From the home to the world: Meet 5 South Asian artists thriving in London

Matthew Krishanu

“In painting, you can portray many time periods at once," says Matthew Krishanu, who uses the medium to revisit scenes from his childhood in Bangladesh and India, and life in London. Soon after his major solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre, we visit Krishanu at his studio in Blackhorse Lane and ask him what keeps him coming back to paint.

Examples from his many years-long series stand next to each other here. Krishanu works on these series simultaneously, traversing years and kilometres with each switch. In Another Country (2012-ongoing), two boys, stand-ins for himself and his brother, explore an unnamed landscape in South Asia. They climb trees, sit at the edges of boats and teeter on playground monkey-bars. The theme reappears in a 2024 painting, this time with his daughter on the tree, in Epping Forest, London, and guarded at the base by the painter’s late wife, the writer Uschi Gatward.

While rooted in personal memory, the ambition of Krishanu’s paintings goes beyond autobiography. His figures are stand-ins not just for himself, his brother, his wife and daughter, but gesture at the criss-crossing social histories of, as the artist says, “the majority of people in the world,” that is, those “with brown skin and black hair.” Likewise, Krishanu’s Mission series is less the story of his missionary father in Bangladesh and more a way to call attention to the larger history of Christian missionaries in South Asia. Within these paintings, we see rooms in which iconic pictures from the canon of Western art history hang, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. These “quotations” as Krishanu calls them, re-contextualised in the South Asian setting, make a clever flip — it is now the canon that does not quite belong in the room.

References to art histories are everywhere in Krishanu’s work, and each work often draws from several sources. His House of God series, with large sections of the foreground made of a single colour, clearly cite the American Colour Field movement. Four works from the series were also included in the 2023-24 travelling exhibition of South Asian miniature painting from 1600 to now, Beyond the Page, for their use of the Indian miniature strategy of placing motifs in a flat narrative space.

Despite their many relationships with ideas, places and people of the past, Krishanu’s paintings respond to his here and now. Crow, a series of close portraits of mainly London crows, depicts the ubiquitous contemporary London figure, “strutting, mythical characters,” as Krishanu describes them. “In various cultures, they are the carriers of souls into the afterlife,” he says, “and in some way the invisible thread between my past and present.” If Krishanu’s figures are like tricksters shuttling through time, his canvases are membranes, tensely holding together his many worlds, “many lineages”.

Jasleen Kaur

Jasleen Kaur has just moved into a large shared studio in Somerset House. In this space, we see prototypes, notes towards and remnants of her object-based installations, including from Alter Altar (2023) at Tramway, Glasgow that won the artist the prestigious Turner Prize in 2024. The “cut-and-paste” spirit of the artist's works, which combine elements from her life growing up in Glasgow’s Sikh community and contemporary life in London, reflects here. It is a library of objects without a directory — a car charm in the shape of a boxing glove sits on a light switch; next to family photographs on her desk is a toilet paper roll custom-printed with the face of a visibly Sikh police man; on the window ledge are tiles of marbled plastic, sticks of incense wood, a crocheted doily and a long metal fork.

Kaur grew up around her father’s hardware shop, “surrounded by goods, specifically cheap imported goods” and completed her formal training in jewellery making at the Glasgow School of Art in 2008. Over the years, the artist has come to wield her closeness with craft and mass-produced objects “without shame” and intuitively, pulling close together the “constellation of ideas in her head”. An early sculptural work, Father’s Shoes (2009), for example, collages her father’s blue rubber chappals and leather brogues into one piece of footwear. Her treatment of family photographs is now instantly recognisable for their use of torn up pieces of roti and orange-tinted resin, the colour of Scotland’s favourite soda, Irn-Bru. Objects from various registers of life collapse into one space, freeing up each other’s social and political meanings.

Even as Kaur offers us the sacred objects of her everyday life, she keeps their dignity intact. Faces are covered up, words are not too legible and works are installed at a safe distance from our eyes. “NOT WANTING TO BE DIGESTED,” one of the post-it notes pinned to her board says, a reminder that we are not entitled to see it all.

Sayan Chanda

“In all the ways I can be timid, my work takes up space,” says the Kolkata-born Sayan Chanda about his imposing tapestries, carefully crafted to look primal, organic and totemic. He shows us around his home studio in North-West London — his primary source material, embroidered kantha textiles from Bengal stacked next to a desk lined with folders and books on sacred and folk art from India and Africa, world mythology, outsider art and ceramics. A small collapsible loom from his past as a textile designer and a self-fashioned tapestry weaving frame sit against a window overlooking a community garden.

On the walls are three of Chanda’s recent tapestry works — made using the frame to reweave manually unravelled kantha quilts, gamcha material or bundles of black jute fibres usually used as wigs on Bengali idol goddesses. In form, scale and palette of earthy reds, yellows and blacks, the works are reminiscent of pioneering soft sculptures by artists like Mrinalini Mukherji and Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose 2023 retrospective at the Tate Modern Chanda says he could not bear to leave. Around the tapestries are ceramic sculptures, which combine references from a Hindu temple, such as ceremonial lamps and snake heads, to recast them in unfamiliar forms and a rough metallic glaze, made to look as if “dug out from an ancient archeological site.”

