Rooted, Relevant, and Evolving: Rajiv Menon on Redefining South Asian Diasporic Art

 
 


interview by Parrie Chhajed

With each new generation of immigrants from South Asia making their way to the various corners of the world, so too does their culture and unique interpretation thereof. With the context of comparison, they offer perspectives on their homeland that challenge the idea of authenticity deriving from one’s geographic placement. Thus is the crux of Non-Residency, a group show that comprises sixteen artists of South Asian diasporic identity curated by Rajiv Menon. Bringing the work of non-resident South Asian artists directly to Jaipur is a first for the young gallerist and curator who opened Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood, California, in his quest to bolster representation of the Indian diaspora within the United States. He refers to these artists as the Non-Resident School, effectively defining a voice of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) taste that is both united and richly diverse by way of its orientation.

Sahana Ramakrishnan
The People Under The Sea

PARRIE CHHAJED: First off, congratulations on the exhibition. The work and the scale of the gallery is quite remarkable.

RAJIV MENON: Thank you so much. It’s really been a mission of mine to bring South Asian art to the U.S. and build a new audience for what I believe is some of the most important work happening globally. Seeing such a meaningful response has been incredibly rewarding.

CHHAJED: Let’s start with Non-Residency. It’s a cleverly charged title. How did it come about, and what does it mean to you personally?

MENON: One of the early inspirations was the ongoing cultural debate around “NRI taste.” I was very attuned to the perception of this gap in sensibility between India and its diaspora. While that gap is real, I wanted to understand its emotional and social underpinnings—and more importantly, how those conditions can be fertile grounds for art-making. I didn’t want this to be just an art exhibition. I wanted Non-Residency to act as an intervention in the culture itself—to challenge how we think about the relationship between the motherland and its diaspora, and to elevate diasporic voices as central, not peripheral, to the narrative of Indian art.

CHHAJED: This is also your first professional project in India and the first time a singular gallery is showcasing at the Jaipur Centre for Art. How does that feel both personally and professionally?

MENON: Immense. I’ve always been in awe of Indian galleries—their coherence, their mission, the way they’re contributing to defining India’s national visual identity. That spirit is what I wanted to engage with. As a diasporic gallery, we don’t operate within India’s territorial boundaries, but we are equally invested in its cultural perception globally. This exhibition is my way of asserting that the diaspora isn’t just looking in from the outside—we’re in dialogue. We’re translating, challenging, and innovating alongside what’s happening in India.

CHHAJED: The exhibition is set in Jaipur’s historic City Palace, yet it tackles themes like migration, displacement, and otherness. How did the palace’s context influence your curatorial choices?

MENON: I really wanted to play with that irony—the grandeur of a heritage space colliding with deeply contemporary diasporic narratives. Jaipur, in the Western and diasporic imagination, often represents fantasy and opulence. By placing diasporic work in that setting, it creates a tension. The goal was to force the viewer to confront that gap and start a dialogue between heritage and the now. The Jaipur Centre’s mission aligns with this—to open up heritage spaces to contemporary voices, and that made it the perfect partner.

CHHAJED: What was the initial spark for this exhibition—what made you feel that Non-residency was needed now?

MENON: Over the past few years, I’ve seen a distinct shift in diasporic art—a cohort of artists in conversation with each other, building something that felt like a movement. I’m calling them the Non-resident School—artists working through similar themes and aesthetics, but with singular visions. Many are already in major museum and private collections, but the world wasn’t seeing it as a movement yet. Non-residency is my way of announcing that. It’s a statement: This is not isolated brilliance—it’s a cultural wave that’s reshaping how South Asian identity is viewed globally.

Kelly Sinnapah
Mary Violette’s Book The Girl with 3 Eyes, 2025
JCG18987
photograph by Christopher Burke Studio

As if Hoque Up Up And Away

CHHAJED: And that wave is definitely visible—not just in art, but across music, fashion, and literature as well.

MENON: Absolutely. Indian fashion, in particular, has had such an incredible global presence lately. When I meet young designers and creatives from India, there’s this shared vision—to show that Indian aesthetics are not just relevant, but leading on the world stage. Whether it’s garments or fine art, we’re participating in the same cultural project. That’s why it’s so important to me that my gallery also acts as a platform to showcase fashion and other creative expressions from India.

CHHAJED: Diasporic identity is often framed through nostalgia. But this exhibition feels like a break from that. Was that intentional?

MENON: Very much so. One of my biggest critiques of diasporic work is its frequent fixation on the past. I wanted this show to be about the future—about innovation. The artists featured are using their identities not to look back longingly, but to create something new. This is about possibility, not just memory. I wanted to challenge the idea that diasporic work is a diluted echo of Indian culture. It’s not. It’s its own form—rooted, relevant, and evolving.

