When All That Is Solid Melts into Air

March 4–November 1, 2020

Featuring Indian folk art as well as less traditional forms, this exhibition tells the story of the momentous social and artistic transformations that unfolded in the relationship between the “modern” and the “folk” in India after 1947.

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Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad: A Seed's Journey, 2019, from the series Fields of Sight, 2013–ongoing; acrylic paint on archival pigment print; 42 x 62 in.; BAMPFA, museum purchase. © Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad.
Baua Devi: Untitled, 1983; watercolor; 21 1/4 x 29 1/2 in.; BAMPFA, museum purchase.

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Virtual Tour: When All That is Solid Melts into Air

Join Uttara Chaudhuri, a UC Berkeley graduate student who helped organize the exhibition, for an insightful and comprehensive virtual tour.

When All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern in Postcolonial India

March 4–November 1, 2020

When All That Is Solid Melts into Air tells the story of the momentous social and artistic transformations that unfolded in the relationship between the “modern” and the “folk” within the political and historical context of postcolonial India. The largest body of work in the exhibition comes from BAMPFA’s extraordinary collection of contemporary folk art by Mithila, Warli, and Gond artists. Modern and contemporary artists represented include Sunil Janah, Gauri Gill, Rajesh Vangad, Jagdish Swaminathan, and filmmakers Nina Paley and Amit Dutta.

Immediately following the country’s independence in 1947, India—buoyant with optimism—embarked on a course of accelerated modernization and rapid industrialization, based on the US model and implemented through Soviet-style Five-Year Plans. Almost simultaneously, artists and intellectuals—mostly of leftist persuasions—turned to folk traditions in hope that the communitarian ethos would engender an alternative discourse around postcolonial modernity. As folk practices accrued currency as a national cultural resource and gained recognition internationally, with folk artists navigating the global economies of postwar art, the forms of folk art—a widely collected, coveted commodity—became alienated from sacred cosmography. To be modern, after all, is to belong—as Marx reminds us—in a universe in which “all that is solid melts into air.”

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When All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern in Postcolonial India is organized by UC Berkeley History of Art Assistant Professor Atreyee Gupta and BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder with Associate Curator Stephanie Cannizzo and undergraduate and graduate students in the seminar The Folk and/in the Modern: Critical Concepts + Curatorial Practicum in Twentieth-Century South Asian Art. Student curators are Uttara Chaudhuri, Shuli Fang, Yiman Hu, Vanessa Jackson, Michelle Kwhak, Ashley Pattison-Scott, Ariana Pemberton, Saif Radi, Ryan Serpa, and Ellen Song. The exhibition is made possible in part with generous support from Dipti and Rakesh Mathur.

When All That Is Solid Melts into Air

March 4–November 1, 2020

Past Films

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Virtual Tour: When All That is Solid Melts into Air