Exhibitions

The Lady Vanishes

"The British Museum exhibition captures something of this Bengali ethos of urban, popular surrealism and dislocation. Walking around the Great Court, moving away from Durga and then coming back to her, you are reminded how much the modern museum still mimics the neighbourhoods of the 20th-century city, which confer on the loiterer the right to explore and make chance discoveries...the British Museum, with Durga in its Great Court, has had the impossibly put-together air of a great pandal - and the note of incongruity is just right; the museum has briefly become a part of Calcutta." - The Guardian

Indian Summer at the British Museum

“The Garden and Cosmos exhibition at the British Museum in London, featuring 56 paintings on loan from India, looks at life in the royal court of Jodhpur in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's part of the museum's Indian Summer season, which sees its Bloomsbury forecourt transformed into a jasmine-scented garden. The paintings, never before seen in Europe, depict the pleasures of palace life and speculation about the origins of the universe.” - The Guardian

"It starts to get unreal when you encounter the grey-blue ashen body of the ascetic Jallandharnath, seated among blooming jungle flowers and trees. Man Singh (r.1803-43) believed passionately in this immortal ascetic, and gave huge power to the Nath gurus who transmitted his teachings. The paintings done in his reign suggest a court vanishing in introspection while the British took over India."

- The Guardian

Peabody Essex Museum 2016

Inspired by Islamic designs from the 12 - 14th century fortress at Alhambra in Granada in Spain, and generated by the abundant intersections that criss-cross all of our lives, this spellbinding light installation created an equalising space of serenity and beauty within the museum.

A version of this work is now on permanent display at the Peabody Essex Museum.

"Sharing power is not easy. Those with it are afraid that if others are empowered they will become less powerful. People do not realize that equality benefits EVERYONE."

— Anonymous PEM Visitor, 2017

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Anila Agha uses beauty to transcend borders of race, religion, gender, and culture to create a totalizing space that embraces all. A single bulb activates a laser-cut box, casting patterned shadows that reference Islamic filigree across all corners of the gallery. Growing up in Pakistan, Agha described her childhood wonder at the beauty of Islamic sacred spaces but also how, as a girl, she was confined to worship at home.

Many years later after arriving in America, she had felt welcomed as a woman but excluded as a Muslim. It was the desire to overcome the barriers and categories that crisscross all of our lives that provided the emotional motivation for this work. This is not a work about Islam but a meditation on the alienation created by boundaries and their arbitrary categorizations.

South Asia’s shared cultural heritage has continuously resisted erasure despite the incredible burden placed upon it by its new borders. The experiences of political rupture, of belonging and suddenly not belonging and of the enduring human need to create in spite of political revision and truncation is universal.

A Space for Everyone

"The kind of arbitrary categorizations that get set up in one's life and the desire to transcend them is something that she tries to do in this work, and I think she achieves it," says Sona Datta, PEM's curator of Indian and South Asian art. "She does it through beauty."

“The power of the piece is kind of happening upon it—just walking into it and being in it,” says Datta. “You’re bathed in light and shadow, and you become part of the work.”

"Datta, who joined PEM in 2014 after eight years at the British Museum, has been helping the Salem institution launch an initiative to expand its coverage of South Asia. While PEM holds an extensive collection of art from India, Datta hopes to showcase works from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and other countries in the region” - Boston Magazine

She Persists

“Balancing radical, established artists such as Judy Chicago and the Guerrilla Girls with younger painters, filmmakers and activists like Emilie Pugh and Rose McGowan was a conscious decision for HEIST Gallery founder Mashael Al Rushaid and art historian Sona Datta, so too was the choice to have all four corners of the globe represented. From London to Lahore, New Dehli to Tokyo, sculpture, painting, film, virtual reality, photography and performance weave together the commonalties of the female experience and the intricacies of nationhood. Shown in the prestigious seventeenth-century palace Palazzo Benzon on the Grand Canal – site of salons held by the daring Venetian salonnière Marina Querini Benzon – the show actively continues the building’s history of female celebration and rebellion.” - Port Magazine

Venice Biennale 2019: The Must-See Pavilions and Exhibitions by Women Artists, Beyond the Giardini

“Enter She Persists and a quote from Guerrilla Girls greets you on the stairs (their posters also feature in the exhibition). Upstairs, the tangerine-tinged desert-scape of Judy Chicago’s Women in Smoke resides gloriously, the portal to 22 works by both established and emerging women artists who have moulded art history to include the complexity of female experience in countries ranging from Britain, to Pakistan, Japan and Iran. Lahore-based Aisha Abid Hussain’s tongue-in-cheek photography incorporates the contemporary notion of sologamy (marriage to oneself) into the traditional image of a Pakistani wedding.” - Art She Says

Idea Store, Watney Market 2024

Hunger Burns surfaced unheard voices of the 1943 Bengal Famine when three million people perished not due to lack of food but because of catastrophic colonial mismanagement and the multiple currents coursing across Calcutta and India at the end of WWII. As British subjects, more than two million Indians fought for the British during WWll while their families starved at the far frontier of home. As a catastrophe that has never been acknowledged, this exhibition marked the first iteration in a much larger project involving research, public art commissions, curation and broadcast.

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Sona Datta

EXHIBITIONS

Voices of Bengal

British Museum 2006

The Lady Vanishes

Garden & Cosmos

The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

British Museum 2009

Indian Summer at the British Museum