CURATOR’S NOTE
It’s hard to believe how fast this year has passed, with a very serious second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic overtaking the country and with extended lockdowns pertaining over various places for a major part of the year. But despite the closures and restrictions on the movement of people, 2021 was not a bad year for art exhibitions across India. We have seen some of the finest art displays – from the moderns to the contemporary. For the October issue of Art in India’s monthly newsletter, we have Urvi Kothari, the founder of Inside the White Cube, taking us through the 5 most important art exhibitions of the year. This month, as we highlight the important exhibitions that blew us off in 2021, we also take the time to ponder upon one of the most crucial questions – where does art belong? Is it only in the confines of the white-cube space of the art galleries and museums we frequent and know and refer to as places of art and culture? Or can we think of art as something that is present around us, in our surroundings, and in the spaces we inhabit?
- Ankita Ghosh
5 TIMELESS EXHIBITIONS IN INDIA IN 2021
FROM THE MODERNS TO THE CONTEMPORARY
by Urvi Kothari
The year 2020 has been a year of growth- there has been reflection and resilience. Amidst the doom and gloom of the first wave of the pandemic, what continued to heal the soul was art that stood timelessly within our interior spaces. This constant inspiration churned into creative expressions that transpired this year with some of the most beautiful curation concepts and art exhibits.
So here are my top 5 recent art show picks in India that you might want to revisit virtually and warm up for the art season soon to kick in. Hope you enjoy this virtual gallery hop!
1. What My Mother Didn’t Teach Me | Solo Show by Viraj Khanna at Art Exposure, Kolkata:
Khanna embraces the idea of imperfection with a burst of color, limitless imagination, a dose of quirk and a hint sardonic humor. What started off as a mere magazine collage making exercise during lockdown 1.0 for Instagram feed, went on to define the foundations of Viraj’s visual aesthetics. Just like Marcel Duchamp, Khanna’s almost caricature like- characters question the stereotypical definition of beauty. Those non-binary gendered reversed torsos, plumped cherry-red lips coupled with distorted abstract figures represent the ‘deconstruction and assemblage of singular identities’. His brilliantly sculpted pieces form a strong commentary on various stereo-typical facets of our society and prevalent human conditions. The artist is now set to open the Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2022 with Tao Art Gallery.
2. You Are All Caught Up | Solo Show by Sameer Kulavoor at TARQ, Mumbai:
Kulavoor’s exhibition explores the notion of time, space and identity in this digital era. Apart from these pandemic effects, a common thread that continues to weave across global lifestyle trends is the increasing internet consumerism. Kulavoor’s paintings beautifully highlight this rather conscious or non-conscious act of consuming digital content or being consumed digitally. Aptly titled “You Are All Caught Up” (an Instagram feature to avoid users from addictively scrolling through one’s feed), these paintings deeply look at ideas, both personal and political through the lens of an omnipresent cell phone. Kulavoor attempts to reimagine how our surrounding landscapes constantly modify at every ‘ping’ of a mere notification. Ironically, the same is also relevant in the current arts landscape with radical innovations and adaptions such as NFTs!
Selected works from this series were also seen at Lokame Tharavadu curated by Bose Krishnamachari at Alappuzha, Kerala.
3. Dance of the Elements | Solo Show by S H Raza at Akar Prakar, New Delhi:
A gush of royal blues, soothing ochres, glowing reds and majestic blacks with powerful gradients and a strong structure!
This was the world of a legend, S H Raza! His calming works beautifully adorned the walls of Akar Prakar Gallery, as they commemorated with the artist’s centenary celebrations. The five elements, also called Pancha-Tatva, define the late phases of Razaji’s works. Quoting a text by a poet and a cultural theorist, Ranjit Hoskote:
“In an incandescent exchange of attributes, they also appear as one another. Fire ripples like a river…….earth seems buoyant as air”
His vibrant brush strokes are frozen in time- like soundless poems emblematic of love for mankind and reverence for nature in all its infinite forms. Razaji’s timeless Bindu (meaning origin) series continue to allure me to his universe of geometric forms, lines and colors. It is indeed a graceful ‘dance of elements’!
