Art Mumbai: Bhajan Hunjan and Amal Ghosh

We are delighted to present works by Bhajan Hunjan (b. 1956) and Amal Ghosh (1933–2022) at Art Mumbai.

Both artists moved to Britain to pursue their art studies, albeit almost two decades apart; Ghosh arriving from Calcutta in 1958 and Hunjan from Kenya in 1975. Each would negotiate London's art schools and wider artistic milieu whilst developing practices informed by Indian and South Asian visual and cultural histories. Yet these histories were neither fixed nor ever entirely recoverable; instead they belonged to places and moments that were themselves changing. For both then perhaps, the question was how to make art that might begin to articulate what could be carried from one world into another, what might be lost and what might be gained along the way.

Both Ghosh and Hunjan exhibited at Horizon Gallery, established in Fitzrovia in the 1980s by diasporic Indian artists who had arrived in London in the preceding decades, and came to know each other well over the years. Our presentation brings their works into conversation, both formally and through the intersecting histories that inform them; suggesting different ways in which artistic languages emerge through the movement between cultures and histories, without ever quite resolving the tensions between them.