The title of this group exhibition, which mounts a survey of recent developments in Indian visual art, hints at both the socioeconomic context within which these artists are emerging, and the paradigm within which the Serpentine is framing this curatorial venture. The Indian Highway is a super-sized, better-connected version of what may in earlier times have been described as a trade route. With information, finance and goods travelling further and faster virtually, the title also points to the Information Super Highway, a term for the internet which now seems rather anachronistic. The 32 million internet users in India, and its growing expertise and prominence within the global field of technology provide the context for the Serpentine’s use of this term, along with the passage of goods from East to West.

Rather than a diverse and exciting display of current Indian talent we may not normally see, however, the exhibition feels curiously like some sort of Victorian expo. It is pertinent that the gallery is a former tea pavilion; Indian Highway could be viewed as culmination of the building’s origins as somewhere for visitors from 1934 onwards to come and quench their thirst sampling the quintessential Indian import to Britain. Now the import is art rather than tea, but the Western art world’s thirst for the ‘other’ in art is potentially troubling. The fashion for Chinese contemporary art and now for Indian and Middle Eastern art can be viewed as following the path of the silk route.

Thanks to the technological ‘highway’, however, the journey from East to West is far less arduous, and knowledge and ideas can be transmitted much more easily. Moreover, the advance of the biennial throughout the world, from Sharjah to Shanghai, has been showcasing artists outside of the West in non-Western settings for many years now. So why attempt to homogenise a single nation’s artistic production into an exhibition like this? To put it crassly, though not unfairly, the marketing and definition of artists as ‘Indian’ apparently adds to their current sale value. A movement is sold as ‘emerging’ or ‘groundbreaking’, when in reality it is just that collectors and curators have decided to fix their gaze upon the region, stimulating production, value and global interest.

‘Lightning Testimonies’, by Amar Kanwar

Although I have rather cynically foregrounded this exhibition as a tokenistic foray into India on the part of the Serpentine, that is not to say that the works showcased aren’t interesting, just that the attempt to shoehorn so much into a tiny space undermines them. Amar Kanwar’s video installation ‘The Lightning Testimonies’ inhabits its own room, and thus somewhat shifts the viewer away from the hectoring curatorial excess of the exhibition as a whole. Kanwar‘s multiple screen projection spins a cacophonous, despair-ridden narrative of the post-partition horror endured by many Indian women. We see individual piece to camera stories of women speaking retrospectively about the brutality endured, alongside archival footage of naked women protesting at a military base, accusing soldiers of rape. Shifting between Kanwar’s own documentation and news reels, a multi-faceted narrative emerges. Disappointingly, the use of multiple screens is distracting rather than immersive. Multiple screen installations don’t always have this effect, but in this case, mirroring the overabundance of material in the exhibition as a whole, the screens fail to hold the viewer’s attention.

The medium of video is frequent throughout the exhibition; Raqs Media Collective show a multi-part video installation, in a ‘mini’ separate show, a tendril which they have curated to showcase a number of artists. Shilpa Gupta’s ‘National Highway No. 1’ video shows the Kashmiri landscape framed around a highway studded with soldiers. The music, slowness of pace and bleached out colours produce an understated comment on the banality of violence reoccurring in territorial disputes, the checkpoints stuttering out the journey. In the same room, Gupta’s sound piece of speeches by Nehru and Gandhi bleed out of an old fashioned microphone, the overall effect infusing the viewer with a desire to learn more about India’s recent past, an effect singular to Gupta’s work in this exhibition.

Tejal Shah’s videos ‘I Love My India’ and ‘What Are You?’ have a similar effect on a more localised, individual level. Her work focuses on gender issues and the position of the Indian Muslim minority after the genocide in Gujarat in 2002. In ‘What Are Your?’, Shah explores the societal position of India’s transgender community, their presence deeply embedded in some religious and traditional ceremonies. This gripping exploration is similar to Gupta’s successful and sensitive revealing of an aspect of India. Returning to the problems inherent to this exhibition, though, the vitality of the piece was deeply undermined by its being displayed in the lobby of the Serpentine.

I have focused on the show’s video work as, along with the Serpentine’s curatorial agenda, it has been given the least attention in terms of criticism. Too much focus has been on MF Husain’s modernism and its relationship to Western Modernism, Subodh Gupta’s Beuys-like bureaucrats sorting room, or Nalini Malani’s quietly subversive pastel-hued figurations of Indian Gods contorting across tropes of class, gender and race. Increasingly, video appears to be the privileged medium for Western-approved, non-Western art, and the practical elements of this are clear in its cheapness and ease of reproduction. That the Serpentine did not devote more space to germinations of talent in this field is unfortunate. Instead of an overly anxious attempt to cram as much in as possible in order to best represent India, the curatorial agenda should have been more focused; to a tighter theme, medium, geography or time frame.

Till 22 February 2009