The trajectory of the visual arts in India is characterized by multiple transitions; it embraces and internalizes the broader discourses of colonialism, nationalism and international modernism. It relates to visual traditions in the light of postmodernism and seeks to legitimize its position in the contemporary arena of art production. Multiple narratives unfold simultaneously, like tactile elements that refuse to lose their reality, presence, speed, heat or humidity, like incongruous testimonies of a focal point in an installation that aims to present a multiplicity of possibilities. Evoking nostalgia more than history, these voices rise sometimes in unison and sometimes in mutual tension, on opposite sides of time, like a mirror, turning our gaze on a familiar but radical pastiche of liberation, ecology, urbanization, migration, feminism, gender, subjectivity and sensation.

In the spaces of the Accademia Albertina, Sama: Symbols and gestures in contemporary art practices is broadcast. Italy and India vol. 1., the first part of a visionary and pioneering documentary which, through a multitude of voices, explores the world of contemporary art and craftsmanship in the Indian subcontinent and in Italy. In this first "episode", a group of contemporary Italian artists, including Stefano Arienti, Alessandro Sciarroni, Sissi, Marzia Migliora among others, alternate with as many Indian artists, such as Sheba Chhachhi, Taniya Goel, Rekha Rodwittiya and Ayesha Singh, offering the public an insight into the aesthetics of the two regions that highlights the relationship between tradition and modernity, the pedagogies of the East and the West, genre, archeology and politics of the time; the themes of migration, exile, time and memory; religiosity and syncretism and regional specificities in the era of globality.

Sama: Symbols and gestures in contemporary art practices. Italy and India is a project by Myna Mukherjee and Davide Quadrio, directed in India by Onir and written by Alessandra Galletta.