mnj

Weaving Old and
New Tales

Weaving Old and New Tales

The online digital exhibitions platform, IN Touch presents a reflexive space to contemplate range of artists and narratives.

Oct 3, 2020

The new segment of In Touch-4, gently makes its presence felt amid the pandemic where people are locked away from the world as they know it, isolated and placed in solitary but seemingly safe environments. The galleries selection this time around seems to be with an emphasis on words that evoke introspection and self-reflection, encouraging the viewership to look beyond the obvious physical reflection of the self, rather towards examining the inner core that is often hidden from one’s own view.

In Delhi it is Gallery Espace presents us with Overwrought Fancies a collection of digital prints by Chitra Ganesh and B. Manjunath Kamath, two artists who are at very different ends of the spectrum of found imagery, popular culture and the collective subconscious as they reflect their concerns by reclaimed and re-engineered imagery.

“Why certain stories easily proliferated and accrued power, while others remained absent, or even actively suppressed?” asks Chitra Ganesh, a diaspora artist based in New York, but with an Indian-Tamilian childhood and background that fed off classical music and dance and of course heavy doses of Bollywood. Having acquired a formal training in painting, Ganesh found her voice and presence as an Indian-Diaspora artist when she honed in on popular culture, and her practice began to reflect and re-invent Indian and Western cultural tropes through the Amar Chitra Katha imagery that was prevalent among her peers. It presents an accessible pop-narrative of Indian mythology that was at the time easily available to Indian immigrants as a source of nostalgia and popular culture. Ganesh leaned into the narrative but found herself making changes to the stories and weaving in her own digitally manipulated imagery.

Kamath takes a more global stand, looking Westward rather and slipping sly references to the East with his own crop of influences growing up in art college where the importance of the Renaissance and studio practice is often underlined and drilled into students. He approaches it as a full-blown artist, with his tongue firmly in cheek, as he juxtaposes imagery from art history and popular culture. A winged angel from Renaissance paintings kneels down to slightly comic, anthropomorphic characters—a man with a horse head clad in shirt and trouser, as a giraffe snacks off a table. In another work A Raja Ravi Varma lady leans in and listens in to a man in hybrid dress seated at the piano while a baby elephant frolics in a plastic bathtub in the same drawing room. These improbable elements are integrated into a ‘natural’, seemingly ‘ordinary setting’, as if to emphasize the unreality of the ‘real’ or the reality inherent in the unreal. Viewed in conjunction, they coalesce into a narrative whose contours are slippery and ever open to imagination.

At Gallery Chemould in Mumbai the focus is on artist Lavanya Mani, who is known for her work on cloth that harnesses traditional Indian craft and textile techniques of kalamkari, embroidery, tie and dye, appliqué and batik to name a few. In this particular series Mani examines the board game as a metaphor for life situations, the idea of Karma and the ultimate union with God. ‘Snakes and ladders originated in India as ‘Gyan chaupar’ or ‘Game of knowledge’. The board was designed on the theory of Karma where the snakes of Karma or the lower passions needed to be surmounted to attain liberation or union with God. There was also a strong association with dice play and divination, where the roll of the dice could determine or foretell one’s future. These works touch upon many aspects of our life today that have suddenly become pressing issues such as, migration or scientific enquiry, that were perhaps not part of collective imagination before.

Experimenter in Kolkata is known for pushing the envelope with multidisciplinary work and Radhika Khimji quotes multiple polarities where her work is at once a painting, a drawing and a collage; it is also an embroidery and a sculpture. Her solo exhibition, Traces of Deconstruction presents her layered practice in exploring categorisation, playing with terms and the naming of things to generate a new narrative for an object. Khimji uses deconstruction and manages to expose a ‘trace’ that acts as a rupture within her own practice leading to a kaleidoscopic shift in the reading of the image. The materiality of her process rubs against the non-material and the implied. Deconstruction, layering and distortion are used as tools to juxtapose the existing polarities in Khimji’s work as best they can.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai brings us minimalist works by Haleh Redjaian whose practice simultaneously engages and troubles the grid, using pen, graphite, paint, and gold leaf on paper, in thread on hand woven carpet, and spatial installations. Her series Notes for Daydreaming (2017-2020) plays with line and shape, translucency and opacity, flatness and depth, order and disorder, pattern and noise.

