TAKE on Art Magazine | Contemporary South Asian Art & Culture Publication

Review

Echoes of Ephemera: Party is Elsewhere

If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as English poet John Keats would have us believe, then what is to be made of a show that highlights decrepitude? Is its job to remind us of the ephemeral nature of life and everything in it? That the value of the grotesque and the repulsive is in its mere existence, as it allows pretty perfection to stand out further? Or, alternatively, does the unpleasantness itself hold value as a much-needed contrast to whitewashed ideals? These are some of the questions that come to mind upon browsing through ‘Party is Elsewhere’, a multi-artist showcase which took place in February this year as an India Art Fair Parallel offering.

Review

Sharp Objects: The Last Rust by Archana Hande

By Neerja Deodhar

Review

On Unequal Burdens: Waste and Toxicity in Navjot Altaf’s New Works

By Zeenat Nagree

The collective title of the paintings, Waste Archive as Landscape, suggests they are meant to be archives. If so, they are archives that are out of reach, whose contents cannot be discerned. Perhaps this effect is a reference to the impact of the limitless cycles of production of products that humans cannot entirely grasp or catalogue. On the contrary, those who live on the edges of landfills, both humans and nonhuman living beings, suffer the consequences viscerally.

Essay

Art Muscle

By Michiel Baas

The wrestlers in traditional miniature paintings are presented differently from the bodies that dominate contemporary fitness culture. Their physiques matter, but they are rarely the central subject. Attention is directed instead toward movement, technique, ritual and the communities gathered around these practices. What emerges is a vision of strength that is fundamentally relational rather than individual. The muscular body was certainly present, but it had not yet become the primary object of attention that it would later become in the worlds of bodybuilding, fitness culture and social media.

Essay

Personal Mythologies

By Lina Vincent

Miniature painting, which may have experienced a low period a decade or two ago, is riding on a good wave now. As Vinita Sharma shares, a lot of artists from the younger generations are investing time and energy in learning these old and trusted techniques, often reframing them to fit within personal contemporary explorations. Vinita Sharma, Mainaz Bano and Gargi Chandola may have never met, but their works connect and share common space, bringing varied perspectives, thoughts and ideas to this dialogue. Womanhood is never singular or fixed, nor is the expression of it. Every sketch, every composition holds multiple stories, mythologies and lived experiences. The individual voice carries the resonance of multiples.

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