Epigraphica Indica; Pushpamala N
Review
By Rajarshi Sengupta
In many ways, Sengupta’s project is situated between “a river of unrest” and “a delta of dreams.” It is the silent space that occupies the void between evidences, oral narratives, sensory experiences, memory and creative reconstructions. Calcutta and its colonial history have been addressed in her art projects the last two decades offering an unique perspective to assess and apprecitate the city’s entanglement of past and the present. In this recent project, Matiaburj (in which mati indicates clay/mud, and burj implies tower) in south west of Calcutta by the river remains a key site where authoritarian and local histories juxtapose, where fiction-like facts makes way for Sengupta’s ambitious creative reimaginations. With a mindful selection of historically informed materials, that include inherited and constructed textiles, jute fibre, paper pulp and graphic prints, archival history is brought in a dialogue with sensorial experiences.
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Review
By Zahra Jewanjee
‘Can You Hear Me?’ is a triggered, and triggering, response to a shocking incident of recent history. It drives Nalini Malani’s narrative into an animation where the central protagonist is an 8-year-old girl, whose soul eventually metamorphoses into that of a bird. The show is composed of a sprawling nine- channel video installation, featuring over 88 iPad- drawn animations created between 2018 and 2020, reorganized into a form of an ‘Animation Chamber’. It refers to this poor child’s violent assault and eventual murder by seven men, inflaming already stretched age-old religious tensions and sparking a debate on communal hatred that became a national and international news story, that unfortunately continues to gain notoriety due to shockingly similar and regular reoccurrences. The imagery is loose, and the text is interlaced and juxtaposed, its treatment is playful yet compelling, hiding its dissolute and bleak reality in light-hearted colour changes and buoyant edits.
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Review
By Indrapramit Roy
“We are meant to survive… beyond our stories " was a selected overview which showcased the Godrej collection of Rekha Rodwittiya’ work of four decades. After completing her Bachelor studies from Baroda she was the first recipient in the field of fine arts of the prestigious Inlaks scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, London. Upon her return to India Rekha claimed a space for her unequivocally feminist ideology and established herself as an important and powerful voice that questioned the status quo of the art establishment and carved a niche for herself in less than a decade from the start of her career in 1985. “We are meant to survive…” covered the whole gamut of her oeuvre from her student days in Baroda and RCA to her latest offerings from the 2020s. One might be tempted to call the show a mini retrospective although not designated as such officially.
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Review
By Avantika Bhuyan
The recent body of work, which was displayed in the solo ‘A Bend in the River’, stands as a testament to Pratul Dash’s ongoing effort to draw connections between ecology and the human mind. Pratul Dash’s works read like manuscripts. Every part of the canvas tells you its own story, only to come together in one cohesive narrative when viewed as a whole. You keep coming back to the works, even the smaller ones, to discover something new that the artist is trying to tell you. What is the truth?
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Review
By Epsita Halder
Navigating through the gallery space of the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), Kolkata, was overwhelming for visitors as around 100 odd artworks of Gobardhan Ash (1907-1996) emerged slowly as visceral experiences around them. The Gobardhan Ash Retrospective Exhibition (1929-1969), archived and documented by Princeps, curated by Brijeswari Kumari Gohil and Harsharan Baksh and housed by the KCC, displayed Ash’s artworks that came out of the most creative four decades of the artist’s life. The artworks were supported by a well-organised timeline (across an entire wall) to help the viewer understand Ash’s growth as an art practitioner as he journeyed across forms, locales and institutions.
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Review
By Archana Hebbar Colquhoun
The boat in the painting, Kaarwaan, is not merely a vessel in which people are transported to a destination but it is a self-contained watercraft that also accommodates a large land mass of breathtaking landscapes with buildings, as if luring the people crowded together at the back of the boat to choose the boat itself as their final destination, in a way trapping their souls on the earthly plane of history – history written, and created by humans – although there are the angels and farishtas hovering just above the surface of the water and around the boat ready and waiting to take the souls on their onward journey to liberation.
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Review
By Saloni
In a world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), when we negotiate with our identities on an everyday basis
creating digital beings and landscapes coded by inputs from uncountable sources, it is pertinent to
ponder upon our history and tradition as tools of archive making and representation of
contemporary life. The artists Hitesh Vaidya, Jagdish Moktan, Nabina Sunuwar, Pooja Duwal and
Tashi Lama of Aakrit Collective mentored by Sujan Chitrakar seem to employ the very tools in the
exhibition The Importance of Loss: Migration, Memory and Continuity to navigate through the
cultural and socio-political landscape of Nepal marked by displacement that informs the everyday
lives of the contemporary citizens. Curated by Georgina Maddox, the exhibition is presented by
Unnati Cultural Village, Nepal, that endeavours to preserve and promote its cultural heritage
through multidisciplinarity in the arts.
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Review
By Premjish Achari
The press release and curatorial essay for Seema Kohli's latest exhibition follows a predictable path, connecting the dots between her work and conventional themes. However, such a narrow interpretation only skims the surface of her boundless conceptual potential, hindering the opportunity for profound exploration. In her solo show, Kohli delves into the cosmic energy of femininity and the mystical world of medieval bhakti saints, while also inviting introspection through her intricate blend of images, materials, textures, and labor. These elements not only raise pertinent questions about the creation of value in a commodified society, but also shed light on the persisting caste hierarchies within artisanal practices. Her exhibition also illuminates the complex dynamics that emerge when craft practices intersect with contemporary art.
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Review
By Manan Shah
Humans and objects share a very close and intimate relationship. Humans identify objects and establish a correlation which further is associated with time, while being recognised by human memory. Objects become a source to initiate pre-established relations of humans with time. Once identified, they add evidential value to time and space. The notion of time and space becomes an important part of the curatorial intervention in the exhibition Things are Vanishing Before Us by Gallery Dotwalk. It is through this that the viewer constructs and establishes the correlation between past and the present, and what posterity holds. The centrifugal force of the art work opens the room for a visitor to revisit the relationship with the past in the present, and how it serves as an opportune moment to shape the future. This, in the exhibition is achieved with the viewer’s familiarity with objects.
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Review
By Sibdas Sengupta
The river flowing through me…’ is an autobiographical landscape that is, at once, psychological, environmental, metaphysical and historical.
- KP Pradeep Kumar
The exhibition features Pradeep’s most recent body of works, which talks about artistic subjectivity as the internal self, and the constitution of the self in relation to the exterior ‘others’, to challenge the separations of eco-diversity of our times.
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