Vadehra Art presents a solo by Atul Dodiya, whose work is a powerful presentation of his consistently evolving meditation on the solitary figure in a landscape. It is sometimes barren like the Biblical deserts and sometimes lush like in the Indian miniature paintings inhabited by protagonists in gestures of intensity and exaggeration. The dynamism recalls a plurality of art-historic contexts – the Indian Modernist painters and the Italian pre-Renaissance masters.

Photo Ink presents a selection of arresting and intimate black and white images featuring Mahatma Gandhi from the Estate of Kanu Gandhi, while gallery SKE showcase works under the title In Solidarity, highlighting community, empathy and solidarity that have been on our mind at this time. As a small gesture in this direction we share our space and present Marfa Projects Beirut with artist Vartan Avakian, artist Faiza Hassan and the Nepal Picture Library with Juju Bhai Dhakhwa.

Nature Morte has chosen the work of four artists who have developed languages that relate to and cull from the methodologies of scientific investigation. Visakh Menon uses colored inks and a porous rice paper to exploit the characteristics of these materials. Nidhi Agarwal uses both organic and geometric shapes, miming an anthropological approach to the collection of data. Ramakrishna Behera brings us into his experience of moving through architecture while Saravanan Parsuraman’s works could be the mappings of sub-atomic particles or fractal phenomena.

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke are engaged in highlighting Buddhadev Mukherjee’s works on canvas and paper that present explorations of interiority and reflexivity through the varied mediums of oil and watercolour. Chatterjee & Lal present Rustom Siodia’s vintage landscapes. He was a key artist in the development of the art scene in Western India at the outset of the 20th Century. While Shrine Empire present a group exhibition of works by Anoli Perera, Baaraan Ijlal, Gautam Kansara, Karan Shrestha, Khushbu Patel, Neerja Kothari, Omer Wasim, Puja Puri, Samanta Batra Mehta, Sangita Maity, Suchitra Gahlot, Tayeba Begum Lipi and Zoya Siddiqui. The exhibition explores the process of healing and significance in our troubled times of dilemma where malady has become part of our daily lives.

Log on to https://www.artintouch.in/ to view the exhibition

 

Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Stay in touch collective

 

Find out more about the artists and gallery:

https://www.instagram.com/manjunath.kamath60/?hl=en

https://www.chitraganesh.com/

https://ravivarma.org/

https://www.saffronart.com/artists/lavanya-mani

https://www.radhikakhimji.com/

https://www.radhikakhimji.com/

http://www.halehredjaian.com/

https://www.vadehraart.com/atul-dodiya-bio

https://www.vartanavakian.com/

https://www.instagram.com/faaizahasan/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/faaizahasan/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/tapeglitch/?hl=en

https://nidhiagarwalartist.wordpress.com/author/mixmediaresidency/

http://naturemorte.com/artists/ramakrishnabehera/

https://www.instagram.com/sara.parasu/

https://www.instagram.com/buddh.mukherjee/

http://chatterjeeandlal.com/artists/rustom-siodia/

http://www.anoliperera.com/

 

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/karan-shrestha/

https://gautamkansara.wordpress.com/

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/khushbu-patel-2/

https://www.neerjakothari.com/

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/omer-wasim/

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/puja-puri/

https://samantabatramehta.com/home.html

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/sangita-maity/

http://www.gahlot.com/

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/tayeba-begum-lipi/

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/zoya-siddiqui/

https://www.galleryespace.com/

https://www.gallerychemould.com/

https://experimenter.in/

https://www.vadehraart.com/

http://www.photoink.net/

http://galleryske.com/

https://naturemorte.com/

https://www.galeriems.com/

https://chatterjeeandlal.com/

https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/

https://www.ivde.net/

Share link