International Reviews Archives

Art of the Kingdom: Poetic Illumination – To Reclaim and Resurge Cultural History

Without losing sight on a fine balance between a tactile approach of tangible art and an aesthetic of moving images in video arts, Wechsler remaps the routes of cultural history and identity in its tangible form. In other words, through immersive installations, multimedia storytelling and archival interventions, the exhibition challenges viewers to reimagine cultural history not as a static relic, but a site of perpetual reinterpretation. In weaving together the threads of identity and belonging, within the curatorial lens of memory Art of the Kingdom: Poetic Illumination emerges as a reflective site of cultural reclamation and epistemic resurgence.

Imprinting Nature: Simryn Gill’s Naga Doodles

By Henry Noltie

In the display case next to the skin is a nature-printed image made in Madras in 1857 by Henry Smith. Unlike Gill’s snakes, Smith’s specimen was artfully laid out in an elegant sinuosity, its two surfaces inked to yield a mirror-image pair when passed through a printing press. There is a history behind the contemporary work. Smith was a government printer, who claimed originality to his method of nature-printing (a process that has always been somewhat experimental), but one that was taken up by Hugh Cleghorn who in South India made many simple black prints of plant and tree parts as part of the earliest phase of the conversion of tropical forests into plantations: in his case for coffee and cinchona.

The Milk of Dreams: 59th Venice Biennale

By Alka Pande

As a long-time viewer of the Venice Biennale, I was particularly struck by the challenges of the post-human condition which Alemani engaged with. Ecology, technology, mental health, and the human body became key concerns for Alemani.

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