ART FEST: THE INDIA ART FAIR 2022 PART II
In keeping with the tradition that the capital is known for, some of the best shows are collateral to the IAF 2022, ongoing into the summer months.
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Sayed Haider Raza Traversing Space: Here and Beyond, Centennial Exhibition
What was S H Raza’s painting like before he discovered the bindu? If you’ve ever wondered that as an art lover, here’s an exhibition providing viewers with the ‘cartography of a wandering soul.’ Get a glance at the villages and cities that have been recurring subject matters in the paintings of the early Raza before the artist started his famous ‘metaphysical abstractions.’ These works mainly from the KNMA collection clearly exhibit the young artist’s journey from an academically trained painter with realistic inclinations to one of the founding figures of Modernism in India. Initiating the historic Progressive Artists’ Group along with the artists like MF Husain and FN Souza, Raza started his career in the cosmopolitan city of Bombay and finally settled in the village of Gorbio in Southern France decades later. He returned to India after the passing away of his wife, taking up residence in New Delhi and it was living in the streets of the leafy capital that he painted his last large canvases with minimal assistance, which he later revealed.
However, let us go back to the past, where we discover the young Raza, raised as the son of a forest ranger, with exposure to all the elements of nature. Even then he had a deep knowledge of Western Indian miniature traditions, and he started working on nature’s five primordial principles and elements (panchabhutas and panchatatvas) since the late 1970s, which surfaced in paintings like the celebrated La Terre and Saurashtra that is part of the KNMA permanent collection. This crucial period also coincided with Raza’s increasing interest in metaphysical abstraction, the esoteric notions of feminine and masculine energies, and the symbolism of square, triangle, circle, and most importantly, the bindu (point) which alone became a dominant and consistent feature in the artist’s body of later works.
“Each journey that S H Raza made was important, one leading to the other. The life in the village, the urban structures of the cities, the travel to different continents. He went from the village Mandla in M. P., India to the city of Bombay, then to a life in Paris where Modern Masters gravitated in the 20th century, and from there to California in the USA, back to Paris, then Gorbio a village in France and finally back to India, Delhi in 2002. His life circled different geographies, and his art traversed gradually to embrace those spaces unbounded and beyond,” says curator Roobina Karode, who recalls hearing his name among the magnificent generation of painters, the Progressives, who migrated to the big city of Bombay at the time.
India Habitat Centre
Techné Disruptors
As the pixels settle down from their NFT fame and excitement artists like Raghava K.K. whose NFT, La Petite Mort, a part of ‘The Orgasm Project’, went at $94,500 (INR 73,52,591) at Sotheby’s Auction, Harshit Agarwal, who had a sell-out solo exhibition at Emami Art in Kolkata and Shilo Shiv Suleman (Her sculptural artwork temple, was recently auctioned for $56,700 at Sotheby’s, New York) are dealing with technology as one of the primes that has affected every aspect of the post-covid art world for ‘a digital disruption’. They are joined by other disruptors Rochelle Nembhard (Rharha) & Gemma Shepherd, Minne Atairu, Babak Haghi, Dr. Mandakini Devi, Nandita Kumar, Satadru Sovan, Seema Kohli, Adil B. Khan, while Suleman has worked with The Fearless Collective, on a series of politically stirring posters that are also animated-NFTs.
We are told that evidence of this disruption abounds in their exhibition Techné Disruptors, a unique epistemic art and tech show in India that intends to ‘reshape sedentary categories of art’ and to “radically shift the way art is viewed, understood, experienced and sold,” to quote the Cultural Curator and Producer Myna Mukherjee who has curated the show. It has been conceived, by Engendered, and supported by the American Centre and the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre. The show premiered from April 30 to May 6 at the India Habitat Centre, in conjunction with India Art Fair 2022. The artworks are still viewable online.
