The Absent Year

How does one imagine the future after an absent year? How fraught is the act of anticipating continuities and ruptures as one bears witness to transitions that are uneasy, uneven, and unpredictable?

Stationed between disease and disorder, and denying every uncontested resolution, the future seems caught in limbo, the kind that brings to mind the 19th century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who talks of swerving between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

As we stumble back to a kind of normalcy, we witness firestorms all around the world — sputtering economies, imploding institutions, threatened freedoms.

How does an artist collect oneself to negotiate with a changing world? In the middle of the raging pandemic, which pictures of the present did they hope to preserve and which did they hope to bury deep?

Asia Society India posed these questions, and more, to six renowned artists, all recipients of the Asia Arts Game Changer Award: Vibha Galhotra, Abir Karmakar, Prabhakar Pachpute, Benitha Perciyal, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Arpita Singh. In response, each artist either created a new work inspired by the questions or submitted an existing piece they felt resonated with the theme.

The result is a moving collection of works that gets to the heart of the difficult questions that an artist chooses to ask in testing times such as these — questions that may address the heart’s unease but also illuminate a path ahead, offering a contract with hope.