What do American artists Dan Flavin, Nancy Holt, John Chamberlain, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, along with the French artist François Morellet, have in common? Beyond their artistic ability to bend, expand and explore the limits of visual and metaphorical perception, the art of these contemporaries from the 1960s and 70s currently shares the same roof at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in the tropical city of Mumbai. Light into Space is an exhibition presented in collaboration with Dia Art Foundation, New York, and is on view until May 11, 2025. 

Curated by Jessica Morgan, Dia Art Foundation’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director, and Min Sun Jeon, Dia’s Assistant Curator, the NMACC exhibition showcases some of the most significant artists from the Light and Space art movement, which began in Southern California in the second half of the 20th century, bringing them to India for the first time. Related to geometric abstraction, op art and minimalism, Light and Space focused on perceptual phenomena such as light, volume and scale, forming installations directly conditioned by the work's surroundings. The counterculture materiality of the art movement, manifested in commercially available fluorescent lights, glass, mirror, neon, resin and cast acrylic that lent a physical and conceptual radicality to the art form, is on display across the four floors of the ‘Art House’. This adds up to a large-scale sensorial exhibition that renders the site of the show — NMACC — in a perception-altering light.

The exhibition is as experiential as it is immersive for it commands not just proximity and distance from the works but a specific choreography of movement to see, find or understand a hidden detail or an unexpected perspective within and between the different installations. For instance, in John Chamberlain’s mineral-coated reflective plexiglas sculpture conceived in high-baroque folds, the piece sits on a plinth offsetting the view of a neon-esque corner with multicolour fluorescent tubes by Dan Flavin ordinarily resting against the wall. This visual duet between the two artworks in an otherwise plain room, painted in white, must be observed by walking across opposite ends to enable a reading of a complex dynamic optical relationship between them. Nearby is a three-and-a-quarter walled room with Nancy Holt’s Mirror of Light I (1973-74) installation, which, while physically placed on two of the planes, occupies the entire three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. A spin on the heels, is the only way to take it all in offering an unprecedented experience for subject matter experts and selfie-seekers alike.

A flight of stairs above, Mary Corse’s fascination with light as both subject and material in art is uncovered through the subtle dance one has to do in front of the work Untitled (White Inner Band) – a white-on-white painting with a near-imperceptible band of micro-sphere glass in acrylic on canvas. This quiet artwork shares a double-height space with The Equal Area Series (1976-77) by Walter De Maria. Drawing attention to the gallery’s physical boundaries through extreme reflection from the flat-laid glossy steel geometric forms bombarded with tonnes of lumens from above, De Maria tempts one to lie down long enough to be quasi-hallucinating as one watches the unremarkable architectural elements of a typical suburban Mumbai glass and steel building replaced by a static river of glimmering reflections from the geometric forms that (may) appear to sway.

The collection on view is from the archives of the Dia Art Foundation, which began in 1974, playing a supportive institutional role in the careers of the artists in the NMACC exhibition, as the official press release notes. What calls for a special mention is the boldness with which the works are placed – they are not categorised by artist, medium, chronology or theme. The works are placed in the centres of rooms, at intersections and corners, effecting dialogue, debate and conversational pauses between one artist and another. Their placement serves to engulf the space, with the light from one work bleeding onto the other – and reflection extending the field of vision. Since light itself is an invisible medium, the contours of the space – wall-ceiling-floor – then become as necessary as they are inconsequential. Light-colour-reflection is at once the stroke and the canvas itself.

A handbook about the show, distributed at the entrance, allows for restrained wall text seen across the four floors of the exhibition space. As often seen, many travelling exhibitions carry wall text in more than one language.  Having seen English wall labels and descriptions accompanied by Italian, Spanish, French, Danish and German text very often, it was exciting to see the corresponding column in Hindi at Light into Space. I approached the wall enthusiastically, yet it was instantly underwhelming to read something in my native tongue but understand nothing of what it meant. Was this due to my lack of familiarity with an artistic vocabulary in Hindi, or was it because the Hindi text sought to literally translate what was said in English, at the expense of considering how it could effectively convey the same meaning? The use of language which distances most of the audience – perhaps even more so than English – could risk being read as tokenistic. In an overall positive attempt at access and exposure, the linguistic ingress to facilitate a ‘speaking about art’ for general audiences would be a valuable next step for NMACC’s upcoming initiatives.

Reflectively, the transformation of the spatial experience of the venue registers differently from previous visits. It is fascinating to dissect how the relationship between art and where it is shown in the built environment is a negotiation between hierarchies of perception. Light into Space lives up to its name, making evident how it perceptually challenges and changes the galleries within Art House.  NMACC deserves applause for bringing to India those pop-culture experiences (from the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room to the Phantom of the Opera among others) that are perhaps even a bit too jaded on the Western timeline, yet are a novel phenomenon in the region. With Light into Space, tickets priced at Rs.199 (a little less than £2) and various free-entry categories are a clear indicator of the intent to expand arts audiences in the region. This makes the retro-classic art movement accessible to an audience that may never have crossed the shores in search of it.

'Light into Space' is on view at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai from February 13 – May 11, 2025.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.