South Asia in Central Europe

The research project South Asia in Central Europe studies modernist artistic practice between 1947 and 1989 by tracing the careers of South Asian artists and their links to Central Europe during the Cold War period. It therefore sets out to re-draw the map of modernism. South Asia in Central Europe will focus on the operative function of socialist solidarities and enthusiasms especially among youth during the period of decolonisation. The project focuses on artists active in Bombay (Mumbai since 1995), New Delhi, Calcutta (Kolkata since 2001), Colombo and Lahore, and follows their ideological, intellectual and artistic routes to and exchanges with locations in Central Europe with Prague as a hub from where digressions were made to Brno, Bratislava, Olomouc, Litomerice , Leipzig, Vienna and St Margarethen. While taking Prague as a hub, the project offers a decentred, multi-site, mobile and entangled account of modernist art-trajectories. By taking into account the artists unified interest in utopias, socialism, internationalism and postcolonial aesthetics, South Asia in Central Europe points to the central role that leftist thought played in the development of modernism across South Asia. As a key concern, the project challenges geopolitics and the bipolar narratives of East and West by identifying the region as a terrain of shifting and contested aesthetics and politics rather than a geopolitical reality. South Asia in Central Europe will investigate the impact the exchange and exposure to socialist Europe had on the wider artistic landscape across South Asia.

The FWF-funded research project South Asia in Central Europe: The Mobility of Artists and Artworks between 1947 and 1989 (V880-G) https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/projects/south-asia-in-central-europe/ has been running from September 2021 until August 2025. South Asia in Central Europe proposed to investigate the complex geographical networks and artistic journeys that took place between South Asia and Central Europe, with a focus on Prague. The project's focus was on artists from Bombay (Mumbai since 1995), New Delhi, Calcutta (Kolkata since 2001), Colombo and Lahore. It followed these artists' ideological, intellectual and artistic routes to and exchanges with locations in Central Europe with Prague as a hub from where digressions were made to Brno, Bratislava, Olomouc, Litoměřice, Leipzig, Vienna and St. Margarethen. This circuitry of exchange encompassed the diverse paths of the mobility of artists and their art works as they travelled from South Asia to Central Europe in the postwar era. Within this framework, the project asked to what extent the then under-researched artistic mobility that took place outside the traditional centres of modernism and parallel to the more common East-West exchange informed, contributed and gave form to aesthetic and discursive dimensions of modern art in the post colonies of South Asia. By taking into account the artists' unified interest in utopias, socialism, internationalism and postcolonial aesthetics, South Asia in Central Europe pointed to the central role that leftist thought played in the development of modernism across South Asia. As a key concern, the project challenged geopolitics and the bipolar narratives of East and West by identifying the region as a terrain of shifting and contested aesthetics and politics rather than a geopolitical reality. The methods of the project combined the study of leftist thought and a presumed socialist cosmopolitanism with mobility and encounters, and with art history: The aim was to build a conceptual triangle of modes of mobility, modernism and socialist cosmopolitanism to investigate how modern art, and its artists in South Asia, was attracted to, had responded to and was conditioned by specific modes of socialist thought. The project result is published in the single authored book Cold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague, 1947-1989 (Leuven: Leuven Univ. Press, 2025), DOI: 10.11116/9789461666635