NOW STREAMING, a new group exhibition by Rajiv Menon Contemporary, opens February 13, 2024. There’s a common trope of the Non-Resident Indian returning to the motherland and departing with a suitcase stuffed past its weight limit with reminders of home: snacks, clothes, and, in a pre-streaming era, DVDS. Expats and immigrants were binge watching well before the term rose to prominence, gorging months of content at a time, ravenous for the entertainment that flowed like water in India. Today, thanks to streaming video, Indian film and TV can be accessed anywhere, instantly and effortlessly. However, when it comes to contemporary art, distances still feel vast. It remains difficult to regularly see the exciting young artists exhibiting in the subcontinent outside its borders. While South Asia is home to a vibrant arts ecosystem, the west often still views this world as a mostly regional phenomenon, much to their own detriment. NOW STREAMING brings several of the most culture-shifting young artists from India and wider South Asia into conversation with diasporic artists from around the world. This pairing reveals the distinct ways that new voices from the subcontinent are fundamentally engaged in dialogues beyond borders. All of these artists build an aesthetic of transnationalism that draws on deep historical precedents; realms like the Indian Ocean trade zone and the silk road entailed that the regional and the global were always inextricably linked. I’m particularly interested in how the artists express this through motifs of many types of streams: digital media, popular entertainment, oceans, migration routes, and more. I want to reject the notion that these artists’ regional affiliation is at odds with their global sensibility. In contrast, I believe it is precisely their regional placement that allows them to articulate globality in ways that are often inaccessible in an American context. NOW STREAMING announces the arrival of an exciting new cohort of emerging painters from South Asia, and puts these dynamic, vibrant voices on the map in Los Angeles.