AINA Gallery opens NY space dedicated to non-Western modern and contemporary art

AINA Gallery, the continuation of Aicon Art’s two-decade legacy in New York, has opened a new permanent space in Chelsea dedicated to South Asian modernism and global contemporary art from the Global South. The gallery will present solo exhibitions, thematic projects and historical retrospectives, with a particular focus on artists from South Asia, Africa and their global diasporas. “AINA Gallery was previously known as Aicon Art and operated on Great Jones Street for close to 20 years. The new space on West 29th was designed by studioMDA and built by F&S Contracting,” AINA Gallery notes, as "an exhibition space dedicated to reflection and global artistic dialogues".

The name 'AINA', derived from the Persian and South Asian concept of the mirror (aina / آئینہ) reflects the art gallery’s ambition to act as a space for reflection and exchange, bringing artistic histories that have often remained outside dominant Western narratives into conversation with New York’s contemporary art community. "AINA Gallery was conceived as a space of clarity and synthesis…There is a depth of culture and history that has been left unexplored to its full potential outside of the Western framework, and our mission is to present these artistic movements with the scholarly depth and high-level presentation they demand,” says the founder, Prajit Dutta, in an official statement.

Its inaugural art exhibition, Other Stories—A Genealogy for the Present, takes Rasheed Araeen’s 1989 Hayward Gallery exhibition, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain, as a starting point. “The conceptual framework of AINA Gallery’s programming over the past decade owes an immense debt to this exhibition, as well as to Araeen’s broader curatorial and critical interventions, which insisted that modernism be understood not as a singular inheritance emanating from a few privileged centres but as a contested and dispersed field,” the gallery explains.

Curated by Atreyee Gupta, associate professor of Art History at UC Berkeley, the showcase examines modernism as a dispersed and contested field rather than a singular tradition emerging from a handful of Western centres. The exhibition brings together five artists featured in Araeen’s original exhibition—Araeen, Avinash Chandra, Aubrey Williams, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Francis Newton Souza—with Ernest Mancoba, Mohan Samant, Krishna Reddy and Zarina Hashmi. Their work is presented alongside that of contemporary artists, including Rekha Rodwittiya, Surendran Nair, Veer Munshi, Sujith SN, Faiza Butt, Khadim Ali, Peju Alatise, Victor Ekpuk, Rachid Koraïchi and Saad Qureshi.

“In addition to its primary exhibition program, AINA Gallery will publish scholarly exhibition catalogues, host public lectures and collaborate with international curators, academic institutions and private collections to foster deeper engagement with non-Western art histories,” AINA Gallery shares.