This talk focuses on the career of the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990),  whose practice allows us to interrogate assumptions about Islam, Indian identity, and abstraction. Little-known during her lifetime, Mohamedi’s work has garnered increasing attention in recent years. A notable manifestation of this growing interest was the 2015-2016 museum retrospective of the artist’s work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and The Met Breuer, New York. The exhibition considered the career of an artist who practiced a singular and sustained engagement with abstraction, and grappled with the challenges of situating this practice within her personal history and also larger aesthetic, geographic, and cultural frameworks. In her particular relationship to Partition, Islam, modernism and politics Mohamedi stood apart from many of her contemporaries. "Exhibiting Mohamedi | Frames of Reference" reflects on the negotiation of narratives of difference and affinities in the presentation of the artist’s oeuvre.

Brinda Kumar is Assistant Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC