Ananyaa Sathyanarayana

Between the Lines: India and It’s Makers

_{2025, Bard College Berlin}

Mixed media installation: printed paper, string, pins, corkboard 60x90cm 

Who constructs India’s national identity, especially in the wake of the Partition?

This work stages the question as a puzzle. Through the format of a detective board, it investigates how art became a medium through which the idea of a unified, modern India was both imagined and challenged. Rather than offering a singular narrative, it reveals that national identity is not fixed or fully knowable. It is shaped through fragmented dialogues, competing visions and personal interventions. 

There is no single answer to Indian modernism, only intersecting movements, contradictions, and disruptions. Figures like Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Sher-Gil, the Bengal School, and the Progressive Artists Group served less as unifiers and more as points of tension, critiquing class, caste and cultural authority while pulling global and local influences into the conversation.  

This is not a story of nation building, but of nation critiquing. Identity here is not state assigned, it is individually navigated, historically constructed, and perpetually under investigation.