The Matter Within, presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, is the first major survey in California dedicated to Indian art of the twentieth century. The show’s title is, indeed, its own topic and conundrum. Eighteen artists, at various stages in their careers, are clustered under the umbrella term of “New Contemporary Art of India.”

The criteria for artists included in this exhibition was dependent on their background as Indian and as artists whose works comment on the ever-changing Indian diaspora through video, photography, and sculpture. Some of the included artists were born in India and continue to reside there, while others have emigrated to the United States or Europe. Some are the first of their generation; others are naturalized citizens. This in turn raises issues regarding being Indian or Indian enough and of what constitutes Indian contemporary art as framed by Western institutions. These questions of identity and imagery as synonymous with Indian culture permeate the exhibition.

The title New Contemporary Art of India suggests that art of India focuses on personal and geographical identity. It problematically suggests that Indian artists and/or India’s worth as a player in the forum of international contemporary art is based on delivering a relatively narrow range of topics specific to Indian cultural identity. For instance, there are no paintings or drawings in the exhibition, no abstraction, etc. Instead, just three mediums and a few categories of subject matter are intended to represent the largest democracy in the world.

It is quite impossible to ignore the big pink dinosaur sculpture in the room. Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra’s Now in Your Neighborhood (2008) uses an assortment of Pepto-Bismol-colored bottles with labels depicting people pushing passengers in shopping carts and labels of animals such as dogs and birds to build this quasi-primordial beast. In its imagery and materials, the work comments on the paradoxically obsessive reuse tradition and the throw-away consumer culture prevalent in India. The portraits of young Indian men on the bottles of Artificial Strawberry Flavor—1 (2008) reference the exportation of people as global consumers and as consumed objects themselves. The use of visual metaphor to provide meaning to an artwork is used by artists throughout the exhibition. It is a common and increasingly predictable tactic present in much contemporary art, regardless of the region where it is produced. In their work, Thukral and Tagra lend to this strategy an enthusiastic nod to Pop art and the posthumous nature of disposable bottles.

Rina Banerjee creates sculptures with elaborate names such as: She drew a premature prick, in a fluster of transgressions, abject by birth she knew not what else to do with this untouchable reach, unknowable body as she was an ancient savage towed into his modern present (2011). The figure in this piece is meant to be the raucous Goddess Durga, lying upon a bed of sand and surrounded by medicine bottles that are lit from beneath. This version of Durga is fitted with a sari of green and gold panels as well as a glass ornament for an eye centered on the body. She has a jeweled neck and small doll head that is disproportionately scaled to the mannequin form. Onyx-colored horns rise around her like a ribcage. Lotions and potions like rivers where in quick motion, as well as essential oils amid culture’s notions, where these cultures would once be locked in harbor or empires court now took ride on the global, opened themselves up to mysterious and foreign incantations (2011) is a topography of souvenirs representing international city icons such as the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa that sit atop a tortoise-shell base.

With their sleeved appendages and shells woven into basket-like forms, Banerjee’s sculptures conjure my own memories of ornate sand sculptures often found constructed on the beaches of India, and made for recreational or for festival purposes. They, too, have an effigial quality and rely on the symbolic and the decorative. Banerjee’s materials include clamps and wire from a hardware store alongside items from the natural world like a pink egg, shells, and feathers. There is a charm to this confusion of materials, but at times it feels like a forced smattering of untransformed beauty. If only the sculptures were as wonderfully strange as the lyrical finesse of their titles, but to my mind the sculptures are never quite strange enough.

The reoccurring use of symbology becomes even more obvious in another set of sculptures. The literal definition of the word literal—“of or pertaining to the letters in the alphabet“—is exemplified by the use of single, English words in Anita Dube’s Love (2007–8) and Void (2007–8), which consist of large waxed letters that spell out their titles. When lit, the sculptures emit ambient fragrance that is associated with ritual and celebration in Indian temples and homes. For the similarly eponymously titled Wound (2007), Dube carved the word “Wound” through a wall in the exhibition space. It is, reflectively, an imposed and obvious wound to the wall. One can wander to a similarly literal sculpture, Untitled (2010), from the series Stab by Sudarshan Shetty. A refined and elegantly carved wooden chair has a neon red script of “Stab” syncopated into a blood-like drip with complementing red light that adds to this perhaps too expected set up.

Moving away from words depicted to words spoken, the video pieces in The Matter Within are represented by the artist groups Raqs Media Collective, CAMP, and The Otolith Group. I Saw a God Dance (2011) by Ayisha Abraham is a documentary that highlights the underground lifestyle and talent of the captivating Burmese-Indian dancer Ram Gopal from the 1930s to the 1950s. The subject of his choreography included the storytelling of texts such as The Bhagavad Gita, which acknowledges the traits of good and evil in both mortals and immortals. Gopal performed dance with sculpture in mind by manifesting the body through expression, movement, and discourse. He found an audience outside of India, in countries such as Japan and Britain. Often adorned in gold headdresses and costumed in the iconography of wings, Gopal performed the postures of God, Man, and Woman. Each trait was distinguished as its own descriptive formula with delicate precision, yet the three separate identities of God, Man, and Woman were embraced and channeled through his dancing. In being open about his ethnic and sexual identities, Gopal was able to comment on the arbitrariness of gender and insist that the true essence of a being is her or his soul’s expressiveness in the world.

