What does it mean to build meaning in space? Five of India’s most significant curators reflect on the philosophy, process, and persistent challenges that define curatorial work today.
R. Siva Kumar
One of India’s foremost art historians, R. Siva Kumar (born 1956) has been teaching art history at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan since 1981, making him one of the most enduring scholarly presences in Indian art. His landmark research on the Santiniketan school and on artists such as Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Ramkinkar Baij has shaped how modern Indian art is understood and taught. His curatorial practice grows directly from this scholarship, bringing rigorous historical thinking to bear on exhibition-making, yet always in service of the viewer’s experience, not the curator’s argument.
Curation as a Personal Act
“I am primarily an art historian, and my work in the field of art history informs the exhibitions I curate. However, I try not to turn the exhibition into an illustration of a thesis, as in a book, but reverse their relationship. I want the viewers to discover the ideas behind the exhibition through the process of viewing and engagement with the works. I prefer to gently nudge the viewers through sequences and juxtapositions within the display rather than declaim my thoughts through elaborate wall texts.”
He describes his preferred role as that of a co-viewer, present but not imposing. “Generally, I would like to be a co-viewer rather than an overbearing herdsman and, therefore, avoid heavy editorial interventions.”
From Idea to Opening: The Curatorial Journey
For Siva Kumar, every exhibition is a spatial negotiation between ideas, works, and the physical environment that holds them. “Each exhibition is also a negotiation between the works, the ideas and the physical place you work with. Here, the curator’s challenge, to my mind, is like a muralist trying to fit an image and an idea into a given wall — like the challenge Matisse faced while doing The Dance mural for the Barnes Foundation.”
This is why, he insists, a travelling exhibition cannot simply be reinstalled in a new venue. The spatial logic must be entirely rethought. “To be effective, the exhibition cannot simply be reinstalled, but must be planned anew.”
The Challenges of Curating in India Today
Siva Kumar identifies two structural obstacles. The first is the near impossibility of securing institutional loans. “It is almost impossible to borrow works from any government museum in India.” The second is infrastructural: the absence of appropriate lighting in most gallery and museum spaces, a limitation that may seem mundane but can fundamentally alter how a work is experienced.
Naman P Ahuja
Naman P Ahuja is Professor of Art History and Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Editor of Marg Publications, one of India’s most storied art journals. He began his curatorial career at the British Museum in 2001 and has since built an international exhibition practice spanning antiquities, sculpture, and contemporary art, with shows at the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), the Ashmolean (Oxford), Casa Asia (Barcelona), and institutions across India. He teaches a postgraduate programme that unpacks the full complexity of curatorial practice across its many forms.
Curation as a Personal Act
Ahuja places curation within a dual mandate. “Curation should be concerned with two issues: the communication of the depth and beauty of history and art to diverse publics and, second, the preservation and safekeeping of that historical evidence and art to be made available to subsequent generations.” He is emphatic that both functions carry equal weight, and that each draws on a wide range of disciplines — from anthropology and archaeology to communication design, fine arts, and journalism.
From Idea to Opening: The Curatorial Journey
Curatorial practice, he argues, is not a single process but a family of deeply distinct practices, each carrying its own set of expectations, costs, and responsibilities. “Curating a permanent museum display carries very different expectations of a narrative, the safety and installation costs for objects in a museum are very different compared to a temporary exhibition in a museum.”
What runs through all his work is a commitment to multiple audiences. He makes elaborate lists rethinking each exhibition from the perspective of different viewers. He writes his exhibition narrative in at least two languages as an editorial discipline. And he insists on making room for his own aesthetic subjectivity in the final selection. “That allows me to make the final selection, and also display.”
The Challenges of Curating in India Today
Ahuja’s diagnosis is foundational. The primary crisis, he argues, is the absence of rigorous art historical research. “One cannot reposition objects in new histories when even preliminary research and publication is not complete. Basic cataloguing, photography and accessibility of the information in the public domain limits knowledge, fosters a poor standard of recruitment at museums and galleries, prevents an entire industry from achieving its potential.”
The second challenge is a widespread misunderstanding of what a curator actually does, a gap in comprehension that undermines the entire ecosystem of museum-making in India.
Lina Vincent
Lina Vincent is a Goa-based independent curator, writer, and cultural practitioner whose work moves across contemporary art, community engagement, and sustainable exhibition practices. The founder of SAIL (the Sunaparanta Art Initiator Lab), she has built her practice around expanding access to curatorial and artistic platforms, particularly for practitioners in regions with limited institutional infrastructure.
Curation as a Personal Act
Vincent’s entry into curation was intuitive rather than institutional. “Curation is something I grew into organically, as a need to build meaning into the various aspects of creation and sharing.” At its core, she describes it as an act of mediation — “a process that facilitates meeting points between artists and their work, galleries and cultural institutions, and audiences of different sorts.”
” My curatorial process is also shaped by the fact that I was trained as a printmaker, and then moved into art history and writing. Understanding artists processes from their perspective has always been an advantage to me in establishing methodologies. “ She adds.
