MAXXI presents: Indian Highway

Presented by the MAXXI museum in Italy, the Indian Highway itinerant collective exhibition brings to the public, a selection of 60 works by 30 artists, including 4 site-specific installations conceived for MAXXI Art and a series of works exhibited for the first time, offering a comprehensive panorama of the Contemporary Indian artistic scene.

This constitutes the first investigation by an Italian museum about the art of this fascinating country and reflects the economic, social and cultural developments of the past twenty years. In the likeness of the highway as a supporting element of the migratory flows moving from the periphery towards the city, Indian Highway is about technological development, the economic boom and the growing global relevancy and influence of this subcontinent in the world of the arts since the 1990s.

The exhibition can essentially be divided into three macro areas:

Indian Identity and Histories: investigates political, social and religious themes such as the war between India and Pakistan, the religious struggles, the transience of the national borders.

Exploding metropolises: examines urban expansion and chaos and the abandonment of the rural areas.

Contemporary Tradition: explores the revisiting of ancient forms of expression in Indian culture such as miniatures, ceramics and ink paintings.

The Indian Highway exhibition can be visited between 22 September 2011 – 29 January 2012, at the MAXXI (Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo) in Rome, Italy.

Indian Highway is curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar B. Kvaran together with Giulia Ferracci, Assistant Curator MAXXI Arte, and organised in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway.

Curated by Amar Kanwar for the ‘Exhibition Within The Indian Highway Exhibition’, The News shows a selection of three news extracts of news footage: The first is filmed in the early 1930’s and shows us glimpses of protests against British rule in India; the second is from 2004, of Manipuri activists under attack from the police, while demanding the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act [AFSPA], a law that gives the army the right to search, arrest and even kill with impunity (across the North East of India) since 1958; and the third clip, shot in 2011 shows the people of Jagatsinghapur District, Orissa, protesting against the police attempt to forcibly enter their villages to acquire land for the South Korean Steel Company POSCO.

Call for the release of Ai Weiwei: an online petition launched by the Guggenheim

In sequence of the detainment of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at the Beining airport while en route to Hong Kong on April 3, and confiscation of his papers and computers from his studio compound, the Guggenheim has launched an online petition for Ai Weiwei's freedom and to express the international arts community concern towards China's reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought.

Museums and cultural institutions around the world, including the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD); Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; and the Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Paris, have joined this initiative and launched the online petition through their Web sites, Twitter, and Facebook.

The detention of Ai is inconsistent with the Chinese government pledged, through the Ministry of Culture, to promote all artistic disciplines and to advance artistic ideas, as well as with China's commitment to the guarantee of fundamental freedoms.

Ai Weiwei, the son of one of the country’s most beloved poets, is an internationally acclaimed artist, a documentary filmmaker and an architect who helped design the Olympic stadium in Beijing known as the Bird’s Nest.