Midnight's Family

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Midnight's Family *

Midnight’s Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain exhibition marked a pivotal shift for the Ben Uri Research Unit—its first digital exhibition dedicated to a non-European émigré community. It was a significant scholarly contribution to diasporic art histories and South Asian Heritage Month 2020 in the UK. Tracing seventy years of Indian artists’ presence in Britain, the exhibition offered more than a linear history. It was a generational montage: F. N. Souza’s defiant modernism rubbed shoulders with Chila Burman’s feminist approach, Anish Kapoor’s mythic voids, and the Singh Twins’ acerbic opulence.

Originally intended as a physical show, the pivot to a virtual exhibition during the early months of COVID-19 pandemic enabled access to works like Kapoor’s Marsyas—physically impossible in gallery scale—and allowed a wider viewership through digital means, showcasing a wide spectrum of media including sculpture, painting, and mixed media. At its heart, the project was not simply about representation, but about visibility, refusal, and belonging—where ‘Britishness’ and ‘Indianness’ constantly refracted through one another.

- To narrate 70 years of Indian artists' contributions to British visual culture through a curated virtual survey
- To reframe narratives of British art through diasporic lenses of hybridity, identity, and memory
- To support Ben Uri’s digital transformation during COVID-19 by migrating physical exhibition plans to a virtual museum
- Secondary and Primary Research: Direct interviews with living artists and correspondences with families, galleries, and local guardians of deceased artists (where possible)
- Coordination with press archives, academic advisors, and heritage institutions
- Timeline construction through archival triangulation
- Researching works in the absence of comprehensive secondary literature
- Indian post-modernism and émigré modernists
- Postcolonial cultural exchange and hybridity
- Histories of Indian immigrant artists in post-Independence Britain
- Identity, memory, and belonging within diasporic practice
- Institutional marginality and curatorial counter-narratives
- Critical examiniation of the above in light of the onset of COVID-19
- Descriptive and critical catalogue texts for artworks
- Timeline-driven curatorial annotation
- Biographical essays and interpretive panels
- Editorial liaison with Rachel Dickson.
- Virtual exhibition
- Accompanying free e-catalogue featuring 17 artists including Souza, Biswas, Burman, Kapoor, and Narielwalla
- First Ben Uri exhibition spotlighting a non-European émigré community
- Significant scholarly contribution to diasporic art histories and South Asian Heritage Month 2020

“But, what makes an artist Indian versus British? Is it a choice one makes, one that is thrust upon one? As contemporary Indian art enters Britain’s prestigious public collections, this is an identity crisis worth pondering... The time has come to prise open British colonialism’s can of worms.”

— Dr Zehra Jumabhoy

E-Catalogue

Featuring 17 artists, cross-institutional collaborations, and new textual commissions, Midnight’s Family became both archive and afterlife—addressing issues like isolation, identity, and marginalisation by re-inscribing immigrant art into the public domain of national memory, from Souza to Ladha, Panchal to Shaw.

This book includes works by modernists and global figures Bakra, Chandra, Kapoor, Mistry, Panchal, Quadri, Ribeiro, Souza, This timely exhibition, which coincides with the date of Indian Independence (declared at midnight on 15 August 1947), addresses the representation of Indian immigrant artists (both first and second-generation) working in Britain for more than 70 years.

I was responsible for the catalogue write-ups on artworks and co-wrote the artist bios and chronological timeline of artists and artworks spanning across 70 years.