Sosa Joseph came of age in the late 1990s when key figures of the Indian art world began to experiment with new media such as video and installation. Nevertheless, a tradition of figurative painting in the country from this earlier cohort provided an important context and resource. Looming large is the figure of Bhupen Khakhar, a painter who is celebrated both in India and internationally, including through major retrospectives in some of the world’s top museums. In our conversation Sosa spoke of her early fascination with Bhupen’s work encountered through reproductions, and she describes her father’s shock at this artist’s queer transgressions. This conversation reminded me of the way that transgressive elements in Bhupen’s paintings, exist but get folded into a larger ‘weltanschauung,’ part of the painting’s composition, similar, perhaps, to how the shocking or disturbing elements in Sosa’s own paintings are integrated into what she describes as a harmony on the canvas. 

— Grant Watson

Grant Watson is an independent curator based in London. He holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London. He was Senior Curator at Iniva, London (2010-14), and Curator at MuHKA, Antwerp (2006-10), where he presented the large-scale exhibition “Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture" (2008), which addressed left politics and modernism in India. He was Visiting Curator for documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, where he researched the participation of contemporary Indian artists in the exhibition. Recent activities include 'bauhaus imaginista' a 3-year research project exploring the transnational character and reception of the Bauhaus with exhibitions and discursive events taking place in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the USA.