Barbican – Friday 21 December 2024
After a sustained period of talking, followed by an equally long period of procrastination and then a short period of faff I’ve finally booked flights back to New Zealand in March 2025, stopping for eight days in Delhi and Chandigarh on the return to London. I will be away a month, which is all I can really take as annual leave. Eleanor is coming with me to New Zealand, where a London friend will join us for a few days before I go to India and they return to London via Sydney and Tokyo. With today being the shortest day of year and constant grey skies, drizzling rain and cold it is properly nice to have something to look forward to.
Ever since the aborted trip to India in 2016 I’ve been determined to go back and see some more of that fabulous, maddening country. When starting to think about this trip I’d planned on spending some time in Delhi before heading south-west, returning to the state of Rajasthan to visit some of the historic towns I didn’t get to in 2016. However, I recently discovered the town of Chandigarh in the Punjab to the north of Delhi. Chandigarh was planned in the 50s as a new town to replace Delhi as India’s capital city and move the country on from British rule after independence in 1947. Renowned French architect le Corbusier was engaged to draft a plan for the entire town and the delivery of that plan was eventually entrusted to English and Indian architects (more on this when I visit). It didn’t become the capital, much as Prime Minister Nehru wanted it to, but it is, apparently, a wonderful modernist town and I’m very much looking forward to visiting.
Conveniently, soon after I decided on Chandigarh as a place to visit, the V&A Museum had a small, though perfectly formed, exhibition – ‘Tropical Modernism’, which addressed the idea behind the building of Chandigarh and the city of Accra in Ghana and the importance of modernist architecture to the story of both India and Ghana’s independence from Britain. I bought the book.
The Barbican is currently holding an exhibition of Indian art from 1977-1998, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ which I went to visit today, a non-working Friday. I took the camera with the intention of doing a walk around the Barbican estate before my 3:00 o’clock booking at the gallery. It was drizzly and cold out and I wasn’t in the photography mood so after a desultory and largely uninspired wander I had a glass of wine while I waited instead.
I enjoyed the exhibition, particularly the photographic works, though some of the paintings were fabulous, with my favourite being the second piece you see when you walk in. The space is fabulous, it’s my first visit to the Barbican Gallery, so wasn’t sure what to expect from the venue; I will be going back.
Gieve Patel – Two men with a hand cart.
Gulammohammed Sheikh – Speechless City (my favourite).
The exhibition documents one of the many periods of upheaval in Indian history, between 1977 and 1998, a period of massive social change in the country with a burgeoning middle class and rapid urbanisation as rural incomes dropped and people flooded into the cities. Heightened awareness of social issues and demands for fairness and equal rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community are out in the open and these were captured in the art of the time and well represented here. I loved the photos on show, particularly a series from Delhi in the 1970s of members of the artistic community. It isn’t how I saw India in those days. One of the things I love about art and travel is having my perceptions challenged and changed.
It was also a time of political unrest (again) with violent clashes between Muslim and Hindu communities in the north of the country and the unlawful killing of political activists including Safdar Hashmi in 1989, painted by the artist M. F. Husain, who had to flee the country in 2006 after threats on his life.
Ending on that happy note and with a date with Eleanor and some friends ahead I left the Barbican and walked the hour to Soho where we had a quick early dinner before going to see comedian Stewart Lee in Leicester Square, something that is becoming an enjoyable annual event.
It was a lovely day and evening out and something I should do more of, more often.
Where is Phil now? 
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