From Idea to Opening: The Curatorial Journey
Vincent’s process resists formula. Each project, she says, demands its own logic. Her starting point is immersion: “I usually allow myself to be like a sponge to begin with, soaking in everything about the broader content of the idea.” From that openness, patterns emerge and unexpected relationships between artists and works, dialogues that couldn’t have been scripted in advance.
Practical and creative processes run concurrently for her: considerations of space, logistics, and sustainable display methodologies develop alongside the conceptual framework, always in conversation with all participants. “Curation is about people and responses, as much as it is about art.”
She also places great value on outreach. “I like to include outreach programming as much as possible, in order to expand the possibilities of any artist’s communication and for greater aesthetic and social engagement.”
The Challenges of Curating in India Today
Vincent identifies three interconnected challenges. The first is structural: the vast number of emerging artists across Indian cities far exceeds the available platforms for dialogue and critical engagement, leaving many talented practitioners without the support they need to develop. Her response to this gap in Goa was to found SAIL.
The second challenge is hierarchical — an unspoken system of age and experience barriers that prevents the comfortable exchange between practitioners at different career stages, compounded by an irony she finds troubling: “the cutting off of most open-call opportunities to practitioners past the age of 40.”
The third is ethical: an unregulated art world where exploitation, plagiarism, and the silencing of voices through fear of cancellation remain live issues. “We need to develop a platform to combat bad practices,” she says.
Nalini S. Malaviya
Nalini S. Malaviya is a Bengaluru-based curator, art consultant, and writer who has been contributing to India’s art writing and exhibition landscape since 2003. Her work spans contemporary art exhibitions for galleries across the country, and her practice is notable for the conceptual care she brings to each project — whether working with established senior artists or more experimental practices. She has also written for publications including the Financial Times and Bangalore Mirror, and has published papers for the Karnataka Lalithkala Academy Journal.
Curation as a Personal Act
For Malaviya, curation is energised by its role as an interface. “For me, curation is an exciting process that allows me to create and mediate an engaging interface between the artist/s and the audience.” She grounds this in practice, pointing to two recent shows as examples of how differently a conceptual anchor can manifest: Interwoven, which explored senior artist S.G. Vasudev’s integration of craft traditions, and Pragati Dalvi Jain’s Shapes of Unseen Voices, which brought together performative photographs, sculptural installations, video, live performance, and painting.
From Idea to Opening: The Curatorial Journey
Malaviya outlines a process that is at once systematic and responsive. It encompasses conceptualisation, research, creative framework-building, artwork selection, catalogue and wall text writing, and display planning. Equally important, for her, is the programming that surrounds the opening — performances, talks, walkthroughs, and panel discussions. “Several of my exhibitions have opened with an art performance by one of the participating artists, or a discussion with the artist, in other cases.”
The Challenges of Curating in India Today
The central tension in Malaviya’s practice is between ambition and resource. She points to a reluctance among institutions and patrons to support large-scale or experimental work, and the persistent difficulty of securing production costs for projects that push beyond the conventional. “Funding, and finding a balance between theoretical contexts and marketability are major concerns.”
Anushka Rajendran
Anushka Rajendran is the curator of Prameya Art Foundation (New Delhi) and works independently as a curator and writer. Her curatorial research traces how the notion of the public has acquired alternative significance to contemporary art, and the aesthetics of engagement within exhibition frameworks — informed by her earlier research on Indian artists’ responses to political and cultural trauma in the 1990s. She was the Festival Curator for Language is Migrant, the 2022 edition of Colomboscope (Sri Lanka), co-curator of Phantasmapolis at the Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2021), and was on the curatorial team for the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018. Her exhibitions span institutions across India, South Asia, Europe, and the Gulf, including Alserkal Avenue (Dubai, 2025), Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Madrid, 2021–22), and Warehouse421 (Abu Dhabi, 2022).
Curation as a Personal Act
Rajendran came to curation from writing and research. What drew her to exhibition-making was its capacity for non-linearity — something the written word, by its nature, cannot fully offer. “Switching to curatorial work opened up possibilities to build narratives in space that are not linear. Its porosity appealed to me, especially the scope for building cross-connections and dialogue between various propositions in the exhibition space.”
From Idea to Opening: The Curatorial Journey
Rajendran is clear-eyed about what curatorial work actually involves once the conceptual groundwork is laid. “Curatorial work exceeds conceptual frameworks and artist research, which are only starting points.” The bulk of the work, she says, lies in navigating multiple teams like production, communication, administration, partners, patrons, and audiences with genuine care for the ethics of each relationship.
She also sees curatorial practice as a site of institutional accountability. “Through working methods, it’s also a curator’s responsibility to urge institutional reform, especially when working independently.”
The Challenges of Curating in India Today
Rajendran’s concern is with the direction of curatorial ambition in India. While acknowledging the robustness of current practice, she calls for a deeper investment in research-led and publishing-oriented work. “Rather than exhibitions that gather large numbers of audiences, what we need are focused exhibitions that speak to located and contingent communities and contribute to discourse in meaningful ways.”
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