EXPRESSION AND MODERNITY: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SELF AND HISTORY
Three striking shows from various artists that offer an introspective dialogue between the self and culture, history, mythology, and identity: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in collaboration with Natasha Ginwala, at Experimenter, Mumbai, Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri’s The Dream of an Idiot at Emami Art, Kolkata, and Diana Al Hadid & Louise Despont featured at Galerie ISA, Mumbai.
A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance is a project by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in collaboration with Natasha Ginwala, at Experimenter, Colaba.
Jul 27 – Aug 26, 2023
Seeing Tibetan men with guns in their hands amid the Himalayan mountains is truly an anomaly to what most of us are used to witnessing of Tibet, an occupied nation that has led a peaceful Buddhist resistance to Chinese occupation of their country.
Indeed, very little is known of the guerrilla war that was fought from the mid-1950s to 1974, when thousands of Tibetans took up arms against the invading forces of China, a movement that became entangled in global geopolitics.
After the Communist Chinese invasion of 1950 and its subsequent takeover in 1959,
Tibet has been a country under occupation. In Tibet and among Tibetans living in exile, there has been a resistance against China that has been unyielding and resilient, transforming over time in response to the changing situation in China and the shifting winds of geopolitical alignments.
In the early 1990s, filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam started to research this untold story, for a documentary film. They were inspired by Tenzing’s father, the late Lhamo Tsering, one of the leaders of the resistance, and the key liaison between the Tibetans and the CIA, unfortunately the resistance collapsed in 1974 when its last stronghold in the mountainous kingdom of Mustang on the Nepal-Tibet border was shut down by the Nepalese army.
As an archivist and mapmaker, Lhamo Tsering recognised from the beginning the importance of maintaining a record of the resistance in order to guard against its erasure from historic memory. The exhibition is an attempt to unshackle and shed light on what anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan calls, “…arrested histories of the Tibetan resistance army.”
The exhibition is truly a historic and documentarian jewel and worth seeing and analysing from many points of view.
Different Realms – Diana Al Hadid & Louise Despont at Galerie ISA, Mumbai
13th July – 02nd September, 2023
Bringing together the varied strokes of different artists who share a common bond, Galerie Isa, turns their gallery into a platform for an interesting dialogue between the two artists, Diana Al Hadid & Louise Despont. Although the work of the two artists is distinctly different, they share in common a fascination for the associative possibilities that architecture provides. They explore space as a ‘metaphysical portal into a rich, cultural fabric, mythology or of ancient lore.’
“While Al-Hadid looks keenly to architecture for her work, what she produces is intuitive, reactive to the immediacy of the moment and almost shamanic in the idea of it developing according to its own logic; Louise Despont (b. 1983 New York) talks of how the history and energy of the materials she uses to construct her collages guide her work,” remarked the Curator, Jane Neal. Both artists are sensitive to the evocative and mysterious nature of the papers they discover, and to their innate histories and the energy that leads to their creation.
While Al-Hadid’s work brims with its own particular energy and these changes according to the various materials and methods she selects as most appropriate to each new creation. Despont’s creations are created from antique papers which she collected from sources she found in Mallorca – where she now lives and works. She is inspired by a hand-painted children’s theatre from the 19th century, lithographs of facades, and doorways from the 1920’s, drawing exercises from a convent school from 1940. Brining all these together she expresses a contemporary expression.
The Dream of an Idiot: Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri at Emami Art, Kolkata
July 14 – September 30, 2023.
A multi-expressionist, Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri embodies the early polymath who excelled at everything they laid hands upon: a weaver, painter, printmaker and designer, Karchaudhuri was born in 1944 and studied at the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta, from where he graduated in 1966 in Applied Arts. Karchaudhuri, was attracted to a non-figurative fluid approach.
He carried this sensibility with him when he joined as a regular faculty at NID’s Department of Textile Design, in the 1980s, teaching there for almost a year before he moved to California, where he took up printmaking under Geoffrey Bowman at San Jose University. Karchaudhuri was exposed to a variety of diverse learning experiences, which further enabled him to understand the essential roles of form and colour, crafts and material in creating artwork without extraneous content.
Karchaudhuri’s body of wall hangings is characterised by diligent craftsmanship, simplicity of form, and an organic approach. These evocative tapestries made of hemp, cotton, wool and other natural fibres form a significant part of his variegated oeuvre.
In an essay for Karchaudhuri’s solo exhibition, KG Subramanyan wrote, “Shiva Prasad’s tapestries are delightfully ambivalent. At one look, they are abstract fields where broken lines, zig-zags and patches of colour waltz around; at another, they evoke a landscape or scene with various atmospheric nuances, though he is abstemious, even austere, in his use of colour and other devices…”
Although the title of the exhibition is taken from an eponymous work by Karchaudhuri, one admittedly has to agree that he was anything but a fool and his dream of expressing himself in different mediums over time and through different phases of his life, was unique and more than just a fool’s fantasy.
Text By Georgina Maddox
Images: Experimenter, Emami Art and Galerie Isa.
Learn more about the exhibitions and the Artists:
Different Realms | Current Exhibition | Galerie Isa
The Dream of an Idiot | 14 July – 30 September 2023 – Overview | Emami Art
Shadow Circus: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957 – 1974)
