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Posts tagged with Raqs Media Collective

Talk on Sharjah Biennale in Mumbai on March 22nd, 2013

March 17, 2013

Manjari Sihare shares details of a forthcoming public lecture on the Sharjah Biennale in Mumbai organized by the Asia Society

Mumbai: The Sharjah Biennale 11 is currently on until May 13, 2013. The Biennale organized by the Sharjah Foundation is an internationally-acclaimed exposition of contemporary art that takes place every two years in Sharjah, U.A.E., where the works of art spread across the city. Curated by Yuko Hasegawa, this Biennial reassesses and challenges the Westerncentrism of knowledge in modern times and reconsiders the relationship between the Arab world, Asia, and the Far East, through North Africa and Latin America.  The exhibition features work by more than 100 artists, architects, filmmakers, musicians and performers, including Indian participants Amar Kanwar, Raqs Media Collective, Studio Mumbai, and CAMP; and foreign artists Francis Alÿs, Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliasson, Yang Fudong, Ernesto Neto, Elizabeth Peyton, Anri Sala, and Wael Shawky.

For those who cannot make it to the Biennale, this public lecture (details below) is a goodopportunity to learn about this international exposition.

Sharjah Biennial 11
Re:emerge –Towards a New Cultural Cartography

Speakers:
Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation
Judith Greer, Associate Director of International Programmes, Sharjah Art Foundation
Moderator:
Girish Shahane, writer and curator

Friday, 22 March 2013, 06:30 – 8:00 pm.

Registration begins at 6:00pm  Venue: Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Sir Cowasji Jahangir Public HallM G Road, Fort Mumbai – 400032    

RSVP REQUIRED: [email protected]  (priority will be given to Asia Society members)

Information about the speakers:

Hoor Al-Qasimi, President of the Sharjah Art Foundation, is a practicing artist who received her BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2002), a Diploma in Painting from the Royal Academy of Arts (2005) and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2008). She is on the Board of Directors of MoMA PS1, New York and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, and was on the curatorial selection committee for the 2012 Berlin Biennial. Her recent curatorial projects include ‘Drift’ — an exploration of urban and suburban landscapes (2011), and the upcoming ‘In Spite of it All’ (2012). A solo exhibition of her photographic work ‘Off Road’ opened recently at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno.

Judith Greer is the Associate Director of International Programmes for Sharjah Art Foundation. Greer previously worked as International Director at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Co-author of Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook (2006), she lectures internationally on the topics of collecting, arts patronage and the Middle East art and cultural world. A long-serving trustee of Artangel, UK, she was a juror for the 2007 Max Mara Prize for Women Artists and, in 2009, was on the jury for the Dubai-based Sheikha Manal Foundation Prize for young Emirati artists.

Girish Shahane has degrees in English literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and Oxford University. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He was editor and later consulting editor of Art India magazine. He has written on visual art, film and cultural politics for leading publications, and contributed columns to Time Out and Yahoo! India. He has lectured at institutions like the NGMA and NCPA in Bombay, the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, the Tate Modern in London, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is on the faculty of art history courses run by Jnanapravaha and Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Exhibitions curated by him include The Presence of the Past (NCPA, Bombay, 1998); Art / Technology (Max Mueller Bhavan Gallery, Bombay, 2000); Legacy: A-vanguard (Gallery Threshold, Delhi, 2010); and Home Spun (Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, 2011).

Shilpa Gupta & Raqs Media Collective in Every Day Matters @ Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen

March 4, 2013

Tarika Agarwal of Saffronart contemplates what to expect from the upcoming exhibition ‘Every Day Matters’ at Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen

Mumbai: ‘Every Day Matters @ Fairschou Foundation Copenhagen’ is a group exhibition of international contemporary artists. The exhibition will run for a period of three months starting from 14 March, 2013. If any of you are in Copenhagen during this time and have the opportunity to visit the show, I think it’s a definite must-see. I know I would.

