Conceived as a two-year rotation, Capturing the Subcontinent juxtaposes Huma Bhabha’s Reconstructions portfolio with historic and contemporary South Asian photography from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s permanent collection. Bhabha’s portfolio, which features her ominous, looming figures painted on photographs of the Pakistani landscape, recalls South Asia’s rich tradition of painted photography, as well as the tradition of landscape and monument photography, often utilized by the British to depict India as backwards, decaying, and ripe for conquest. This rotation highlights various aspects of Indian photography history - the colonial landscape, portraiture and studio photography, contemporary manipulated photography - to contextualize Bhabha’s portfolio and introduce some of the unique facets of South Asian photography.

Synthetic Anatomies was the culmination of my two-year curatorial fellowship. After the Asian Art department received a gift of historic and contemporary East Asian art from Gabrielle Lurie, I researched and wrote acquisition reports for every work in the collection. Afterwards, I identified key works ideal for display, and put together a one-year installation juxtaposing Lurie’s gifts with other key objects from the permanent collection. The installation highlights historic and contemporary East Asian artists who idealize, distort, or abstract the body, exploring how nonrealistic depictions of the figure reflect changing social mores and responses to universal realities like war, trauma, and immigration.