Curator's Note

'The Earth's Heart, Torn Out'
Navjot Altaf: A Life in Art

I consider it a great honour to curate the retrospective of the feminist artist Navjot Altaf (b. 1949), whose compelling journey has been marked by unexpected detours as well as barriers that she has overcome with grace and persistence. As an artist whose practice spans half a century, Navjot's work is not bound within a single and readily identifiable signature style. In the late 1990s, she gave up a flourishing practice in painting to work collaboratively with Adivasi artists in the heartland of Central India.

Navjot's oeuvre has registered her changing ideological positions, moving from Marxism in the 1970s, through feminism in the 1980s, to a critical Leftward position in the 1990s and 2000s. Correspondingly, she has migrated from paintings and drawings, through sculpture and the sculpture installation, to a conception of art as social project and new media practice. To adopt a musical metaphor, Navjot has sometimes played the artist as solo performer; at other times, she has been a performer in concert with an accompanist; at yet other times, she has performed in symphonic partnership with others.

Significantly, Navjot's art has never been medium-centric but process-oriented. She has refused to base her art on the creation of individual masterpieces – typically a male prerogative – that can be consecrated within the connoisseurial system. Instead, her art has been premised on the act of searching, plotting and re-structuring the course of meaning through a life of artistic and civic interventions.

As an alumna of the JJ School of Art, Bombay (1967-1972), Navjot was trained as a formalist, with the academic emphasis on abstraction. However, her introduction to Leftist politics while still at JJ instilled in her an empathy for the marginalised denizens of society. What began as a behalfist gesture to represent the other gradually grew into a quest for equitable communication. But having realised that no form of communication or discourse is entirely free of prejudice or power asymmetry, she has deftly deployed abstractionist devices in her work to express the limits and pitfalls of communication. I have elsewhere analysed this as the productive push-pull between the discursive mandate and the impulse towards abstraction in Navjot's work.

The exhibition follows the long arc of Navjot's practice, showcasing her drawings from the early 1960s, before she had joined the JJ School of Art, as well as never-before-seen student assignments at JJ, rare posters and prints from the 1970s and 1980s, her iconic paintings from the 1990s, and collaborative and new media practice from the 1990s to the present.

A transcultural artist, Navjot fluidly travels between Bombay and Bastar (where she has set up the Dialogue Centre along with artists Shantibai and Rajkumar), while also collaborating or interacting with artists and researchers across Europe, the US, Latin America, Japan and China. Her work has been shown at prestigious international venues such as Tate Modern, London, House of World Cultures, Berlin, the Biennales of Sydney and Havana, among others.

The title of this show is a tribute to all those voices that have been suppressed by an apathetic State, but refuse to be silenced. In Navjot's video 'Soul Breath Wind', Nirupama, a farmer from Chattisgarh, warns us of the final countdown as rapacious mining rips people from their ancestral land and disembowels the earth: “Pure dharti ka kaleja nikaal diya.”

- Nancy Adajania