Manchester's Gallery Celebrating South Asian Art and Culture

The gallery, the product of a £15million renovation to the museum, has been curated in collaboration with the South Asian Gallery Collective, a group of thirty individuals who span a variety of disciplines. Among them are Azraa Motala, an up-and-coming, Preston-born oil painter and visual artist whose “conceptual representational work [...] relates to herself as a young British-Asian Muslim woman within the contemporary Western space”; Michelle Oliver, an Anglo-Indian collagist who uses her artform to “represent the trauma and disruption of mixed-race people’s sense of self”; Dr. Aziz Ibrahim, a British Muslim museum who interweaves Punjabi, Urdu, and English lyrics into his songs to create a self-developed genre named ‘Asian Blues’; and The Singh Twins (Amrit Singh MBE and Rabindra Kaur Singh MBE), a widely-acclaimed Sikh duo who work collaboratively to combine traditional Indian and Sikh tradition, Western medieval illuminated manuscripts, and contemporary Western culture.

The gallery is designed to explore six separate but interrelated themes: Past & Present; Lived Environments; Innovation & Language; South, Music & Dance; British Asian; and Movement and Empire. The items on display range from ancient pottery taken from the Indus Valley to army uniforms to letters between Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose (a Bengali polymath recognised as one of the most influential mathematicians and physicians to have ever lived) to contemporary painting and Quran cubes (an electronic speaker that recites passages from the holy scripture). The objective is to show the richness of South Asian culture, the influence of South Asian communities on British life since before the ‘70s and ‘80s, and the impacts of British colonialism on South Asia, particularly in relation to the 1947 Partition and the trauma and spectres it has left behind. The gallery will thus both serve as a celebration and an emotionally-charged reminder of how complex British-South Asian relationships have historically been, marred by British myths of racial supremacy and acts of violence including the 1943 Bengal famine, the result of an intentional withholding of food supplies by Churchill to further feed the British war machine in the East.

The museum is a necessary edition to the UK’s contemporary art space and tells the stories of one of its most vibrant communities in a city whose rich culture owes indelible thanks to the South Asian diaspora. Indeed, some 17.1 per cent of the city’s population identify as Asian, with the city’s ‘Curry Mile’ - named so for the wealth of South Asian restaurants that line the road - being one of the richest pockets of South Asian culture in Britain. Its opening adds just another point to the long list of reasons to visit what is quickly becoming the UK’s second city (although most Mancunians will gleefully tell you it’s already the first).

To find out more, visit the museum’s website here.olding of food supplies by Churchill to further feed the British war machine in the East.