CAMP’s Al Jaar Qaba al Daar, Jerusalem (The Neighbor Before the House, Jerusalem) (2009) documents the everyday lives of eight Palestinian families who reside in East Jerusalem. Whereas CAMP displays a more direct approach by filming within their subject’s environment, Raqs Media Collective and The Otolith Group offer speculative hybrid documentation; the latter offers more fictionalized sequences. Otolith III (2009) traces meandering unproduced footage from filmmaker Satajyat Ray as he grapples with expectation, role, and aliens. To say that this is the content of the video would be to simplify its complexity. By drawing from the personal and collaborating with contemporary film genre, the video explores the inherent subversion of content itself and the alien within and among us—whoever they are, whoever we are.

Raqs Media Collective’s The Surface of Each Day Is on a New Planet (2009) delves into the myth of selective history through a cross-culturally spanning poetic plea. Against a backdrop of articulate voices and repetitive phrases the film shows scenes from a history of India whose truth has been altered. Roughly two thousand Indian people were killed in Lucknow during the Indian War for Independence in 1858. A photograph of the site was taken by Felice Beato, an Italo-British photographer, about four months after the massacre took place. The film suggests that the human remains in the photograph could not have been those of the original victims. The bones of the skeletons appeared polished to perfection and were arranged with the formality of a careful table setting. The scene was staged for pictorial effect, and the photograph’s ability to witness is obscured. Raqs Media Collective poses questions as to the identity of the skeletons, thereby assigning humanness to the forgotten and the slaughtered. The film explores issues of quantity in relation to significance, and prompts its viewers to reconsider the sheer mass of a massacre in direct proportion to its rank in historical horror. Both elegant in script and pictorial presence, Raqs Media Collective and The Otolith Group’s works contain haunting time-lag sequences that lead instinctual consciousness astray.

The photography portion of the exhibition attempts to portray India’s people and places. Dhruv Malhotra began his project Sleepers in 2008. The color photographs show common street scenes of people sleeping in unoccupied public spaces. The subjects seem to accept outdoor repose due to overpopulation, poverty, or inadequate housing standards. These people often represent the working force of the early morning hours or graveyard shifts, and opt to slumber in closer proximity to their jobs. The landscape of physical public space neither integrates nor propels the dormant figures into the viewer’s eye, and an overbearing light outshines the darkness of the nocturnal milieu. It will be interesting to see if Malhotra’s series evolves with continued nightly sojourns, and if he tempers the light and allows the viewer to sink into the photographs.

Sunil Gupta’s group of glossy, colored inkjet prints, Sun City (2010), offers another spectrum of lifestyle through scenes that often involve men in sexually suggestive environments. A choppy story line, which includes vignettes involving a white male “other,” moves from airport, to living room, to bath house, and, finally, to death. That the photographs are geared toward shock creates a polarization around their subject matter: that all human beings should have the right to openly experience the pleasure and pain of their lives.

There is real bravery here. Until recently, homosexuality was illegal in India. Gupta’s works uninhibitedly approach homosexual culture and share the truth and reality of the unjust taboos ascribed to this population and to the AIDS epidemic in India. A powerful piece of art can influence thought and banish stigma. However, Gupta’s pictures are sometimes too caught up in the party scenes they depict, and they could use more of the aesthetic craftsmanship necessary to keep the viewer engaged beyond important subject matter.

Opting for an alternative to the potential slickness of color, Gauri Gill’s black-and-white photographic series, Notes from the Desert (1999–2010), is a tactile portrayal of Rajasthani rural village life. Examples of situational ambiguity include a homemade weapon pointed at a girl in an apron with hearts stitched to each hip; a man in reconstructed, oversized pants standing with a bag on his head while knowingly facing an array of onlookers. Other photographs are more ordinary and are staged in a less theatrical way. Although calculated and maybe just beautiful, Gill’s photographs depict with respect and dignity populations frequently marginalized.

Part of art’s purpose is to question categorization—dare I say omit it completely? Despite Yerba Buena’s good intentions, The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India is another example of the division of artists into regions. A certain carelessness in this approach is evident in the blanket interpretations that represent a particular region with a specific agenda—one revolving around issues of identity. Avoiding obvious anecdotes and stereotypical imagery would help to showcase the diversity that is India. At the same time, there is not an umbrella big enough to cover all of India’s complexities. But with the underrepresentation of contemporary art from India, the intention of this exhibition, despite its flaws, serves as a stepping stone for further exploration of the current arts practice and discourse of the Indian subcontinent.