4. Call Me By Your Name | Group Show conceptualized by Udit Bhambri at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi:
I truly believe that art is as much of the viewer as that of its creator. What a more beautiful way than this, when a viewer (now an avid collector) conceptualizes a show from his perspective. Similar to perfect pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Bhambri’s Call Me By Your Name showcases an exquisite display, of some of the leading contemporaries of present times, that weave common narratives of relationships, identity, space and time.
The show featured Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Arpita Singh, Shilpa Gupta, Sunil Gupta, Gieve Patel, N.S. Harsha and Sudhir Patwardhan. Divergent in terms of technique and tonality, they not only share personal relations with Bhambri but also reflect on love and its multiple connotations. The show leaves back an after thought on striking a fine balance between self-indulgence and self-sacrifice, which also becomes a basis of a healthy lifestyle in unprecedented times like these.
5. Code Switch | Solo Show by Lubna Chowdhary at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai:
The London based artist opened her solo show at the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, 2021. Chowdhary’s works display a sense of hybridity. I absolutely love the way, she captures motifs from spiritual and traditional Hindu and Islamic contexts and finally reassembles them into a contemporary diaspora comprising iconographies and logos. Her vibrant art is almost like a code, switching between languages, cultures, aesthetics and identities. This code is left for the viewers to decode!
Chowdhary’s art displays a fine balance between various binaries: ornamental excess and minimal restraint, pure geometry and dynamic abstraction, symmetry and irregularity. Juxtaposed with the unfinished wall aesthetics of Jhaveri Contemporary, Chowdhary’s vibrant works explore scale and scope across diverse mediums from gouache to ceramic tiles.
These 5 must (re)view exhibitions also sum up some investment worthy artists in India. Their appreciation is inevitable and their style has led them to global recognition. You may have missed viewing them physically, but here is your chance to explore their sheer brilliance virtually.
Urvi Kothari is the founder of Inside the White Cube - a digital collection of art reviews, critiques and general commentary pertaining to the art world. She is an aspiring curator, who opines on the South Asian Art market and currently the Gallery Manager at Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai.
ART IN THE EVERY DAY: TRACING THE SOCIOLOGICAL NATURE OF ART
by Ankita Ghosh
Writing this from Kolkata during that time of the year when the city is magically transformed for the biggest festival a Bengali knows, I found myself thinking about the places we associate with art. A gallery space, with its framed displays and bright lights obviously comes to mind. But what about art that originates around us, envelops us on an everyday basis and comes up in the unlikeliest of places? In Kolkata, Durga Puja happens to be not just the most-awaited religious festival for the people in the city, but it is also a time when the streets come to life with visual tableaus abounding in every nook and cranny. With pujas being held in each neighborhood, big or small, there is no limit to the artistic expressions on display for an art lover roaming the city during the pujas.
One finds the traditional shabeki puja pandals, which have been made in the same style for decades, with little changes in the material or the patterns used to deck up the idols. Pearlish-white shola is artistically carved to decorate the clay idols of Durga and her four children – Ganesha, Laxmi, Saraswati and Kartik. While this style has its own subtle charm and will always continue to captivate us with the artistic genius in recreating the same style for generations, in recent years, one also sees a rise in the number of theme pujas that have emerged to be not just art for art’s sake, but rather an arena for a commentary on the most relevant and contemporary issues plaguing us at the moment.
Themes tackled by different puja committees have ranged from current issues such as the demonetization which was highlighted in at least two pandals in 2017 to deeper insights into the past history of Bengal and Bengali art and culture. Last year, one of the best theme pujas highlighted the plight of the migrant workers as they faced the humongous task of going back home when the country shut down for more than 3 months in between March to June. Other themes in 2020 included paying tribute to the workers who have been at the frontline in our fight against the pandemic. The present year has seen puja themes being centered around the NRC-CAA and the farmers protests, with particular reference to the Lakhimpur Kheri incident as well.
What comes to notice at each of these pandals is the sheer artistic zeal with which each and every element is constructed before the pujas. The artists working on them do not treat these as temporary installations that will be brought down by the end of the festival, but their work reflects the sense of dedication in bringing a tableau to life. It is the unknown, and largely unnamed artists who are in charge, from the idol-makers who find themselves expressing their talents through clay, to the artisans working on the installations and the technicians who contribute to light and sound elements to ensure a well-rounded sensory experience at each of the puja pandals. To think that these artists continue to come up with something new, something unique, year after year, makes it an even richer experience.
