Santhal Family

Santhal Family produced in 1938 by the artist Ramkinkar Baij is considered to be India’s first modernist public sculpture. Situated on the campus of the art school Kala Bhavan, at Santiniketan in West Bengal, the sculpture reflects this institution’s ethos by drawing together and fusing elements from the international avant-garde with locally rooted traditions. It speaks to a left movement in politics, issues of migrant labour, and the Santhali tribal people, whose cultural practices informed the school, and who’s resistance was central to insurgencies against the British, as well as for the Naxalite movement. The exhibition Santhal Family - Positions Around an Indian Sculpture seeks to unpack the different elements of this work and reflect on its  importance for Indian art history, as well as for an emergent global art history, including modernisms iterations in the Global South; and to make Ramkinkar’s sculpture more widely known along with its many contexts.

While the sculpture itself remains absent, in the exhibition its presence is evoked through a series of artist commissions, and archival material including, films, photographs, pamphlets, posters and songs, all of which produce a discourse around it. Historical materials from India situate Ramkinkar’s sculpture in relation to a left cultural tradition in Bengal, including the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, whose unfinished work Ramkinkar is a documentary about the artist that provides audiences with a portrait along with archival footage of his sculptures which are dotted about the campus. Radiating out, contemporary artists have been invited to consider Santhal Family, to work with forms, ideas and histories linked to the sculpture and to situate these in the present. Taking an experimental approach, this exhibition breaks with regional and art historical formats and opts instead for groupings that cut across geographical and generational lines. It touches on questions of transcultural aesthetics, alternate modernisms, nationalism, marginality, the micropolitical, public space, globalisation and the ethics of representation. The exhibition is accompanied by a bookthat considers Santhal Family in relation to Santiniketan modernism, to a diverse formal languages, and in relation to migration and the invention of a subaltern counterpublic.

Exhibiton images, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), 2008
Photography by Christine Clinckx