LONDON.- In Buddhism and Hinduism, Indra’s net floats over the globe, protectively, revealing interconnectedness of life. It’s an image that seemed ideal for curator Sandhini Poddar, who was invited to create a special section at Frieze London (Wednesday through Sunday) for lesser-known galleries from around the world.

The image of an earthly net is about inclusion, Poddar said, but also could be seen as the fragility of connectedness in a world divided by environmental issues and the reality of wars past and present.

“If you think about this idea of the earth as a witness over a long arch of time, you can talk about history, ancestry, language and the whole matrix of ideas,” Poddar said in a phone interview. “Everything is caught in this cause-and-effect relationship.”

“Indra’s Net,” which will feature 18 artists from galleries from Asia to Latin America, is a chance for smaller galleries to get a bit of the spotlight at a major art fair. Poddar, a London-based curator of Asian art for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is also helping to curate the Asian and African galleries at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which after many years of delay is scheduled to open in 2025.

Finding artwork from around the world has led her to many tucked-away galleries and artists.

“All of that research feeds into what I’ve been invited to do at Frieze,” she explained. “I was asked to do an international program and to invite galleries that were not already part of the Frieze family.”

Most of these galleries and artists are making their Frieze London debuts.

“Sandhini wants to support cultural workers in countries where we have such little support, and she can see the impact we’ve made here in Vietnam after almost 20 years,” said Quynh Pham, director of Galerie Quynh Contemporary Art in Ho Chi Minh City.

Two sculptures by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, an artist the gallery has worked closely with, are heading to Frieze. “We have international projects that we feel resonate with her, and I want to encourage people to learn more about this part of the world,” Pham continued.

Two sculptures by Nguyen, a Vietnamese and American artist, explore the legacy of the Vietnam War by molding the casings of unexploded artillery shells that litter central Vietnam into tiny hands that dot a wooden Buddha. One is “Broken Into a Thousand Arms.”

“The piece is about reincarnation, and it’s also about repair and recuperation,” Nguyen said. “In Buddhist statues, the arms and hands are the parts that break off the easiest, and certain positions of the hands and fingers, the mudra, promote healing and compassion.”

Compassion is a theme for the Frieze offering from Silverlens Gallery in Manila, the Philippine capital.




Visual artist Martha Atienza is very much in the spotlight these days. Not only is the gallery representing her at Frieze London but also as an opening exhibition at its new gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. And it’s all part of a series she prepared for the Istanbul Biennial, which runs through Nov. 20.

Atienza, who lives on Bantayan Island in the Philippines, has documented the plight of the families that make their living from fishing.

“The people who Martha is documenting have been fishing for hundreds of years,” said Isa Lorenzo, founder and co-director of Silverlens Gallery. “Their lives and livelihood are being erased by mass tourism and land developers. These works are a rallying cry for everyone who works with the sea.”

Atienza’s installation for Frieze London is “The Protectors,” a 75-minute silent black-and-white film that simply shows a fisherman at work on his boat.

“It’s very immersive and feels dreamy,” Lorenzo said. “It’s on a continuous loop so you don’t know where it starts or ends. He’s like a mythological hero.”

That heroic status can certainly be applied to the Sri Lankan artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara, who will be represented by Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, Sri Lanka (both are making their Frieze London debuts).

As the economic crisis that erupted in the country this summer continues, Thenuwara’s work feels even more urgent, said Saskia Fernando, the owner of the gallery.

“His work is completely dedicated to his life as an activist, and he has been at the forefront of this for several decades,” Fernando said.

The Sri Lankan civil war from 1983 to 2009 defines much of Thenuwara’s work, and Frieze London will be no exception. Four small brass-cast sculptures and about 25 drawings, all focusing on corruption, militarization and nationalism, are an extension of his installation titled “Covert,” which he is showing at the Venice Biennale this year.

“Coincidentally, the installation in Venice combined early bodies of his work spanning three decades,” Fernando said, “and it debuted at the time that the Sri Lanka protests erupted earlier this year.”

For Nguyen, timing is also part of his art. His two pieces for Frieze are partly a homage to Alexander Calder, with mobiles that dangle among Buddha’s hands and fingers.

Calder adamantly opposed the Vietnam War and died in 1976, a year after the war ended. Nguyen’s use of artillery shell casings to create hands and fingers — and the Calderesque mobiles — may be a way of shaping the arc of time, and perhaps even a bit of what Sandhini is after with her idea of the all-encompassing Indra’s net.

“To take something that was meant to destroy and turn it into something that is meant to heal made sense to me,” Nguyen said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.