India Art Fair concluded last week in New Delhi, highlighting a growing collector community eager to support India’s flourishing contemporary art scene, which is steadily embracing a more global outlook. And the fair’s recent announcement of its expansion to Mumbai reinforces that city’s emergence as a cultural powerhouse. This shift is underscored by the debut presentation of works from the Dia Art Foundation’s collection at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), a sprawling multimedia venue founded by philanthropist and arts patron Nita Ambani.
“Light into Space,” which opens today (Feb. 13), was conceived in collaboration with the organization and curated by Dia Art Foundation director Jessica Morgan and assistant curator Min Sun Jeon. Observer spoke with Morgan ahead of the opening to explore her vision of presenting artists known for minimal aesthetics, light, and spatial exploration within India’s rich artistic landscape, famed for its intricate symbolism and ornamentation.
The exhibition grew out of Morgan’s long-standing relationship with NMACC, where she has served on its Art House advisory board since 2018. “This exhibition emerged from her engagement with the museum’s formation and conversations with Isha Ambani, a Dia Art Foundation trustee,” Jeon said. “This partnership provides a new platform for Dia, bringing works from our collection to India for the first time and aligning with NMACC’s mission to introduce leading international contemporary artists to Indian audiences.”
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Among the artists included in the show are well-known names of American postwar art, such as John Chamberlain, Mary Corse, Walter de Maria, Dan Flavin, Nancy Holt, Robert Irwin and Robert Smithson, along with French artist François Morellet. “The exhibition brings together a group of artists who have engaged with light and space as a medium, pioneering this work in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and Europe,” Morgan said. “These artists are central to Dia’s collection, and their approach to creating expansive, experiential and perceptually challenging works remains as relevant and impactful today as when first explored many decades ago.” Notably, while these light and space masters have been celebrated worldwide, this marks the first time many of these artists will be presented in India.
All of the artists in the show pioneered a new concept of immersive art, working with light, perception and environment to inspire a slower, contemplative mode of engagement—an antidote to the relentless overproduction and overconsumption of objects, experiences and information, which quickly fall into obsolescence. Their shared desire to create meditative, sensorially engaging environments finds an intriguing and often unexplored resonance with the use of light in Indian traditional spirituality. In Indian culture, light is celebrated throughout the year as a symbol and tool of purification, redemption, knowledge and joy. Diwali, the “Festival of Lights,” is a prime example: spectacular displays of fireworks, lanterns and candles celebrate the triumph of good over evil. The lighting of lamps, or deepas (diyas), is central to Hindu rituals and ceremonies, symbolizing wisdom, invoking blessings, purifying surroundings and fostering a positive atmosphere.
In both the artworks selected by the curator for the show and Indian religions such as Jainism and Sikhism, light shapes a positive experience of space on a sensorial and, in some ways, more spiritual and metaphysical level, igniting both external and internal contemplation. “Diwali was certainly a point of reference when thinking about the significance of light symbolically and spiritually in Indian culture,” explained Morgan. “At the same time, the works in this exhibition also speak to the contemporary surroundings in India,” she added, referencing how the works engage with the overabundance of neon advertising in an increasingly commercialized urbanscape and the aesthetics of industrial materials. As she notes, the exhibition draws compelling parallels between “the immateriality of light and the potential of luminosity to incorporate the viewer and the architectonic surroundings in the experience of the work and light”—a quality that America’s metropolitan landscapes and India’s major cities share in our global culture.
“Light into Space” runs through May 11 at Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai.
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