Contemporary Art South Asia
Take Pick
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.
Read More
Column
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.
Read More
Column
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.
Read More
Column
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’.
Read More
Column
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.
Read More
Column
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.
Read More
Column
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.
Read More
Column
By The Phantom Lady
The air is thick with identity controversies which seem to manifest themselves over statues and monuments. The Phantom Lady ponders.
Read More
Column
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.
Read More
