Considering colonisation, independence, and nationhood, Historica imagines ‘the nation’ as a conceptual project and ‘modernism’ as an aspirational value. Colonisation was based on the superiority of a nation – be that language, religion or race but does adherence to religions, languages and race define the modern democratic state? This exhibition asks whether nationalism in post-colonial societies, though democratic and secular, curbs its citizens fundamental rights of freedom such as one’s right over sexuality, gender and body.

Historica considers the state’s responsibility towards art and its aims, by way of the museum concept, to continue the modernism project as way to construct national identity based on a constitution.

Sumesh Sharma co-founded the Clark House Initiative, Bombay in 2010 where he presently is the curator along with being the invited curator to the biennale of African contemporary art – Dak’Art 2016, Senegal. His practice deals with alternate histories that are informed by the Black Arts movement, Socio-Economics, Immigration in the Francophone and Vernacular Equalities of Modernism.

This project is presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.