MEMORIES OF HOME: ART NIGHT
THURSDAY
PART I

MEMORIES OF HOME: ART NIGHT THURSDAY PART I

The opening of Art Night Thursday on 8 July 2021, marks the attempt to raise the shutters on Mumbai’s galleries that had to shut down during the terrible second-wave of COVID 19. With a ray of hope, we present the first part of our selection of four galleries and what one can look forward to, physically as well as online.  

HONEY PEAK A SOLO SHOW BY SANTIAGO GIRALDA, GALERIE ISA, 8 JULY- 30 SEP

Santiago Giralda lives in La Cabrera, Spain, a place that he has chosen to isolate himself in during the wake of the pandemic which has laid siege to our understanding of time. The artist has left his home in New York and moved to Spain to situate himself within a culture endemic to his idea of ‘home’.  The memory of the past and the immediacy of the present constitute Giralda’s understanding of his surroundings that he ‘manipulates’ to create landscapes that are “territories of consensus.”
“Landscapes are places that allow us to confront memories. They are the keepers of a vast paroxysm of half-forgotten remembrances, hidden in the shadows of the spaces of our imagination. As keepers of memory, landscapes are also the guardians of time – moving slowly to their own rhythms, like musical notes set to an abstract tempo,” writes Imran Ali Khan of Giralda’s works.

Viewers are then led to contemplate that perhaps landscapes are the intersection of time and memory in a vast expanse of space. Landscapes and culture are not easily separated; where one comes alive in the presence of the other.

“But what would happen if one was absent from either of these? How would we recall that loss or negotiate the void?” Khan throws out this question on behalf of the artist who is really asking us to ‘renegotiate’ our understanding of space and therefore of memory in time.

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, JHAVERI CONTEMPORARY, JULY 31st

The exhibition features a group of London-based artists: Prem Sahib, Jake Grewal, and Sunil Gupta. They ‘illuminate’ the queer form that ‘takes place’ within a range of aesthetic practices.

Together these three artists engender an inter-generational dialogue invested in queer intimacies. Without forcing a genealogy either, they deploy various media – photography, painting, and sculptural form demonstrating the agility and expansiveness of queerness at multiple convergences.

Prem Sahib’s  sculptural form animates ‘slippery attachments’ to industrial materials such as ceramic tiles, obsidian glass, puffer jackets, and kitchen rolls. Glazed and fired, a digital print remains underneath the surface “like a stain” in the artist’s words and is intentionally faint thus hard to reach; maybe even unattainable.

Part of an ongoing series, Your Disco Needs You XXXXI1 (2017) resembles a reflection, specifically that of a park seen when facing a white tiled wall. The park has often been seen as a popular cruising spot, but Sahib makes it all the more inaccessible since the image is just a reflection of the park seen in the white tiles.
For a viewer, at first glace,  this art work may seem obfuscated in its reference to queer life. The artist here is referencing a song by Kylie Minogue that talks of creating a space for queers.

Jake Grewal’s enchanted forests also evoke a kind of beyond. However, his idyllic pastoral scenes are not simply picturesque (itself a colonial construct aimed at taming the wild) but instead disclose an open vulnerability difficult to contain. Working from observation, plein- air style, Grewal pays attention to markings and edges as they are before incorporating them into broader contexts. For Grewal, nature is play. And he captures that in all the works that are also laced with an underlying sense of sadness and tragedy.

Sunil Gupta has been uplifting queer brown intimacy in his photography for over 45 years. A recent retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery attests that he is a lensman who crystallized his beliefs and confronts his oppressions. During the Black Arts Movement in London in the 1980s, he participated and led many subcultures. Works form his early series Toward an Indian Gay Image (1980-1983) marks the absence of gay Indian representation at the time (not to be confused with gay Indian desire of course), however the series is anticipatory in tone. It looks forward even as it looks back at sites of significant cultural history while imbuing this heritage with queer subjectivity. These poetic juxtapositions signal a queer occupation, announcing the “ways we have always been here, the ways we have always been queer.”

THE GREEN ROOM, CHATTERJEE & LAL, 8 JULY- 14 AUG 2021

The Chatterjee & Lal gallery is excited about the opening of Naveen Kishore’s solo exhibition of photography, The Green Room. Comprising two series – Performing the Goddess and The Green Room of the Goddess – the photographs were made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is the first time that they are being shown together.

Kishore’s eye is informed by his deep engagement with theatre photography, a genre he has been practicing since beginning to work in theatre production in the early 1970s. He has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. His interest in street photography comprises the second main thread of his oeuvre.

Kishore established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies.

Performing the Goddess has an illustrious international exhibition history and is also included in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Washington.