Jagdeep Raina: Bonds

June 26, 2021 – October 24, 2021
Blaffer Art Museum

120 Fine Arts Building
University of Houston
Houston, TX

Image of Jagdeep Raina: Bonds
Image courtesy of the event organizer.

Image courtesy of the event organizer.

Jagdeep Raina illustrates and reimagines scenes and stories from across the Kashmiri and Punjabi diasporas. Through drawings, writings, paintings, weavings, and animated films, Raina examines histories of transnational migration and mobility and their effects on contemporary life. Often drawing upon oral history and archival research as source material for his practice, the artist works to complicate and upend monolithic perceptions of these richly varied diasporic communities.

This exhibition marks Raina’s first solo museum presentation in the United States, featuring a selection of artworks made over the last six years. The objects highlight the artist’s distinctive figurative language across media, including lushly rendered works on paper that carefully depict various characters and sites of gathering like neighborhood storefronts, theaters, or domestic spaces. Also included are Raina’s recent tapestries and stop-motion animated films, which explore themes of displacement and imperial power, as well as the complex economic, environmental, and material histories of farming labor and rural life in the Punjab and Kashmir regions.