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Living Between Tides: Amphibian Aesthetics and the Question of How We Inhabit the Present

By Tanya Dutt

In an era when the climate crisis is no longer an abstract future but a daily condition of life, the question confronting contemporary art is not simply what it represents, but how it thinks. How does art hold contradiction, vulnerability, and survival at once? How does it remain porous to history while alert to planetary urgency? Amphibian Aesthetics, the inaugural exhibition at Ishara House in Kochi, enters this question not as metaphor alone, but as method.

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Kalighat Painting and Kalam Patua: Contemporary Chronicler

By Epsita Halder

Kalam Patua is considered to be a phenomenon to understand the response of a traditional folk visual artist (the patua or the maker of the pata) to the non-academic and popular art practices of urban Kolkata, the Kalighat patachitra. Hailing from the Murshidabad district of Bengal, Kalam Patua is said to have reinvented Kalighat painting to create his own visual narratives and stabilise his rhetoric, style and technique. Patua started as an apprentice in his family of idol-makers in Murshidabad, and learnt patachitra painting which was the hereditary practice of his extended family spread in the two districts of Murshidabad and Birbhum.

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The Phantom Lady Strikes Again: The Artist and the Archive

By The Phantom Lady

Artists are like scavengers who use various kinds of references in their work, thereby creating their own archive out of disparate materials.

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I Shot the Sheriff: Who is Afraid of Art Criticism Virgins or Wolves?

By Johny ML

Recently, while chatting up with a young student from one of the premier institutes in India, to my surprise she informed me that the professors there discourage the students from qualifying their course as ‘Art History and Criticism’. Instead, they call it ‘Arts and Aesthetics’.

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Culcutta Jottings

By Anirudh Chari

After the languid and not very stimulating monsoon months, the Calcutta art scene is abuzz once again. A few good solo exhibitions and an excellent ‘Gen Next IV’ have done much to provide the viewing public with some unexpected treats.

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Where have all the collectors gone?

By Jai Danani

What does is it mean to be a ‘collector’ today? It’s being used so liberally in the recent 4 years that its true sanctity has vanished.

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I Shot the Sheriff: Art in the Time of Blog-Era

By Johny ML

A little backgrounder: Almost thirty years back, when there were not even land phones in villages (forget internet and blogs), as a 10 year old boy, I became addicted to writing. The addiction came through a rejection; rejection from the editor of a children’s magazine.

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The Phantom Lady Strikes Again: Heroes

By The Phantom Lady

The air is thick with identity controversies which seem to manifest themselves over statues and monuments. The Phantom Lady ponders.

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Lowbrow Art: Intimations of a Pan Global Underground

By Baiju Parthan

Black is part of the renaissance of aesthetics as well as a thorn in the side of the western canon. It is a social space and a civil rights movement, a fashion statement and a designers dream. It is both fear and beauty rolled into one and it can be an attitude and a tradition.

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