EAST LANSING, MI.- The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University presents a new exhibition series showcasing some of the most dynamic emerging and mid-career artists working today. Under the umbrella of the Global Focus series, the Broad MSU will present three to four solo exhibitions annually, bringing artistic voices from around the world to East Lansing to explore global intersections of artistic practice. Artists presented in the Global Focus series will either be presenting their work for the first time at an American museum or creating new / site- responsive commissions for their exhibitions.

The Global Focus series exemplifies the Broad MSU’s mission of exploring global contemporary culture and ideas through art. Artists featured in the 2014 series include Mithu Sen (April 25 – August 31), Imran Qureshi (May 9 – August 17), filmmaker John Akomfrah (October 24 – March 29), and Nilbar Gures (December). Specific dates and information about the Akomfrah and Gures exhibitions will be announced in the coming months.

“Global Focus brings together brave artists from around the globe, all with disparate views of our world and culture,” said Michael Rush, Founding Director of Broad MSU. “It is fitting to bring these artists to a university setting—particularly one with a globally focused mission like Michigan State University—and to our community where they will spark discussion and debate, as they share their practice here at the Broad.”

Mithu Sen: Border Unseen, April 25 – August 31, 2014
The Broad MSU presents the first museum solo exhibition in the U.S. of Indian artist Mithu Sen, born in West Bengal, India, in 1971. Sen rose to prominence in the last decade for her drawings, sculptures, and installations in which sensual and grotesque representations of the human body, animals, and inanimate objects seethe with undercurrents of irony and wit. A prominent voice in contemporary art, Sen upends common approaches to gender and sexuality by exploring the broad connotations of physical attributes like hair, the backbone, and teeth. Sen’s solo exhibition, Black Candy, which explored homoerotic masculinity, was awarded the Škoda Prize for Contemporary Indian Art.

For her exhibition at the Broad MSU Sen uses false teeth and dental polymer to create a monumental hanging sculpture rising from floor to ceiling over a span of 70 feet, drawing an organic and irregular line through Zaha Hadid’s geometric building. The provocative and referential work plays on the histories of materiality and minimalism in contemporary art.

Imran Qureshi: The God of Small Things, May 9 – August 17, 2014
Born in Hyderabad, Pakistan, in 1972, Imran Qureshi is considered one of the leading figures in developing a contemporary aesthetic that integrates the motifs and rigorous techniques of traditional miniature painting—which flourished in the Mughal courts of the Indian subcontinent at the end of the 16th century—with contemporary themes. In 2011 he rose to the international artistic fore with a major installation at the Sharjeh Biennial in which he translated this historical mode of making into a large, architecturally scaled and site specific installation.

For his project at the Broad MSU Qureshi extends his practice into indoor installation— his first in an American art museum. Forms and images appropriated from earlier work have been printed on thousands of sheets of crumpled paper which together form a site-specific mountain, filling the space of a 30-foot-high gallery. As viewers walk around the immense structure, they discover that this mountain has been sliced along the sharp architectural angle of the gallery’s wall, creating an intimate tunnel-like space. This theme of splitting between grand and intimate scale flows throughout the exhibition, as Qureshi pairs a commissioned miniature painting with the massive installation. The exhibition also includes a series of red and gold paintings presented in tandem with never-before-seen video work that will give viewers insight into the slow and careful process of meditative making that the artist employs.