The subjects handled by the artists range from protest art that speaks of gender, race and caste inequalities, or fantasy, sexuality and the desire of a cyborg; the human and machine coming together in a transhumanist ideology touched upon in Raghava’s work. We come to an Augmented Reality work by Harshit Agarwal that speaks of the excessive use of advertising and how it is replacing our natural environment and of course we are stilled by the works of Rharha the Drone Goddess who is on a mission to live her truth, using her gifts to ‘obliterate boundaries and silence stereotypes’.
From elemental light boxes to a complex prototype Non-Fungible Token (NFT) launch powered by a global nexus of innovators and futurists in coalition for a regenerative project across the world; Techné Disruptors features works imagined with the most future-forward technologies of our times, including Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, holographs, and a brand-new minted collection of Global South NFTs.
Studio Art
Chance, Chaos and Catharsis
The exhibition that unveiled just before the art fair, continues on till June 10th. Chance, Chaos and Catharsis looks at three elements that form an important part of our existence. Each element in its ‘hidden’ or ‘apparent’ form, traces the unique synchronicity between them. Artists, philosophers and scientists are constantly unveiling this ‘trigonal relationship.’
The exhibition curated by Jesal Thacker, attempts to unpack and presents the works of artists Aaditi Joshi, Atul Bhalla, Kaushik Mukhopadhyay, M Pravat, Mark Prime, Navin Thomas, Pooja Iranna and Shivani Aggarwal. It represents artists that intermingle these complex nuances with the ease of the mundane using sounds, objects, narrations and abstractions that directly reflect the banal repetitiveness. “Redefining the identity of the ‘everyday’ the artists construct, weave, reuse, carve and assemble a language and form that has layers of visual cognizance, memory and experience,” says Thacker.
Hence the found objects laid out by Atul Bhalla on the floor of the gallery mingle with those that are handmade or crafted by him, leading us to an interesting conversation regarding the process and integration of the two. Aggarwal’s everyday objects painted and sculpted in wood, take one on a tour of her own personal language and preoccupations. While Mark Prime’s interest with futuristic mechanical objects like LED lights, wires and electronic circuits bounce nicely off Kaushik Mukhopadhyay’s humorous pursuit with some of the obsolete and dated mechanics of the past. Pooja Iranna’s miniature evocation of the city’s high rises via the ironically tiny staple-pins converse with M Pravat’s landmasses and tiles and bricks that collapse one into the other while Navin Thomas hold very private discussions with wood and sound, that ricochets off Aditi Joshi’s empty photo-frames, wrapped with Polypropylene.
Art Centrix Space
Our Line in The Sand
The exhibition titled Our Line in The Sand, presented by curator-director of Art Centrix Space, Monica Jain, has been inspired by Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory which states that materiality – the world of things, artefacts, and material signs; affects the way humans have evolved cognitively. The exhibition raises questions about the relationship between an artists’ cognition and their material culture. Both philosophically and artistically. Exhibiting artists include Tehmeena Firdos, Ruchika Singh Wason, Pinaki Ranjan Mohanty, Kundan Mondal, Manish Sharma, Tapas Biswas, Soham Raha, Nityanand Ojha, Siri Devi Khandavilli and Vinod Daroz.
“My curatorial hypothesis would be that mark-making constitutes a salient point of intersection between matter and memory; one in which the plasticity of the mind becomes entangled with the plasticity (or stability) of material culture,” says Jain.
The exhibition examines material culture, and human experiences and thought processes to fully understand further creative, expressive processes and how both of them are intertwined. The forming of marks as material signs brings about cognition as part of an expressive creative process. In that sense, the challenge would be to imagine and produce knowledge around mark-making activities and how such processes can also be described and understood as ‘epistemic actions’ or calculated thought.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Credits: KNMA, IHC, Studio Art, Art Centrix Space, and IAF
FInd more about IAF 2022, Galleries, Artists and their Art works:
https://www.knma.in/traversing-space-here-and-beyond-centennial-exhibition/
https://indiaartfair.in/programme/techne-disruptors
https://artcentrix.com/show/our-line-in-the-sand-625a54ae6fd36
