In Ranjani Shettar’s installation “Seven Ponds and a Few Raindrops,” looping, delicate steel forms covered in tamarind-stained muslin sway ominously in midair, evocative of parched flora or exoskeletons. Reimagining local craft traditions to create abstract sculptures, the Indian artist’s work, which was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer, speaks elegiacally to environmental loss, to historic relationships with the earth and to future uncertainties. While visually distinct, the installation at the Met couldn’t help but be in conversation with another: “We Come in Peace,” Huma Bhabha’s much-photographed two-part sculpture of a figure shrouded in a black garbage bag prostrating before a godlike giant, which conjures a haunting narrative of war and brutality, and of our ongoing grappling with the other.

Shettar and Bhabha share a commitment to materiality, to sculptural innovation and to work that responds to the precariousness of our current day. They are also among a select group of women who are forging new narratives about contemporary South Asian art — and receiving unprecedented attention from major institutions in the United States. “Ten years ago, museums were not looking at us at all,” says Aparajita Jain, who directs Delhi’s renowned Nature Morte gallery and works with many increasingly prominent South Asian artists, including Benitha Perciyal, Reena Saini Kallat and Gauri Gill, whose dreamlike photographs exploring indigenous communities and social class were on display at MoMA PS1 this summer. “They’ve suddenly said, ‘Oh wow, there is a lot going on here.’”