What at first glance may seem like timeless altarpieces are in fact responses to the artist’s deep interest in social and cultural history. “My work often gets clubbed with the esoteric,” he says, “but that is a very late attribute of the work.” The starting point is obsessive research into colonial anthropological and indological texts to excavate forgotten histories of female figures in the Indian cannon. The inspiration comes from these “exiled and marginalised female divinities, victims of male centric reinterpretation over the years,” Chanda explains. One of his largest works, a 4 metre long dark black piece is named Jyeshtha, after a goddess who was later rewritten as Alakshmi, the well-known Hindu goddess Lakshmi’s dark-skinned and more sinister sister. Reworking existing kantha materials, typically passed down family lines and made by women, becomes a way for the artist to engage with and restage the abjected feminine figures of our social unconscious.

“I don’t leave things half-finished,” Chanda says about his years-long commitment to his research, materials and process. His arsenal is sparing and precise — kantha, jute, metallic glaze, charcoal, vermillion and turmeric. In the next few years, he may add a few more shades and a material or two. A quiet faith in the practice sustains the work and imparts them their presence.

Arinjoy Sen

At the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, architect and artist Arinjoy Sen’s three-panel embroidered installation titled Bengali Song became the talk of Biennale goers. In the midst of dozens of un-peopled installations, here was a work teeming with life, saturated with colour and dotted with the intricate texture of Bengali kantha embroidery. Miniature figures were set in a communal landscape making food, music, implements and textiles, around temporary bamboo and steel houses. Sen had already been planning a collaboration with Marina Tabassum, the architect of Bangladesh's revolutionary modular housing typology depicted in Bengali Song, known as ‘Khudi Bari’ or ‘Little House’, used by many of the country’s marginalised and landless people, including at the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. Wanting to do “something meaningful for the Biennale’s global platform,” Sen decided to put the ‘Khudi Bari’ and its sociopolitical context centre-stage. Digital drawings of scenes of the Khudi Bari were then reinterpreted by the kantha artisans at SHE Kantha, an NGO working with artisans around West Bengal, and the final works were thus staged at the Biennale, held up by collaborators in the United Kingdom, Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal. The triptych has now been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

At his home-studio in Islington, he continues pushing his visual art practice, balancing it with a career in architecture and lecturing engagements. Driven by a research interest in the politics of architectural history and disillusioned with Western architectural standards, Sen is drawn to various South Asian folk traditions of visual representation, such as Mughal miniature, Kalighat paintings and Pattachitra. For him, these are not just visual forms but important cultural and historical documents with which to develop a new language of telling stories and imagining space. From these traditions he takes, for example, the flat pictorial plane that need not follow the rules of a single perspective but which can tell the stories of many characters at once. In a 2024 mural installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Sen used this visual logic to create a “carnival” of various brightly dressed indigenous figures and craftspeople in response to the Institute's Jarvis Mural’s depiction of colonised peoples, widely considered an imperial racist project.

The artist is currently working on a project — “I like to work on projects not single works,” he says — on the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979, during which a refugee settlement in the Sundarbans became the target of police patrollers, along with research on the “alternative origins of Calcutta,” traced through Kalighat paintings, calendar art and the city’s historic red light district. “In the end, I just want to tell stories,” he says.

Amba Sayal-Bennett

One way to approach Amba Sayal-Bennett’s meticulous 3-D printed sculptures is to view them as maps. If they seem unreadable, they are intentionally so, and a way for the artist to challenge the assumption that the world can be known, manipulated and laid bare.

Her studio, among a cohort at Collective Ending, an artist-run initiative in South London’s Deptford, is close to Goldsmiths University, where the artist completed a PhD in Art Practice and Learning before an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. “I try to combine my practice with research and learning in a rigorous way,” the artist says, for whom drawing has been the basis of a mode of thinking, theorising and making, all at the same time.

Since her PhD, the artist has been working around the world, responding to the architectural and aesthetic histories of each site through her practice of mapping, drawing and building. During a residency at the British School at Rome in 2022, for example, she examined the appropriation of modernist design aesthetics by mid-20th century fascism, using the former’s clean lines and glass surfaces to impose regimes of structure and transparency. Later that year, she created a commission for Somerset House, based on Sir William Chambers’ architectural drawings of the iconic London building, once the site of the Royal Navy and the Royal Society. Plans of the past are picked up again and inspected with the hope of discovering something in them in excess of their old meanings.

For her 2024 exhibition at TARQ, Mumbai, she drew inspiration from the neighbouring Rani Baug, formerly Victoria Gardens, set up by the British in the 1860s, as an outpost of bigger gardens like the Kew Gardens in London, an important centre for the cataloguing and survey of Britain’s empire from its earliest days. The now disorderly garden in Mumbai became a way for the artist to think through the complicated movement of materials such as rubber plants, an important colonial crop, exported from the Kew nurseries to India with the hope of setting up productive plantations. The seedlings however did not really take and the full scope of their plans failed. The artist says, “it was as if the climate and soil collaborated to refuse the crop.” Each of her sculptures functions in this spirit, in the image of an ideal, but somehow botched. Their contours, markings and keys have mutated, overgrown and overtaken the original plan.

“I am interested in how objects of knowledge became agents of knowledge,” the artist says. She has become fluent in a language of the past to find new and graceful ways to refuse it.