AT ONLINE VIEWING ROOMS
In so many ways, even outside of the pandemic, we’ve been adapting to a technologically resultant ‘contactless’ world yet in essence, what we’re culturally trying to build as networks and respond to as ideology is a vital necessity to stay in touch as a prerequisite for belonging to a community and even ourselves. Art Basel OVR (Online Viewing Room) Portals; features three solo shows of Asian artists represented by Indian Galleries.
Among the plethora of curated online viewing rooms, Vadehra Art Gallery among others is participation in the upcoming Art Basel OVR: Portals. Their presentation features Faiza Butt, a Pakistani-born, London-based artist who’s solo show After All This Is Won, is a body of work that explores embrace as cultural tokens imbued with as much nostalgia as hope.
“We are delighted to be presenting a body of work by London-based artist Faiza Bhatt centered around the idea of ‘touch’, one of our most intuitive expressions which was already under threat in this technologically driven world, and suddenly became a taboo with Covid-19. Faiza’s works research the fragility of the human condition, our search for love, warmth and embrace in our relationships and our surroundings, in these precarious times,” says Roshini Vadehra.
It is a powerful body of ceramics, ink drawings and works on polyester film developed by Butt over the last five years. She has responded to and in some cases ‘predicted’ the sudden decline of touch as an errant or unwanted gesture of contact outside the social fabric, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Butt, the necessities of an essential human experience may be transferable to a digital realm where they are even experienced intensely, but the simulations cannot supplant our primal sense of fragility that motivates us to search for stable love, warmth and embrace in our relationships and surroundings.The gallery will be hosting a special webinar, featuring the artist herself about putting together a body of work that encapsulates cultural history in the making.
Chemould Prescott Road will be presenting a solo show Desmond Lazaro, titled The Cosmos Project. It looks at the artist’s ongoing journey of an OVR existence.
“Far away in the southern hemisphere, in Melbourne, Australia, Lazaro worked away in isolation (as artists almost always do), delving deep into his own journey that took him into the far-reaching skies of ‘The Cosmos Project‘,” writes Shireen Gandhy with her team.
“Entering Desmond’s virtual studio was a study not only richly layered, where you learnt about astronomers, stars, planetary movements and the galaxy, but also an immersive dive into his use of colour – always pigment based, handmade, and hand-ground by the artist,” she says.
The works return to Lazaro‘s early beginnings as a miniature artist. His practice involved the making of hand-ground pigments from the earth. The Cosmos project is a return to such origins as he makes a relationship between representation and symbolism. Referencing early medieval manuscripts illustrating Ptolemy’s geo (earth) centric views of the heavens, he found each concentric circle represented a visible planet.
Experimenter presents Samson Young’s solo exhibition Relational Drawings, a body of works on paper proposed for Art Basel OVR: Portals. They are relational drawings that present a play of negotiation and interpersonal interactions that Young has shared with people over the past year: a community-building conversation that split into forking paths; an ensemble of old and new friends who speculated on decentralized collaboration; an art adjudication meeting that convened over the internet – these interpersonal events are recounted through notations, mark-making, written word and stamped symbols.
Multi-disciplinary artist Samson Young (born 1979, Hong Kong) works in sound, performance, video, and installation. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale. The artist has shown across the globe, including a solo at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work primarily looks at the relationship between violence and sound. It is a recurrent line of investigation in Youngs’ work, which is often based on extensive research. His performances often re-create the atmosphere of wars, bombings and military exchange through the medium of sound, as he witnesses it dressed in a faux military or police uniform.
Watch the Art Basel Space for this coming week as they will also bring with it a special look into the artist studio, VIP walkthroughs and a conversation with Justine Ludwig (executive director of Creative Time), Faiza Butt and Desmond Lazaro. In the International section watch artist Gisela McDaniel and curator Larry Ossei-Mensah in conversation
On view till 19th June, 2021
Text by Georgina Maddox
Images Courtesy: featured galleries and artists
https://www.gallerychemould.com/
https://www.instagram.com/faizaaugust7/
