Material Affinities and Tropical Dreams examines two modernities: the situational encounters between cultures along ancient trade routes leading up to the age of discovery, and the emergence of post-colonial nations in the majoritarian world. Of the countless imperial ships that traversed the oceans, some left from Europe, passed through Brazil, and sailed on to India. These vessels, besides hope and material goods, carried with them stories, seeds, and images. Visions, dreams and hallucinations (at sea) were enmeshed with experiences and hearsay and became tools for worlding. This porosity prevailed even as lines of exclusionary borders were being drawn and wars began to break out among colonial empires.

As these empires faded, a second modernity came into view. In the newly independent, post-colonial context of South Asia, regional textures and climates were being shaped into new identities from familiar and foreign materials. Emboldened by the possibility of a clean-slate, utopian imaginations flourished and organizations such as the Non-Aligned Movement emerged. Harsh, tough, (fairly cheap) grey concrete reinforced with steel became the humble material for lofty ambitions. The brutal surface was softened by playing with recurring patterns of light and shade, and adorned with native and non-native plants and trees. These alien structures were let loose in lush forest-gardens reclaiming an unruly wildness that scrupulously-manicured colonial gardens had resisted.

Divining form would become an abiding practice amongst this group of artists. Recalibrating and distilling images, freeing them from their excesses. A considered sparseness surfaces from long, laborious processes. To fully understand Anwar Jamal Shemza’s practice it is essential to see his artistic work in tandem with his writing practice. The artist consistently experimented with structures as if they were languages, rephrasing and editing until they arrived at a poetry of form. His influences were myriad – from Islamic motifs to Mughal architecture, from carpets to literature – but they held onto the tension between Islamic and Western aesthetics. Multiple energies, geographies and systems flow into Lubna Chowdhary’s work as she seeks new ways of finding her diasporic self and examines notions of belonging. Born in Tanzania to immigrant Pakistani parents who eventually settled in the industrial north of England, the forms in her works borrow from architecture, advertising, industry and devotional iconography.

Variously-shaped, industrially-manufactured, custom-made tiles are glazed and coloured one by one. Geometric patterns stretch out horizontally to be read as city skylines. The unique iconography of each tile, when stacked together, turns these symbols into languages: petroglyphs, circuit diagrams, town plans.

An ocean apart, and a contemporary of Shemza, Balraj Khanna was a self-taught artist who moved to England to study literature against the backdrop of the India-China war. Grounded in references from his childhood and everyday life, Khanna began creating abstractions from nature. Set free like leaves carried on the wind, or music itself, his forms traverse the canvas, as if forming a fugitive, reverberating landscape. Sometimes these forms concealed the references that inspired: as kites filling a sky, or plantlike and animalesque toy forms. Shemza and Khanna shared a deep affinity for the musical, notational quality of forms and language, whilst freeing the grid from its rigidity. Imperfect, hand-drawn lines and errors bring a deeply human quality to their abstraction.

Similarly, notation can be read in Ayesha Sultana’s practice where marks, breathing and gesture become rhythmical. Using graphite, densely and meticulously layered on paper, Sultana foregrounds gesture, material and distance. Form is space and vice versa. Sultana is interested in fissures, where the plane of memory-experience splits open, bringing to light what time and circumstance had rendered invisible or peripheral. At times these works emerge from visions distilled in the subconscious: familiar, yet hard to place. This fluidity is achieved through a range of actions – incisions, folds, layering, tracing, excavating – until she arrives at an experience – ultimately, a landscape.

Distilled from (and inspired by) the expression ‘Tropical Modernism’, fusing the states of “being tropical” and “becoming modern”, the exhibition draws on references from deep time – from an age when stars and line-drawings were the first civilizational languages, to the formation of new aesthetics and nationalist vocabularies in the second half of the 20th century. Examining the affinities throughout our regions, and here in Brazil where these works serve as an introduction to the context, this exhibition examines the transmission of signs and images as they entwine with ancient pasts and possible futures.