A Body Surrendered.

Among the booths at NAP+, South Asian Contemporary (SAC) Art Amsterdam makes a double debut, appearing at its first fair and becoming the first gallery devoted to South Asian contemporary art to show at a Dutch fair. Behind it is Tasneem Hatimbhai, who founded the gallery in 2024. Born in Bombay, India and a longtime Amsterdam resident, Tasneem came to the art world through words rather than walls. She spent years writing and interviewing artists, gallerists and academics across India’s modern and contemporary scene. Her work kept returning to the intersection of art, architecture and cultural history.

Opening a gallery came as the natural next step. Her aim was a “platform to be a sustainable, consistent hub for all things creative in South Asian contemporary.” Belonging runs through her thinking. For Tasneem, it means standing apart while still feeling seen and valued. Shaped by constant shifts, both geographical and personal, she sees belonging as less about geography and more about purpose, and that purpose is what fuels the establishment of her gallery.

The gallery’s focus is not a narrow one. “The biggest theme is contemporary art,” she says. The gallery is niche in its specialisation but wide in its reach, spanning work from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Afghanistan, as well as the diaspora. “South Asia cannot be contained to one geographic region anymore,” she continues, “so best to explore the whole gamut of it.”

With a first fair and a first-of-its-kind position, the question was which artists could represent the gallery together. Tasneem and her team spent a year on the process, working through “different permutations and combinations” of artists and works before settling on three.

She studies the portfolio, where they have shown and where they hope to show. Formal education can matter, but sometimes it is not the most relevant. Mostly it comes down to the art and the practice: “We show artists who have been doing this and will do this for the rest of their life.” That is where the passion draws from. It is a vow as much as it is a selection process, a bond with those for whom creating is not a choice but a way of being.

The same attention is directed outward in her subjects. Her charcoal Moonrise is a diptych because the moon, for her, is two things at once: looking at it is “a very lonely affair, “and yet it leaves her with “a sense of fullness.” This bilateralism exists in much of her approach; with one panel holding the moon alone in the night, shedding light, and the other holding the radiance “that fills the internal me, the inner me.” The split form carries what she calls “looking at and being looked at.” The more that Aditi explains the parameters of her own relationship to her work and her craft, the more that we can also see development of this ritualism in how an artist, such as Aditi, conceives the world around her. The practice of always looking again at the things that surround you, yet simultaneously also being perceived and, in some ways, changed by the very world that one confines to their imagination.

For example, The Red Mountain (Arunachala), which depicts Arunachala in the south of India, the mountain where the sage Ramana Maharshi meditated and opened his ashram, which Singh glosses as “a space of belonging.” In Hindu mythology, she says, the mountain is Shiva himself. Her devotion to it is strikingly simple; every year she goes and walks around it, explaining that “there’s no kind of ritual besides just walking around the mountain.” What she is reaching for is not a possession of the sacred but a place within it: “The sacred is not limited to a place. The sacred is within us.” Going to Arunachala is, for her, a way of remembering, “I’m so small in the universe, and the universe is so much larger than who I am.”

Surrender, in Singh’s work, is therefore quiet and daily, and, importantly, done through willingness and acceptance. A hand following a colour or a body circling a mountain, one is surrendering to something greater.

Vihaan Surya Singh arrives at surrender from the opposite direction. He lives and works between Jaipur and Amsterdam, is halfway through his undergraduate degree at the Rietveld Academie, and paints and photographs. His painting, Ashvamedha, takes on the Ashvamedha, a ritual in which an emperor lets a horse run free across his land and beyond for about a year. Whenever the horse strays into someone else’s territory, that ruler must either yield or fight. The ritual, Vihaan explains, is only attempted by someone “confident enough in their own power that they knew no one would challenge them.” What caught him was how much of what people tell each other is built on the same logic. “So many of our stories, as humans, are about conquering and possessing.” And yet, he says, being in love reverses it. “Suddenly what you want to do is not to conquer, not to possess, but to surrender. And that can be, in a way, equally brave and equally radical.” Turning the ritual inward and exploring it from within: “Can this be a more spiritual sort of horse running through your own being? And whatever the horse covers inside of you, is that something you can then give to someone instead?” This question begs the limits to which you are willing to surrender parts of yourself in love, in a way, a reminder of all the things that are waged against us in love.

Thus, the figure at the centre of the painting holds both ideas. The horse runs inside the body, with the veins as “the track that the horse is running on,” and the raised leg echoes Vamana, the dwarf of myth who crosses “earth, hell and heaven” in three steps. It is a story of encompassing and possessing, and Vihaan’s question about it is a gentle one: how can these stories be turned inward, “giving instead of taking”? Here Vihaan adopts a similar methodology to Aditi and locates his work inside the human body.

