Installation view of the exhibition, “Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia.” Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Joseph Hu, 2020.
May 13, 2020
Amie Potsic interviews Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art about her new exhibition, Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Installation view of the exhibition, “Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia.” Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Joseph Hu, 2020.
Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia
Through Fall 2020 | Alter Gallery 276 | Philadelphia Museum of Art
Curator: Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
This exhibition features the work of six female artists all born in South Asia, although often active elsewhere throughout the globe—Tanya Goel, Sheela Gowda, Priya Ravish Mehra, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Nasreen Mohamedi, and Zarina—whose works uniquely embrace and reconfigure the visual language of abstraction as they address questions of memory, home, and belonging.
Through a sensitivity to ritual and materials—ranging from cow dung, to copper wire, to handmade paper—these artists engage the subtle politics and poetics of people and place. In their works, the line becomes a map of, and a metaphor for, geological, political, and psychological landscapes. Presented together, they force the viewer to reconsider the larger art historical narrative of twentieth- century Modernism (a narrative mostly centered on the West and dominated by male artists) while expanding on the history of art from the region.
As the world continues to form new borders and build more walls, these works speak to the fault lines of our fractured and divided existence—the boundaries between tradition and modernity, the powerful and the powerless, presence and absence, earth and sky.
This exhibition has been made possible with support from the museum’s endowment, through the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is currently closed through June 30, 2020.
To learn more visit: https://philamuseum.org
Amanda Sroka is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She joined the museum in 2014 following the completion of her MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she focused on global conceptual art practices. Previously, she served as a curatorial assistant at the New Museum, New York. Recent projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art include Jitish Kallat: Covering Letter (2016), Philadelphia Assembled (2017), Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned (2018), Marisa Merz (2019), and Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia (2020). Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions with Martine Syms, Sean Scully, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.