Dozens of group shows dot the Indian art world map every year. Few manage to get it right. Fewer still boast of an all-woman line-up. Both an ode to female power and a radical statement in a male-dominated world, ‘Woman is as Woman Does’ (WIAWD) at Mumbai’s CSMVS Museum, held in collaboration with Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (August 13-October 16, 2022) was a rare group exhibition that worked as a thought provoker. Curated by Nancy Adajania, the show brought 27 women artists from five generations on one platform, blending disparate voices and practices. From Zarina Hashmi’s iteration of home to Nilima Sheikh’s howl against gender-based injustices, ‘WIAWD’ reiterated that creative chaos can well transcend the individual narrative to consider broader perspectives. 

This obviously prompts the question: what makes a successful group show and is there a magic formula for it? “I would contend,” says Adajania, “that a group show works best when the curator is able to provide the viewer with a thread or at least a clutch of threads into the labyrinth that is the exhibition. This is made possible by deploying a cogent conceptual framework, an imaginative mise-en-scène and a provocative pedagogy, all of which enable an immersive experience.” She believes that for a group show to be a “living organism that talks back to us” instead of being static, it is important to “orchestrate an interplay between legibility and ambiguity”. Through that duality arises a complex set of emotions and questions in the minds of viewers, shares Adajania, who feels her curatorial projects are scripted like a polyphonic musical score, in which each artist makes her own individual contribution while taking her place in a larger composition, shaped through counterpoint.

The honesty of an idea 

For Hyderabad-based artist and textile designer Shruti Mahajan, group shows are “about synergy—and an opportunity to see multiple viewpoints of a curatorial inquiry”. “A good one would be remembered for its honesty towards the idea and for the voices of participating artists,” adds Mahajan, who has showcased her works influenced by memory, textile and the idea of home in several group exhibitions throughout her two-decade-long career, most recently in ‘Lines (by) Lines’ at the Dhoomimal Art Gallery and ‘Spatial Dialogues’ at Shrine Empire gallery. Interestingly, the latter explored a creative dialogue between artists and architects. Different group shows work differently from her vantage point in the artist-curator interaction. She explains, “Some are important in terms of my practice, where a certain kind of opportunity leads to an expansion in one’s art,” she says. For instance, Continuities of Construction—a project with conservation architect Ravindra Gundu Rao presented as part of ‘Spatial Dialogues’ and at Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti during HUB India in Turin, Italy—was collaborative at different levels, from text to form to the art piece itself. “It emerged from personal documentation, long-term relationships with the collaborators and also, the place where it was located,” she adds.

Standing on its own 

The key to a first-rate group show lies in its distinctive mix of integrated commonalities and contrast. As Priyanka Raja, co-founder of Experimenter gallery in Kolkata and Mumbai says, “A good group show makes the viewer look at an artist’s work that they may never have seen in a congruent way.” It is also a much more intricate undertaking than a solo show, sometimes taking years. “It’s easier with a solo show because it’s the singular journey of one artist. It’s like going deep in conversation with that artist and representing their mind. A group show teaches you to balance so many thoughts. In a way, the curatorial voice is stronger because it is about how you bind different things together,” explains Raja, further illustrating this with the example of Experimenter’s multi-year group show, ‘Drawn from Practice I and II’. Conceived in 2018, it explored the art of drawing as a starting point for artists and has since grown to include curation from multidisciplinary fields such as performance, writing and visual arts. “You understand one strand even better by looking at the other. That is the charm of a good group exhibition. If you look at the Venice Biennale or Documenta, they are group shows but they stand, in some ways, on their own. And many of them change our way of thinking and add to our worldview, thanks to their meaningful curation,” she adds.

The historical arc

If art is a revolutionary road, then group shows have certainly been era-defining turns that pave its path. The format came into existence with Salon de Paris in 1737 and gave way to Salon des Refusés in 1863—a cataclysmic event that ushered in the Impressionist era. The turn of the 20th century coincided with the advent of avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in Salon d’Automne, leading to German Expressionism with the Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1911. Two years later, Americans got a taste of modernism through the pioneering interventions of Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne etc with the Armory Show, an annual group show that continues to this day.

India has not been bereft of its own historical encounters with group shows. In a 2016 piece in GQ magazine, gallerist Mortimer Chatterjee mentioned India Through the Ages. First mounted in London in 1947-48 and afterwards travelling to Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi, the influential show of Indian classical paintings and sculptures apparently caught the eye of a young man called MF Husain. Later, as part of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, Husain came to public attention while exhibiting in group shows along with peers such as SH Raza, Krishen Khanna and FN Souza, among others. “In their case,” Chatterjee observed, “it was less individual exhibitions that secured their legacy; rather, it was the mythology that aggregated around the individual personalities in the group.”

This statement captures another underrated quality of group shows—their potential to discover emerging talents and lionise a few chosen ones, of which perhaps the late Husain was the perfect embodiment. But that is for another day.

‘Sangam/Confluence’, a group show featuring five Indian and five international artists, will be view at the Art House, Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Jio World Centre, Bandra Kurla Complex, Mumbai from April 3 to June 4, 2023. Open all days; 10am-10pm