Durga Puja emerges as an occasion when the city of Kolkata becomes the venue for a public exhibition with people lining up outside pandals, willing to wait in lines just to take a tour around the place. One is free to take in the diverse themes, and become engulfed in the sensory experience of the entire space, one pandal at a time. Tours are planned around neighborhoods, pictures clicked, and when it is time to bid adieu to the goddess, it is also time for the installations to be brought down, piece by piece, till there is no trace of the work remaining anymore. It is only the experience of having visited the pandals that linger on after the festivities have taken place and the clay used to sculpt the idols is returned back to the riverbed.
Likewise, one thinks about the art that comes up on the walls around our cities, murals done with precision that add beauty to the cityscape, but often painted over or made a punishable offence. It begs the question – where do we place such works that are also important and worthy of being celebrated as the artworks that we so dedicatedly preserve inside the four walls of a gallery or a museum? How do we ensure this sort of art in the every day goes places and is celebrated as much as the art shows we visit? Despite falling under the category of tangible culture, we have no know-how or perhaps the will as a society to ensure due importance is given to art that surrounds us.
A recent audience research project conducted by the Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore and ReReeti Foundation concludes that 62.3% of the people surveyed mentioned that they feel more connected to the idea of culture around them – religious and cultural festivals, everyday art and rituals, activities and social occasions, traditions and lifestyle choices. Probably a lot of this stems from the fact that we have come to associate museums and art galleries to be spaces for the high arts and culture and a vast majority of the people feel intimidated by these institutions. Maybe it is the lack of accessibility by means of displays in regional languages and lack of guided tours by professionals who are well-versed and can guide people through the different displays at these places.
The public space, on the other hand, offers one the freedom to explore the works of art at one’s own pace and terms, and one could even simply walk past, without the specific need to draw particular meaning from the displays, or see it as something that requires serious introspection. Perhaps there is a need for us to encourage the public nature of displaying art when it comes to engaging with the people for whom art has been created? To encourage better engagement with the arts and culture, it might be useful to consider accessibility as key for better participation of audiences for whom the institutions were constructed in the first place.
Ankita Ghosh is a student of Media & Cultural Studies at TISS Mumbai and the curator of Art in India’s monthly newsletter.
EXHIBITION ALERT
Gardens as Thought Form: Lexicons for Revolution at Experimenter, Hindustan Road, Kolkata.
Featuring works by Aziz Hazara, Bani Abidi and Prabhakar Pachpute, this exhibition dwells on the question of the multiple forms in which gardens exist. Is it possible to imagine a garden of revolution? Probing the questions that such a garden may present, the exhibition asks whether a lexicon of thought form can be constructed around this. This exhibition is available to view at Experimenter’s Hindustan Road gallery, and via the viewing room on https://experimenter.in/viewing-room/
Battles and Dalliances at Akar Prakar
Part of Asia Week New York’s Autumn 2021 exhibition, this exhibition of woodcut prints of the 19th century in Calcutta was commissioned in the 1970sby artist and art historian, Ashit Paul, and engraved by a team of artisans led by artisan Gopal Dutta. Used to convey narratives from mythology, these prints were referred to as Battala publications. The exhibition is available for viewing virtually on Akar Prakar’s website www.akarprakar.com
You migrate, we migrate, you displace, we displace at Jhaveri Contemporary
Artists Hardeep Pandhal and Jagdeep Raina, with a shared interest in historical repetition, present works that take us to the issue of reinvention – “whether of cultural tradition, identity, or historical memory” through this exhibition now live at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. This exhibition is open for viewing till the 30th of October 2021.
Students’ Biennale 2021 – States of Disarray: Practice as Restitution
The fourth edition of The Students’ Biennale, led by five artists and art educators and featuring works by 314 student artists across India, is currently available for viewing on https://studentsbiennale.online/ and will be live till the 31st of December 2021.
To make it an interactive platform for discovering the arts and cultural exhibitions taking place across India, we are opening up this space for suggestions about the art and cultural events going on in your city. Let us know the cultural events you think are worth seeing at the current moment, with a picture and we will feature it in our monthly Exhibition Alert section on the newsletter!
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That's all for this month! If there are any suggestions, feel free to contact us at artinindiaco@gmail.com.