IN THE MOOD FOR ART

South Asia, a big room of art practice and experience, is enjoying great visibility across markets and museums. Works of seasoned and emerging artists from the Indian subcontinent represented by Delhi and Mumbai galleries are making their way next week to the Wong Kar-wai city for Art Basel Hong Kong 2025.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

FOR regulars at Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery, many may remember Bangladeshi artist Rahman's Ashfika 2016 work, a photography series on a solarrun television set, a 'powerbox' that aired government propaganda; when silent, covered with a ghaghra, it was as innocuous as a teapot under a tea cosy. A new mixed media series of Rahman is being shipped to Art Basel Hong Kong. This one is on a woman named Behula, whose face seems pock-marked with zari thread; she recalls the mythical Behula, the heroine not of a love story but one burdened by family expectation to bring back to life a dead husband. Gurugram-based Astha Butail's work, 'A Transcendent Scheme', made with archival paper and sheer muslin, is going to Hong Kong too, as is Pakistani artist Zaam Arif's works in which solitude is etched on large-format paintings and embodied in male figures surrounded by still waters.

Wedding-day photographs that have been digitised, enlarged, cut into pieces, coloured and placed on recycled wood by Malayali artist Saju Kunhanhe is represented by Mumbai's TARQ gallery-to re-imagine his uncle's wedding day as a tragedy and a migration story, is another Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 entrant.