His painting, The anatomy of a desire I don’t understand, positions the various twinges of love and surrender within the human body by completely restructuring its different components. A poised arm for pride, an animal head for ugliness and, at times, despair. Our very experience of the ways love can boost us but can also devour and demolish us is explored through a fictitious restructuring of the human body.

His other work, If you say I will stay, holds opposites in a different way. A dress sits above a mass of writing. The garment is an angarkha, an old Indian court garment he associates with people of refined taste, and it was made of fabric so delicate it “would tear quite easily,” so that the wearer “had to be very mindful when moving in it.” He set that over a shape that is “very jagged,” even violent in places. “I really wanted an image in which I could hold those two together.” Beneath the dress, he writes the same words over and over in charcoal: “I will come, I will stay.” Again and again until the text is a black mass, and here, his practice meets Singh’s. He is drawn to “this sort of tipping point where text stops becoming text, and it just becomes shape and form.” Near the end, “you don’t really even know what you’re writing anymore, but your text is just being absorbed into this form.” It is the moment when the maker’s control gives out, and the material carries on. The words themselves are the surrender. “The most that you can give someone is not to say that ‘I will do this for you, I will get that for you,’ but just that ‘I will stay.’” This, for him, is “the most beautiful and powerful thing you could give a person.”

The journey begins in the Persian and Mughal charbagh, the quadrilateral garden. In the Shade of a Distant Tree, four parts stand for the land itself, and a fifth acts as the connector that holds them together. Across antique maps, Samanta draws botanical forms, so that the careful borders of cartography become soil for something that grows. The garden is laid over the world as it was measured, and quietly overtakes it, nothing here is fixed. “There is always a temptation to tinker,” she says. “I don’t think the work is ever done.” The charbagh gives the work its order, and the tinkering keeps that order from ever hardening.

She surrenders the idea of fully completing an artwork, and the belief that a thing must stay as it was made. She gives herself over to the pull of objects other people let go of, and to the slow rewriting of one image by another. Even the garden, so often a plot of land with a boundary, becomes in her hands something tended and then released.

From the courtyards of the Mughals, the work crosses into the walled gardens of medieval Europe. The Hortus Conclusus was built for contemplation, a small paradise enclosed against a restless world. Two traditions that don’t quite share a geography arrive at the same longing, to hold the sacred within walls. Here the garden turns inward, and the landscape becomes a state of mind. Samanta describes the work as a mooring, a wandering through “the garden of my soul.” It is a vessel caught between drifting and anchoring, and it echoes what she names as a very human need: “We, as a people, are always looking for a place to land, a place for solitude, somewhere to feel at home.”

The final movement turns toward a broken form of nostalgia and becomes an elegy for the Partition of 1947, when the subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan, and millions were uprooted from the places they called home. In What the Land Remembers, Samanta places vintage portraits of noblemen, found in flea markets and antique shops, into her landscapes. These are objects no one wants or owns, handled with reverence and a care to represent them kindly. Partition arrives in this work not as history witnessed but as history inherited, felt through a transgenerational empathy, a vicarious grief passed down and still unresolved. Memory here, for Samanta, is not neutral. “We remember what we want to remember,” she points out. “We end up having a unique relationship with the memory.” Standing at a midpoint, neither inside the past nor outside it, she surrenders to that in-between. The remnants are still there, as in the work itself, where the original is altered but never erased, and a trace always remains.

“I am drawn to them precisely because they are forgotten objects,” she says, and in her hands the forgotten are given somewhere to rest.

All in all, the artists from SAC Art represent, within their work and within themselves, a cyclical habit of both surrendering to their work and having the work surrender to them. Aditi Singh discusses the importance of surrendering the body, willingly, to the space and time it is suspended in. Finding a balance in how control moves and shapes the work she makes, whilst also retaining a centre and a base, somewhere, within the body itself. For Aditi, art becomes an expression of the inner rituals and beliefs we hold with the world around us. Vihaan represents a more symbolic surrender, one that is not necessarily intentional or willing, yet remains all-encompassing. Vihaan focuses on love and all the despair that comes with it. Here, loss of control is not part of a process of “becoming” but rather a part of falling even deeper. For him, desire runs through us, like a horse, with its monotheistic repetition of dauda, dauda, dauda. He turns rituals such as the Ashvamedha on their head, and creates a new lens, a new pair of eyes for us to gawk at the inner workings of love through. Samanta Batra Mehta showcases a surrender to memory. Her work is historical and archival in nature, she traces a similar relationship to the land as Aditi, in which she searches for an active answer, piecing together remnants of archival images and botanical illustrations in order to puzzle out what something, such as the 1947 Partition, meant to the memory of the land itself.