Photo by Pavan KJ. © 2008 N. S. Harsha

N. S. Harsha, Melting Wit (detail) (2005). Acrylic on canvas, 66 x 114 in.

Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. © Dayanita Singh

Dayanita Singh, DMV 11- 2007 (2008). C-print, 20 x 24 in.

December 2008 Field Guide

Anri Sala

Predrive: After Technology

Experimenta Folklore

Javier Ramirez Limon

Mark Manders

Klara Liden

Andre Kertesz: On Reading

Ron Arad

Pipilotti Rist

Transpop: Korea Vietnam Remix

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans

Ree Morton

Emotional Drawing

Subodh Gupta N S Harsha Dayanita Singh Nikhil Chopra Less Is More at This Year’s Frieze United Nations Subodh Gupta 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale

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Contemporary Indian art has been getting quite a lot of attention this year, with major 2008 surveys in Chicago, Turin, and elsewhere, not to mention the launch this fall of New Delhi's own Devi Art Foundation — India's first nonprofit exhibition space for contemporary art. Yet London, one-tenth of whose denizens are of South Asian descent, has curiously lagged behind in presenting the kind of in-depth exhibitions other art centers have mounted. That's about to change. "Indian Highway," coorganized by the Serpentine's star curatorial duo Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Oslo's Gunnar V. Kvaran, launches at the famed gallery this month, with an expanded version traveling afterward to the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo and at least five other international venues.

"Indian Highway" refers loosely to the actual highways running through the country, movement in general, and the information superhighways that are so dependent on exploding high-tech industry in cities like Bangalore. Like other exhibitions Obrist has cocurated, such as "China Power Station," "Cities on the Move," and "Uncertain States of America," "Indian Highway" is conceived in an aggregate mode, with a Russian-doll-like exhibition-within-an-exhibition created by a different Indian guest curator or artist at each venue (New Delhi–based Raqs Media Collective, fresh off its stint as cocurators of Manifesta 7 last summer, will be up first).

Rather than a dizzying survey, "Highway" will present some 20 artists, most of whom will be creating new work for the show. Obrist, in the metaphor-laden parlance characteristic of global curators, explains the concept as both "a marathon, not a sprint" and "a group of archipelagoes, not a continent." Highlights include a mural by the esteemed 93-year-old painter M. F. Husain on a structure around the exterior of the Serpentine, a new performance by Nikhil Chopra, the magnificent photographs of Dayanita Singh, and a large installation by master of the readymade Subodh Gupta (he of the glittering stacks of stainless-steel kitchenware), as well as contributions by N. S. Harsha, Amar Kanwar, Sheela Gowda, and Ayisha Abraham. An ambitious program of lectures and readings on Indian poetry, literature, and architecture, as well as a film series, makes the immersion complete. "Indian Art" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.