Installation view. Non-Residency. Jaipur Centre for Art 2025

CHHAJED: That’s a powerful shift. You’ve also spoken about moving away from “authenticity” as a standard for Indian art. Can you elaborate?

MENON: The notion that work must be created in India to be authentically Indian is limiting—and frankly outdated. Authenticity is not fixed. It evolves. What we think of as “authentic Indian culture” today is different from fifty or a hundred years ago. Diasporic art is no less authentic just because it’s created elsewhere. It reflects the lived experiences and social contexts of the artists. If we continue to gatekeep Indian culture through rigid authenticity, we miss out on incredible new voices and visions.

CHHAJED: The artist list for Non-Residency includes a rich mix of intersectional identities. Was that intentional?

MENON: I don’t believe curation should be a box-ticking exercise. But if you’re genuinely tuned into the landscape, diversity happens naturally. I wanted to present a wide spectrum of diasporic experience—not just the dominant post-1965 immigration narrative. That’s why including Indo-Caribbean artists was essential. Their work speaks to layered displacements and complex racial and cultural identities. This isn’t just about representing different experiences—it’s about expanding the aesthetic language of the diaspora.

Installation view. Non-Residency. Jaipur Centre for Art 2025

CHHAJED: What was the process like of choosing the artists and curating the show?

MENON: A joy. The majority of the works were created specifically for this show. Many artists responded to the location of Jaipur itself. Anoushka Mirchandani, for example, created a painting in response to Jackie Kennedy’s iconic shoot in Jaipur. Nibha Akireddy, who’s currently in residency at JCA, explored the history of women polo players in the region. The curatorial framework—non-residency as both a social and aesthetic concept—also led me to explore the uncanny. There’s a distortion, a doubling that diasporic artists often experience when engaging with the homeland. That tension became an aesthetic throughline across the works.

CHHAJED: Earlier this year, you also launched a permanent space in Hollywood. How has the journey been of creating a gallery focused on South Asian art in the U.S.?

MENON: There was a huge gap on the West Coast for South Asian art, and the response has been incredible. Not just from the diaspora but from the broader art community. Museums have been especially supportive, and that’s a major signifier of cultural impact. But yes, one of the challenges is the lack of cultural literacy—many Americans don’t have a deep understanding of India. That’s why our gallery isn’t just commercial—it’s educational. I want people to understand the context, the complexity, and the multiplicity of Indian art.

CHHAJED: How did the collaboration with the Jaipur Centre come about?

MENON: I attended their opening last year and was deeply moved. Noelle Kadar and HRH Sawai Padmanabh Singh have a truly global vision for Indian art. It felt like the perfect place to make a cultural statement, to bridge the diaspora and the homeland. Their level of ambition and taste matched the gallery’s, and the collaboration just made sense.

CHHAJED: Were there any surprises along the way?

MENON: The journey is still unfolding—the show installs next week! While I visit India often and it feels like home, bringing art here as a business is a new experience. There’s been a learning curve, but this is only the beginning. We’ll also be showing at the India Art Fair in February and plan to keep India as a consistent part of our programming.

CHHAJED: If Non-residency is a homecoming, what’s next?

MENON: In September, we take on a different kind of homecoming—I’ll be curating a show in my hometown of Houston, Texas, at the Untitled Art Fair. The theme will also be homecoming, and like all my curatorial work, it’s deeply personal. I think this pair of shows—India and Houston—reflects the scope of my own identity and vision. After that, we’ll show at Untitled Miami during Art Basel and continue regular programming in our Los Angeles gallery.

Non-Residency is on view through October 5 @ Jaipur Centre for Art Gate No. 1, City Palace, Pink City, Jaipur, Rajasthan 302002

 

Rajiv Menon at the opening of Non-Residency at Jaipur Centre for Art

 

Everything She Touches Turns to Gold: an Interview of Colette Lumiere

interview by Karly Quadros

Fuck art, let’s dance.

It’s the attitude that Colette Lumiere had become known for, immortalized in a mural that she painted on the wall of iconic ’70s downtown New York nightclub and art scene haunt Danceteria. She’s celebrated for her bold personas and expansive multimedia projects from street art to installations to fashion collaborations, yet her later evolutions have received less attention. A new show at Company Gallery, Everything She Touches Turns to Gold, running until March 1, explores the artist’s career in the ’80s as she ventured off to Berlin under the guise of a new persona, the mysterious Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

Lumiere always had a surprisingly contemporary attitude toward blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between art and commerce. She began by painting cryptic sigils on the SoHo pavement at night and has shown art everywhere from the MoMA to Fiorucci shop windows to German nunneries to nightclubs. Her longest running piece was a 24/7 installation in her own apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with champagne and blush-ruched fabrics, a polymorphous punk rock Versailles. Lumiere took that louche crinkling of fabric from her Living Environment and translated it into harlequin frocks that she wore like a uniform. Her influence reverberates widely from Vivienne Westwood and Madonna’s ragged, spunky takes on period clothing to the elaborately staged personas of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee Cohen.

