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ESSAY

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Essay

Philanthropy: Every Idea is a Seed in Time

By Feroze Gujral

Hope, funding, a dignity of livelihood and mentorship are core values for me and The Gujral Foundation, where we support the growth of intent and the future of ideas. My happy quotient lies in the expansion of giving and watching these idea seeds grow into much larger projects and careers. For instance, ‘Artdemic’: It was a project that began during the pandemic with a very small open call to fund young artists. We started with two to three micro grants per week and three years in, we continue to fund artists every month and are now looking to establish Artdemic as a much larger platform that really nourishes young artists’ futures in a very competitive and fast-growing art world. 

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Essay

A Life in Art

By Mortimer Chatterjee

The inherent internationalism with which Godrej imbued Cymroza insured its cultural relevance and allowed for young artistic talent to gain attention. Over time, she built up an impressive roster of artists who would exhibit regularly at the gallery: artists such as Rekha Rodwittya, Madhvi Subramanian, KG Subramanyan, Jai Zharotia, Haku Shah, Arpana Caur, and Akbar Padamsee. As Godrej makes clear, “we also paid attention that all this work was documented through our annual catalogues that encouraged contributions from art critics as well as art historians, that were then distributed to a wide community of visitors, collectors and art admirers.” Beyond the visual arts, she was equally committed to design practices, foregrounding crafts techniques from around the country.

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Essay

What ‘South Asia’ signifies today

By Inakshi Sobti

So. what is South Asia today? With 22% of the world population spread over 7% of the world’s land mass, the region boasts a mix of contradictions, with an average per capita annual income of merely two thousand dollars, a fifth of neighbouring East Asia, and one-twentieth the level of high-income countries. Juxtaposed against the sluggish growth rates and, in some cases, de-growth in Europe and large parts of the West, South Asia is expected to grow faster at just under 6 percent.

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Essay

Art and Power: Networks of Patronage in Contemporary South Asia

By Rachna Shetty

From ancient Buddhist monuments to medieval royal temples and the syncretic visual world of the Mughal court, art in the Indian subcontinent reveals a deep history of patronage. As a system of exchange, patronage also reveals underlying expressions. The inscriptions of donors at Buddhist sites at Sanchi, Amaravati, Karle, Nashik and Kuda, among others, reveal a diverse array of faithful patrons—gardeners, fisherfolk, merchants, traders, monks and nuns—brought together by a shared religion. [1] On the other hand, the idealised portraiture of Chola royals in southern India—which incorporate religious symbolism—and Jehangir’s allegorical portraits, project real and desired imperial power. [2] It was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that patronage, as we know it today, began taking shape in the Indian subcontinent, even as artists moved towards ‘modern’ forms of art. These changes, too, were underpinned by political intentions, this time by the British.

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Essay

Arpita Akhanda: The Memory Collector

By Rituparna Roy

In the past decade and a half, significant art has been produced on the subject of Partition, its aftermath and afterlives – with focus on geographical sites of ancestry, the border, migration and displacement, refugee colonies and inherited memories. Arpita is the youngest of the artists who have made this theme their own, to varying degrees. But what really distinguishes her oeuvre is that it is entirely predicated upon ‘familial postmemory’.

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Essay

Remembering Vivan Sundaram: 1943-2023

By Emilia Terracciano

Saddened by his passing, Emilia Terracciano remembers Indian contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. He summoned up all his energies from his great reservoir of wisdom and experience. He was an unstoppable creator, who never gave up, no matter how dark the situation. He reminded me that optimism is something one must purposefully marshal, a form of discipline one ought to cultivate, against all internal and external threats of dejection and hopelessness. That optimism is another word for political action.

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Essay

The Lure of Collaboration: Dissecting Consensus

By Premjish Achari

In the hierarchical structures of the global contemporary art world, the lure of self organisation holds immense power over alienated art workers. Strategies of artistic collaboration to come together, be together, and work together are foregrounded in the name of collectivism as a remedy to create alliances against the exclusive nature of the art world. In this book, Premjish Achari unravels the problems of the deliberative processes of consensus building in collaboration, exposing the exclusive nature of these procedures of decision-making.

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Essay

Independent People

By Blessy Augustine

A truant pebble disturbs the otherwise clean, unwavering lines of the pavement in Tiananmen Square. One feels the urge to push it aside, restore the harmony of the composition. It’s impossible to do so as a viewer standing in front of an image. It also must not have been an easy task for those standing around while the image was made.

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Essay

Archive As Medium: Exploring the Performative Body

By Najrin Islam

Archive, by nature, is based on a series of selections and deletions, the motivation being to preserve material deemed most representative of the production in question. I look at these questions through the processual journeys of the artists, spaces and productions to see if or how the notion of the archive extends beyond its traditional role as static repositories of information.

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