subTerrain: artworks in the cityfold is a statement on contemporary Indian art. The exhibition’s curator Geeta Kapur – one of India’s leading art historians – has selected works by sixteen artists who have very distinctive reactions to social and political issues in the Indian megalopolis, raising questions about bodies and subjectivity in the context of urban cultures, democracy and the political dimension of space and place, and tensions between the local and globalisation. These works reflect a multi-facetted, ironic and critical stance – whether as painting, photography, installation or video – positioned in the spaces between urban structures and between the interfaces where individual and social processes meet.

The vast majority of the works are being exhibited for the first time in Europe, and some were commissioned directly by the House of World Cultures. In addition to the HWC main exhibition hall, the adjoining rooms and corridors have been integrated into the display, creating routes that simultaneously open a narrative process and disclose internal reference.

“I propose situating the artist (here, the Indian artist ) in an uneasy ‘subterrain’, in the ‘dug-outs’ of the contemporary, where s/he reclaims memory and history; where the levelling effect of the no-history, no-nation, no-place phenomena promoted by globalized exhibition and market circuits is upturned to rework a passage back into the politics of place.” (Geeta Kapur)

With works by: Navjot Altaf, Sheba Chhachhi, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Anant Joshi, Ranbir Kaleka, Jitish Kallat, Bhupen Khakhar, Sonia Khurana, Nalini Malani, Raghu Rai, N.N. Rimzon, Sharmila Samant, Vivan Sundaram, Vasudha Thozhur