Growing frustrated with the limitations put on a young female artist, in 1978 Lumiere staged her own death in a performance at the Whitney Museum. She emerged a few days later at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, beginning an ongoing dynasty of artistic personas and eras. Everything She Touches Turns to Gold features the artist’s under-celebrated paintings, mostly from the early ’80s, “metaphysical portraits” exploring herself, her friends, and the subconscious. While her ’70s works recall historical reclining nudes including staged photos and durational performances in which she napped in poses modeled after classical paintings such as Manet’s Olympia. Her Berlin period, instead, foregrounded motion. The figures in her portraits wave. They evade. They drift and dream and run away.

I recently met up with Lumiere at Company Gallery to explore the new collection. Now in her  seventies, Lumiere is as true to herself as ever in a ruffled white blouse beneath a hot pink Victorian riding coat. Tunisian-born and French-raised, her accent is caught somewhere between her native French and a dry German lilt. We spoke about Berlin before the wall came down, resisting categorization, and, of course, potatoes.

KARLY QUADROS:  I wanted to focus on the gallery show because it covers this specific period of time: Berlin in the ’80s. Rather than focusing on performances and living spaces, this one is much more concerned with visual art and paintings. A lot of what is written about you concerns a smaller period of time: a lot of your ’70s work, your show at the Whitney where you killed your first persona. But there's still several decades of artwork after that.

COLETTE LUMIERE:  Interesting how people focus on one thing to describe you. They get set.

I really began as a painter. But it wasn't long before I got restless. It was in the air. I was very naïve, and I wasn't coming from Yale or whatever. I was coming from nowhere, actually. It was before street art became popular. There was a bar on Spring Street where I did a lot of my graffiti work. I always had an accomplice, a friend, a girlfriend or somebody helping me out, watching for the police

Simultaneously, I was creating the environments that I lived in. I got intrigued with using space in a different way. This was a time where art changed completely, and unconsciously, I was picking up on that.

I used to go to the nightclubs. It was at Max's Kansas City. No place like it ever again.

The people hanging out there were all famous artists. They were [Colette adopts a macho stance] men, and I was a young girl and I usually had another young girl with me. But one night I met [land artist Robert] Smithson, and we had a long conversation. I said I had learned about him and we were doing the same thing. I think he was rolling his eyes. He had other ideas in mind, but we took him to my place, which was near where he lived and he walked in my environment and then he sobered up. We gave him a cup of coffee, and we talked about art. And from then on, he introduced me to everyone. Richard Serra, Carl Andre. That was my beginning.

QUADROS:  Why did you decide to go to Berlin?

LUMIERE:  Sometimes I just like to give up. Surrender. You always want to plan your life, and then sometimes I find it's best to surrender.

So, I was really at that stage of my life, where my Living Environment had come to an end. I think I was ready to be dismantled. I lived in an artwork that was ongoing. It was very extreme, and I was part of that artwork. And there was another element, which was my landlord, who tried to throw me out from the beginning [laughs]. So it was coming to a climax. And then I get this invitation to go to Berlin. How convenient! 

I don't know why I'm talking about my past again. This is really a problem I've noticed. But this show is Mata Hari. We're talking the ’80s! Berlin was a new beginning. 

QUADROS: Who is Mata Hari the persona?

LUMIERE:  Actually, I didn't know at all about Mata Hari the person when I chose that name. The reason I chose Mata Hari was because I knew she was a spy… You had this image. The Berlin Wall was not that far away.

None of my personas are actually about the name. A lot of people think Olympia, it's Olympia from Manet, Justine, it's de Sade, but none of them are. Of course Mata Hari has something to do with the name, but I had to make something new out of her. So, it became Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes. It was the potatoes because it was the food for Germany. Then stolen made it more mysterious, dangerous. That's what I felt Berlin would be like. I would take pictures of myself, running like somebody was going to catch me, like the police or the Gestapo.

I got into [the show’s videos] because it's really old footage. One of them was staged at the opera where I did a music video that was interrupted by the police. I have a tendency to do things I should not do for the sake of art, of course, because I'm obsessed. I had the approval of the director who I had done sets and costumes for at the Berlin Opera.

We were just starting to rehearse. It was a potato song, which is in the show as well. It was called, “Did You Eat?” Well, apparently that was not legal. And everybody came out from the kitchen, from the offices. “What is going on here?” And here I am doing my music video rehearsing. We were just at the beginning, and the police came. And I said, “You're not gonna stop this.” I said to everybody working with the band, “Let's just go. Let's just finish it.” At the end, my wig is like half down. People don't know this when they see the video.

QUADROS: What was the Berlin art community like?

