North/South

Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles | September 6–October 4, 2025

Aiza Ahmed, Jatinder Singh Durhailay, Devi Seetharam, Lakshi Madhavan

NORTH/SOUTH at Rajiv Menon Contemporary investigates the way regional identity shapes contemporary art in South Asia — not through the familiar East–West lens, but through the internal divide between the North and South of the subcontinent. The exhibition underscores how artists make place visible: not just as geography, but as lived experience, history, and cultural imagination. By focusing on voices from Punjab in the North and Kerala in the South, NORTH/SOUTH highlights how art-making is deeply rooted in local sensibilities and perspectives that resist simple national narratives, revealing the nuance of regional self-definition.

In this context, art becomes a means of asserting identity through figures, objects, textiles, and landscapes — where each work offers a sense of space or place that is as much emotional as it is geographic.

Punjab emerges not simply as a place, but as a shared spirit shaped by memory and rupture. Drawing inspiration from the Wagah-Attari Border, Aiza Ahmed’s work reimagines how landscapes are divided along arbitrary lines, foregrounding Punjab’s fractured position within the South Asian imagination and the lasting imprint of partition on collective identity.

Pictured above: The grand rehearsal, 2024, ink, oil, and charcoal on muslin, 72 x 154 in.