Miniature painting MK Gallery

For an exhibition premised on miniatures, Beyond the Page boasts the titans of South Asian contemporary art. Likewise, many of the works are neither small nor paintings, but large-scale, sculptural works, which challenge typical expectations of the media.

Gasps are audible from the get-go; for want of a better phrase, it’s a wow-kind of exhibition which, along with its context, is as much about the joy of looking closely. Peppered throughout are 180 small-scale works dating from the to the centuries, a time when the Mughal Empire ruled much of South Asia. During the period, bound albums of works were particularly prized for their portability and technical skill, with curator Hammad Nasar describing them them as the ‘luxury yachts of their time’. Tiny details, and glass ledges for leaning, only invite the viewer to look even closer. ‘You’ll leave with a headache for looking,’ Nasar warns.

‍Beyond the Page is both a historical and historic exhibition. It is a responsibility to display these works; many are on public display for the first time, and whilst the wider exhibition will tour to The Box in Plymouth, some of the historic works won’t be shown again for decades whilst they are returned to storage for preservation. Tarana Sawhney, Chair of the Circle of Friends, remarks how she hasn’t seen some of these works since visiting museums in India as a ten-year-old child; she’s now 47.

A question implied is why some of the greatest South Asian miniature paintings and manuscripts are held (and hidden away) in Britain. The labels bear the names of private collections like Deutsche Bank, and public institutions like the British Museum, Tate, Wellcome Collection, and V&A, but little is given of their provenance. More explicit is the history of how many works entered the Royal Collections, by acquisitions made by King James I in the early 17^th century, and through employees of the colonial East India Company.

Nasar argues our museums suffer from a kind of ‘indigestion’, for taking in too much. Whilst there’s a wealth on display in Milton Keynes, the grand narratives are grounded in the personal; walking amongst historic portraits and contemporary passport photographs, often used to speak of migration, we might layer our own experiences into the exhibition too.

One of the first South Asian miniatures to arrive in Britain was a painting of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir; here we encounter a monochrome print from the period, engraved by an English artist working in a Mughal style. Alongside it sits a more contemporary rendering of his successor, Shah Jahan, in Rashid Rana’s ‘I Love Miniatures’ (2002), a digital photo-mosaic constructed from images of advertising billboards (mostly of milk). Both are far detached from the pomp of the nabobs, or ‘white Mughals’ like William Fullerton, the subject of the popular works of William Dalrymple. 

Familiar names feature as access points, from Abanindranath Tagore and Howard Hodgkin, to Raqib Shaw and multi-Biennale award-winner Hamra Abbas. As much attention is paid to those who commissioned and collected such works, like Lady Mary Impey and Alethea Howard, and art historians such as Virginia Whiles, an approach also taken by the Royal Scottish Academy to reinsert the women often excluded from well-worn art histories.

Works by Shahzia Sikander and Arpita Singh pluralise often gendered stereotypes of Islamic cultures, the former more literally. Sikander plays on the placement of notable Muslim figures like Malcolm X to Benazir Bhutto on the historical periphery, turning their relegation into a regaling at the borders. Next to this minutely detailed work sits ‘The Explosion of the Company’ (2006), a great open book on a figure from the British East India Company. The artist’s defacement represents a sort of ‘retribution’, a contemporary response to aggressive colonial policies across the Indian subcontinent. On a similar scale is a work by the Singh Twins, two more giants of the contemporary scene.

Focus is given to a few artists, which permits us to see their work across media. Ali Kazim works with both the wall and in the air, in a special commission constructed of hair. Other sections speak of the interdisciplinary nature of South Asian cultural forms more widely; whether in calligrams, or performed poems, plays, and storytellings like the Mahabharata, recently restaged at the Barbican. Bhupen Khakhar’s ‘Voice of Freedom – Strike’ (1972) visualises the same factory relations which formed the subject of Sonali Bhattacharyya’s superb Chasing Hares, performed in 2022.

It begins in the Courtyard, the meeting point, where Qureshi and Noor Ali Chagani work separately on paper, and collaborate, in a blood-stained terracotta brick sculpture. (Qureshi also organised the  six-strong karkhana (workshop), making a mixed media commentary on 9/11 with images circulated across continents via FedEx.) Blessing marks the first collaboration between the Pakistani artists, both students of the Miniature Department at the National College of Arts, Lahore, which Qureshi now heads. For a time, it was the only arts institution to teach in the miniature tradition – attracting a range of students including Maha Ahmed, currently showing at Leighton House in London - and whose first was John Lockwood Kipling, father of the British writer, Rudyard. 

Though its foundations are South Asian, Beyond the Page always brings it home to Britain. Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, the first Indian artist to have works in the Tate collection, is curated in conversation with the artist William Rothenstein, whose son was also director of the institution during the mid-twentieth century, a period spanning colonisation and independence on the Indian subcontinent. Beyond India and Pakistan, artists are drawn from across Asia and diasporic communities, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. It concludes close to the local community in Milton Keynes, with David Alesworth and Shakila Haider’s botanical interrogations of the origins of Britain’s ‘exotic’ plants. 

Making versatile use of the MK Gallery’s grand space, the curators include film works by Jess MacNeil – and monochromes made using water from the River Ganges – more welcome interruptions to the environment. Two-way flows come in the well-known Dutch or Old Masters like Rembrandt and William Schellinks influenced by courtly and Company paintings in form and subject. In the mid-twentieth century artists like Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Gulammohamed Sheikh, who returned to the subcontinent with an education at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) and reinvented ‘authentic’ South Asian painting. 

Between the new commissions in the first and last rooms, Beyond the Page fosters constant conversations between the historic and contemporary, the sacred and the secular, past, present, and potential futures. Some draw on transnational spiritual traditions; N.S. Harsha’s ‘Distress Call from Jupiter’s Neighbourhood’ (2011) is based on the popular Hindu image Vishvaroopa, a representation of the universe as a body with multiple heads, but it also seems to borrow from Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s crowds of individual faces, as much as Western pop culture.

Stand back to see the works of Olivia Fraser, a Scottish artist who splits her time between southern England and New Delhi, for her works could as well be by their nineteenth century neighbours, paintings commissioned by her ancestral family friends, the Baillie Frasers - so too can connections be found with Japanese woodblock prints, decentring exchanges with Europe altogether.

The captions – accessible and direct – permit us to read the artists in their own words. Many use their practice for anti-colonial purposes, as political and damning in their testimonies of colonial atrocities, as their treatment within contemporary art structures: ‘A European artist born and raised in Amsterdam is not expected to produce works that visually resemble those of Rembrandt or Van Gogh,’ writes Rashid Rana, ‘but the same expectation of subscription to tradition is present for an artist from Pakistan or other regions that were colonized in the past.’ 

With an extensive book – and booklet – there are many levels with which to experience this exhibition (and we should, on multiple occasions). It’s incredibly ambitious and beautiful to behold; and why shouldn’t it be? For too long, miniature paintings have been diminished in Western European art history, marginalised due to their small scale, their media (paper), and ‘non-conventional’ means of display, in books. But no more; MK Gallery respects and celebrates the medium in this exhibition of epic proportions.

‘There’s an empire-shaped hole in our history,’ concludes Nasar, in an episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, referring to his wider work with the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and their London-Asia Programme. ‘But we can’t be British without being Asian too’. Beyond the Page is a new chapter in our story, a truly national exhibition – and one that rightfully takes place in ‘regional’ institutions.

‍Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now is on view at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes until 28 January 2024, then The Box in Plymouth in 2024.