LUMIERE: At the beginning there was a lot of resistance for me, and there usually is. I've noticed this everywhere I go. First of all, I'm a foreigner. And number two, it was the height of the wild painters, the Berlin guys – Lüpertz and Rainer Fetting. It was a whole crew of them. They were very macho, and they ruled the scene. They were very serious, and they drank a lot, and they were very depressed. And here I am, bringing my art to a nightclub. I took a boyfriend's Volkswagen and I painted it and put the potatoes in. I arrived in the Volkswagen, and I did an installation in the nightclub they all went to. It was called, There's a New Girl in Town.

This German art magazine came out with a story that art in the nightclubs is what's happening. In New York, there was Palladium. It was where all the big artists like Schnabel, Clemente, Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Colette [went], but Colette was on her own always. So, it explained how I kind of started that way back before in Danceteria. Then they were respectful. Then I won them over, and they were nice to me.

QUADROS: Can you speak a little about the Silk to Marble series? Many things come up for me: the seductress, a statue of Venus, a nun, decommissioned artwork covered in a sheet, perhaps even a dead body covered in a sheet.

LUMIERE:  Well, you just described it. It's not that I'm against high tech or having a big budget, but usually I don't have either available. So I'm very good at transforming material. It was an evening at home bored and I'm leaving, [so I said] “Let's make some art!” I had this one sheet. It was very organic. Organic is a big word in my work. 

They were first exhibited in Berlin, in the house, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, which was beautiful because it was a nunnery, so it had these oval religious arches, white walls. It was perfect for the series. And then out of nowhere at the opening, I appeared behind one of the columns way up – the ceilings were unbelievably high – and there was special music composed for that performance.

QUADROS: A lot of your performance work is inspired by art history and the canon, often subverting or playing with classical images. But these “metaphysical portraits” seem to come from somewhere else entirely. What can the world of dreaming offer us?

LUMIERE:  My art was trying to reach the invisible, the unknown. That's what I'm reaching out for… I don't care what the trend is… I don't like trends because trends are things that happen and leave, and I'm interested in the eternal. Artists – I guess they’re called visionaries – they follow that line, and they're mystical in a way. I try to stay away from describing myself as that, but that's what interested me from the beginning: the metaphysics, magic, the mystery of life and art. I'm always seeking for another dimension. That's what my soul is looking for, and whatever way I can manifest it, whether it's canvas or performance, that's my goal.

The feminine influence is a big thing too. Now it's much easier for women, but at the time I was doing it, my work was labeled feminine, like it was an insult. Even the women were insulted by me. Like I was an insult. Because I impressed my femininity in my paintings and the way I dressed. I always have fun anyway. That's another thing. Fun is very important. 

QUADROS: You like to build the whole world.  It can't just stay in the gallery. It has to be in the streets, and in the club, and in the bedroom. 

LUMIERE: In the bedroom, yes!

QUADROS: Were you part of the punks?

LUMIERE: Oh yeah, of course. But I also wasn’t. I was never a part of anything is what I’m trying to tell you. In the clubs it was so cool to be mean! [Colette adopts a snarl and a tough pose.] I like punk, but I don’t like it when it goes in a very negative direction. So I created my own thing, which was a contradiction. I added the Victorian look, the soft look, and mixed it up with the tough look because it was only black, black, black.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because Victorian fashion is very confined and restricted, like a corset. But your clothing is much lighter and more playful.

LUMIERE: Well by 1980, I was getting restless to get rid of my Environment, but I wasn’t really ready. So, I started wearing it. It was an experiment in walking architecture. The whole idea was to use space in a different way.

I work very intuitively and later, I get what I meant, you know? I think intuition has its own intelligence. We live in a culture where intellect is so celebrated, not that that doesn’t have its role. For me, it’s always been about the unity of the mind, body, and the emotions. There’s a cerebral part of my work. There’s an emotional quality. I think this show reflects that. 

QUADROS: Do you think you can explore something with painting that you can’t reach with performance or fashion or music?

LUMIERE: I love it and I don’t love it. I’m a loner, really. I like my private life. But it’s a contradiction because I also like to have large audiences and speak to lots of people. Painters are usually by themselves. With fashion and with music and with all of the other parts, I’d probably do a lot more, but I don’t want to because this is my first love. Being who I am and on my own time, that’s me.

QUADROS: I do think you were forward-thinking being so multidisciplinary. Nowadays, it’s so hard for people to make a living doing just one thing. So you see artists that collaborate with fashion designers or build window displays, all the things you used to do.

LUMIERE: I was always interested in pushing that line between art and commerce. And now it’s merged. And I don’t approve of that. But I pushed it.

QUADROS: Do you feel responsible for the people you’ve influenced?

LUMIERE: No, because in the end it’s not me. But it is interesting.


Everything She Touches Turns to Gold is on view through March 1 @ Company Gallery in New York City at 145 Elizabeth St.