September 5, 2026 | Art & Culture
INDIA
MANY INDIAS, ONE EXHIBITION
words Onur Baştürk
photos Francisco Nogueira
At the Palace of the Dukes of Cadaval in Évora, INDIA brings together contemporary Indian art with tribal and vernacular practices, tracing the many languages, traditions and contradictions that shape artistic life across the subcontinent today.
On view until 25 October, INDIA brings together around fifteen artists from different regions and artistic contexts across the subcontinent. Contemporary practices appear alongside tribal and vernacular traditions, challenging the distinctions that have long separated these forms of expression and placing them within the same contemporary conversation.
DIFFERENT WORLDS, SIDE BY SIDE
The exhibition also draws on the long relationship between Portugal and India. More than five centuries of maritime routes, cultural exchange and mutual influence provide a historical backdrop, but INDIA is firmly concerned with the present. Rather than looking at the country through an exotic or purely historical lens, it considers how artistic practices rooted in very different cultural traditions continue to evolve and intersect today.
At the heart of the exhibition is this coexistence of different worlds. Artists educated in India’s metropolitan art schools are shown alongside artists from tribal communities whose practices remain closely connected to ritual and inherited traditions. Curator Hervé Perdriolle approaches their relationship through the idea of “fertilisation”: not as opposing languages, but as practices that have continually informed one another.
The range is deliberately broad. The animist-rooted paintings of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe sit alongside Parag Sonarghare’s hyperrealist portraits and tantric paintings in which abstraction meets spirituality. Tradition and experimentation, ritual and contemporary life, spirituality and social observation all occupy the same exhibition.
A PARALLEL UNIVERSE TO THE REST OF THE WORLD
For Alexandra de Cadaval, who oversees cultural affairs at the Palace and is also one of its owners, INDIA carries a deeply personal dimension. Her relationship with India spans more than two decades, shaped by repeated journeys through its urban and rural landscapes and by her work as co-director of the World Sacred Spirit Festival in Nagaur and Jodhpur.
“It was thanks to Alain Weber that I first discovered the world of Indian arts, initially through music, and gradually through the visual arts, opening for me a lifelong journey into the immense cultural richness of the subcontinent. India has always felt to me like a parallel universe to the rest of the world, where ancient traditions and extreme modernity meet with remarkable intensity. After Portugal, it is the country that has most profoundly marked me.”
That experience also explains the exhibition’s resistance to any single image of India. Alexandra de Cadaval describes a country of profound contrasts, where social inequality and complexity exist alongside extraordinary creativity, humanity and spiritual depth. Rather than attempting to define India, the exhibition leaves room for these contradictions to remain visible.
BEYOND WESTERN NARRATIVES
INDIA also continues a direction the Cadaval Palace has pursued since 2018, bringing contemporary art into conversation with vernacular, rural and tribal practices. The Palace is conceived here not simply as an exhibition space, but as a place where artistic traditions and geographies that are often kept apart can meet.
Hervé Perdriolle has spent decades working precisely within this territory. A critic, collector and curator, he lived in India during the 1990s and has long researched practices that developed outside academic systems and dominant Western narratives. His curatorial position rests on the understanding that contemporary art is not exclusively Western, but emerges independently across many different cultural contexts.
The collaboration between Perdriolle and Alexandra de Cadaval had been taking shape for years. As de Cadaval recalls: “I first met Hervé Perdriolle seven years ago, and from the beginning, we shared the dream of creating an exhibition together in Évora. I would also like to warmly thank Maximiliano Modesti, whose enthusiasm, encouragement and support helped make this project a reality.”
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS WITH INDIA
For the Palace, the exhibition also marks another chapter in a relationship with India that reaches well beyond the visual arts. De Cadaval adds: “Over the past twenty-five years, the Palacio Cadaval has maintained a close relationship with India through music, performance and artistic exchange. To present India today as a central focus of our programme, on the eve of Évora’s year as European Capital of Culture, carries special meaning for us.”
