Prajakta Potnis in Indian Highway MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome 22 September 2011 - 29 January 2012

Prajakta Potnis in Indian Highway

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome
22 September 2011 - 29 January 2012

curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar B. Kvaran together with Giulia Ferracci, Assistant Curator MAXXI Arte, and organised in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway

The exhibition is an itinerant collective show that, through a vast selection of works, presents the multiform panorama of the Contemporary Indian artistic scene. Indian Highway offers an exciting opportunity to learn about Indian artistic research and constitutes the first investigation by an Italian museum of the art of this fascinating country.

With 30 artists, 60 works including 4 site-specific installations conceived for MAXXI Art and a series of works exhibited here for the first time in all their monumentality, the exhibition offers a vast representation of the creative panorama of one of Asia’s largest regions and reflects the economic, social and cultural developments of the past twenty years. Beginning with the definition of the highway as an element of connection between the migratory flows moving from the periphery towards the city, Indian Highway speaks about technological development, the economic boom and the growing global centrality of this subcontinent in the world of the arts since the 1990s.


Still Life

My work dwells between the intimate world of an individual and the world outside which is separated sometimes only by a wall. I would like to look at the wall as a veil and also as an organic separation between the inside and the outside through which imperceptible elements pass and affect the psyche of individuals, after reading about certain crops being genetically engineered, it made me wonder how it would affect, the individual consuming it. How resolutions passed, transgress and enter an individual’s private space. The inside of a refrigerator has always intrigued me, its controlled enclosed environment creates a stage like setting, I wanted to weave a narrative within this setting. Where the viewer becomes a voyeur, witnessing an event happening in the inside of this enclosed space. With the aid of those vegetables that would be genetically modified, I tried to recreate a moment of explosion, a sudden outburst in the inside of the refrigerator. – Prajakta Potnis


For more information visit http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/schede/indian-highway-en