleled, which is what makes the opening of MAP so exciting. Wandering through Visible/Invisible, it is possible to contemplate the female perception through a series of photographs of men taken by a woman photographer, Indu Antony, with their mundus (sarongs) folded above the knee in a manner few Indian women could imagine doing; the clustering of these bared male knees and calves makes them threatening and lewd and harks back to a childhood trauma.

Another major exhibition features the photography of Jyoti Bhatt, better known as a painter. His black and white pictures of village women painting the walls of their huts with elaborate murals have some of the vibrancy of Satyajit Ray’s early films, which found beauty amid the poverty of rural Bengal. In one photograph, a woman in Rajasthan, not content with a spectacular mural on the walls of her hut, is seen painting polka dots on the family cow.

One exits and enters MAP through a courtyard that currently features beautiful work by British sculptor Stephen Cox. The striking 1,200kg black statues made of Indian basalt, which have a lifelike glow achieved by having oil poured over them, seem to meld Cox’s love of Egypt with the temple icons of southern India (the artist has a studio in a temple town in Tamil Nadu). Intoxicated by the sight of these Indian-Egyptian yoginis, as regal as Isis, one steps back out on to the relentless honking of Bengaluru’s streets, which leaves one doubly grateful for this elegant new space in which to appreciate art.

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