Roobina Karode on the art of curation
Roobina Karode, director and chief curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, was in Kolkata recently to present the first-ever large-scale exhibition of veteran artist Ganesh Haloi in his city. We spoke to her to know in detail what went into curating this show.
Tell us about this show.
I think the most important part is to understand an artist’s practice, to get familiar with his work, and also be interested in the practice. How engaging that is for you is very important as a curator. But for me, it was more important to get the opportunity to become familiar with a lot of his work and to understand it because the KNMA had collected his works. It was a great experience overall.
Studying and understanding his work of art must have been a time-consuming process.
Understanding his process of work, and then get interested in how this body of work is curated, is the basic structure of my art curation. So that’s how my process started, and this did not start right away. I’ve been following his work for very long, and I think the first essay I wrote on him was maybe 10-12 years ago.
I’ve known his work since I was a student — I knew his work because we used to study Bengal and understand what artistic movement happened there. But the opportunity came when we acquired the work, and I started thinking more and more about his art, and started to meet him.
The conversations became richer with time, and my interest in abstraction made me think a lot about the artist who has been among all his contemporaries who worked within the figurative tradition.
Was it overwhelming at any point in time?
It is very overwhelming because the first thing you feel is, who am I to edit somebody’s work? He has a huge body of work. But I find that, as an artist, Haloi understands the value of creative freedom. He never tried to impose anything on me. I felt great comfort because he was receptive to my ideas, my thoughts, and my way of working.