Alnoor Mitha was born in Ngora, Protectorate of Uganda, British Empire (now Uganda) in 1961 and was exiled to Manchester, England in 1972 under Idi Amin's dictatorship. After studying at the Polytechnic Wolverhampton School of Art, Mitha pioneered Asian arts and culture initiatives in Manchester and the north west.
Academic, artist and curator, Alnoor Mitha was born to Mitha Mohammed and Khadija Dada in Ngora, Protectorate of Uganda, British Empire (now Uganda) in 1961. His early childhood memories of Africa are of joy and adventure, particularly playing with his friends, picking mangoes and climbing huge rocks (BURU correspondence). However, his family were among the 50,000 Asians expelled from Uganda in 1972 under the dictatorship of Idi Amin and he arrived in England aged nine. Mitha attended Plant Hill High Secondary School, Manchester, and later studied at the Polytechnic Wolverhampton School of Art from 1980–83, where he was awarded an Exchange Scholarship to the École des Beaux-Arts in Angers, France from 1981–82, followed by a Commonwealth Fellowship to the Faculty of Arts at Maharaja Sayajiraoa University in Baroda (now Vadodara), India from 1984–86.
Mitha held several solo and group shows in the 1980s and 1990s in which he exhibited paintings inspired by the culture of Kutch, his ancestral home in India (VADS, 1990). He had a solo exhibition at Horizon Gallery in 1989 and participated in Juginder Lamba’s South Asian Contemporary Visual Arts Festival alongside Parminder Kaur and Roma Tearne in an exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture displayed at Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery in 1993. Another significant show from this time includes Symbiosis: Alnoor Mitha and Bashir Makhool (1999), held at Huddersfield Art Gallery, where Mitha had been curator while acting as multicultural arts officer for Kirklees Council. In this role, he was responsible for showcasing Asian art at the Gallery, including the ground-breaking show Tampered Surface (1995), in which six Pakistani artists exhibited sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography and mixed media (Hammond, 1995).
In 2002, Mitha conceived and delivered ArtSouthAsia, an innovative curatorial programme reflecting the visual cultures of South Asia in collaboration with key museums and galleries in the north-west of England. The same year, he became artistic director of Shisha, an international agency for contemporary South Asian crafts and visual arts, a role he held for nine years. The idea for Shisha was initiated by Mitha while curator at Gallery Oldham in 1998 when he approached the North West Arts Board (later incorporated into Arts Council England) which led to his secondment there. Established during the period of the New Labour government, his remit was to apply the new multicultural policy for the arts in a way that would ‘satisfy claims for a grassroots level of support among Asian British ‘stakeholders’ in the arts’ (Kennedy, Mitha and Wainwright, 2014). In 2008, Mitha founded the Asia Triennial Manchester (ATM) with John Hyatt, director of research and postgraduate studies in art and design at the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). Realised through an extensive consultation process with Manchester’s key museum and gallery curators, along with contemporary artists from Asia and the Asian diaspora, ATM promoted exhibitions with themes that were indexed to the city’s significant Asian community. The inaugural Triennial in 2008 was underpinned by the theme of Protest, and later years included Time and Generation (2011), Conflict and Compassion (2014) and Who Do You Think You Are? (2018). Past ATM projects include Rashid Rana: Everything is Happening at Once (2011), Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood (2014), Jai Chuhan’s Remodel: Painting Studio and Amina Ansari and Anjum Malik: Hidden Heroes (2018). At the same time as frequently stirring ‘enthusiasm about the role of contemporary art in urban space’, ATM ‘reflected upon the motivations for ‘localising’ the art of Asia in Manchester’ (Kennedy et al., 2014; Mitha, Kenyon-Leigh, Khan and Rangasamy, 2009; Mitha, 2016). Between 2009 and 2015, Mitha was also appointed Director of Cubitt Artists, an artist-run cooperative based in Islington, London.
Mitha continues to curate exhibitions such as EART – A Manifesto of Possibilities held at various public sites for the Manchester International Festival (2021) and Where is Home at the Whitworth, Manchester (2022–23). He is Senior Research Fellow (Asian Cultures) at MMU's Manchester School of Art (MSA), where his research intersects critical exchanges between Manchester, Asia and its international global Diaspora (MSA Profile). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), holds an Honorary Fellowship from Winchester School of Art at Southampton University, and has been a Visiting Professor at Teesside University and trustee for the Manchester Craft and Design Centre. He is also a steering committee member for the new Centre for the Race & Racism Studies at MMU and has been appointed to the prestigious Peer Review College, UKRI AHRC. Alnoor Mitha lives and works in Manchester. His works are held in UK public collections including Bradford Museums and Galleries, Touchstones Rochdale, Bury Art Museum and the Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Alnoor Mitha]
Publications related to [Alnoor Mitha] in the Ben Uri Library