The Sahmat Collective

Founded in 1989, the influential Delhi-based artists’ organization Sahmat has offered a platform for artists, writers, poets, musicians, and actors to create and present works that promote artistic freedom and secular, egalitarian values. A companion to an exhibit of the same name at the Smart Museum of Art, The Sahmat Collective explores the contemporary art scene in Delhi while meditating on the power of art as a tool for social change.

The Sahmat Collective documents the history of the organization through a series of case studies, each presenting new scholarship, vivid images, reprints of original articles, essays, and interviews with the artists and organizers of each project. Situating the collective within not only the political sphere in India, but also contemporary art trends from around the world, this beautifully illustrated volume offers both critical essays on the art produced by Sahmat and texts on the political, social, and artistic climate in India by Smart Museum staff members, philosophers, musicians, members of Sahmat, art historians, anthropologists, and artists.

Jessica Moss is curator of contemporary art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.



Ram Rahman is a photographer and independent curator based in New York and New Delhi. As a founding member of Sahmat, he has helped to curate and organize exhibitions, public performances, and symposia across India and North America. He is a cocurator of The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989.