The Faurschou Foundation is a privately funded art institution in Copenhagen that was established by Luise and Jens Faurschou. For 25 years now, they have presented exhibitions of internationally recognized artists both in Denmark and abroad. This exhibition represents artists from the Middle East, USA, Europe, South America and Asia. Among these are Shilpa Gupta and Raqs Media Collective.

Shilpa Gupta is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Mumbai. She studied sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts here, and is currently one the most respected contemporary women artists living and working in India today. She is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sound, video, photography and performance to capture, explore and understand themes like desire, religion and security (nations, militarism and identity).

Raqs Media Collective on the other hand is a group that was founded in the early 1990s by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They enjoy playing around with a plurality of roles often appear as artists, though sometimes also as curators and other times as philosophical agent provocateurs.

The title of the exhibition ‘Every Day Matters’ gives away a lot of what one can expect from this exhibition. It forms a framework for the artists to play with the idea of the fundamental condition that every day is important and that reality has forced its way into our lives and the artist’s lives as a necessity. In places with political unrest or socioeconomic turmoil and challenges that we face on a day to day basis, art is often influenced by these external factors. An artist’s individual needs and social commitments have a crucial influence on their works – through art they express themselves from the past and the present. I think it would be interesting to view the world from an artist’s perspective. Also, to see how their creativity and imagination works to create a masterpiece.

Since the works are not up for viewing on the Foundation’s website yet, I have picked a few interesting pieces by both the artists to give an idea of what you can expect from them while attending the exhibition.

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Asia Art Archive to host a day-long conference on Art Writing in India

February 3, 2013

Manjari Sihare shares details of a forthcoming seminar on Art Writing in India

New York: Those in Kochi or that part of the world, please check out a forthcoming conference on Art writing in India organized by the Asia Art Archive and co-hosted by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Fields of Legibility: disciplines and practices of art writing in India, is a day-long seminar which will be held on February 6, 2013 in Kochi. Asia Art Archive (AAA) is a Hong Kong based not-for-profit organization committed to documenting the recent history of contemporary art in Asia within an international context. Established in 2000, AAA is the most comprehensive publicly accessible collection of research materials in the field and it continues to grow through a well planned program of research and information gathering. Having set up its first Indian research post in 2007, AAA has over the years undertaken a number of research initiatives in the country, ranging from awarding a research grant to Vidya Shivadas in 2009 to critically survey the field of art criticism in India to a digitization project of the personal archive of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram in 2010.

Currently, the Archive is working on the digitization of the personal archives of four important pedagogues in Baroda, namely, professors K G Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Ratan Parimoo, and Jyoti Bhatt. It is also compiling an extensive bibliography of art writing in India since the late 19th century, across English and regional languages. This daylong seminar is the first in a sequence of such programs that will inform AAA’s research towards a series of anthology publications dedicated to the history of writing on 20th century visual art in India.

PROGRAMME SCHEDULE

10am – 1:30pm

Welcome address and conference introduction

Keynote lecture by Prof. Susie Tharu (Professor of Eminence, Department of Cultural Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad)

Panel 1: Writing on the Nation | Writing in the Vernacular
Chair: Prof. Parul Dave Mukherjee (Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Speakers:
Saloni Mathur (Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles)
Prof. Gulammohammed Sheikh (Artist and art historian, Baroda)

2:30 – 5pm

Panel 2: Sites of Discourse | Discursive Positions
Chair: Sadanand Menon (Art critic, Chennai)
Speakers:
Geeta Kapur (Independent critic and curator, New Delhi)
Raqs Media Collective (Artist collective and curators, New Delhi)

Summation by Prof. Parul Dave Mukherjee
Floor open for discussion

To learn more about the Asia Art Archive, click here. 

Must-Attends: Beyond the India Art Fair

January 31, 2013

Manjari Sihare shares details of some must-attend exhibitions and symposia in New Delhi coinciding with the India Art Fair 

New Delhi: If you are in India right now, Delhi is the place to be. The art world is gearing up for the country’s biggest annual art extravaganza, the India Art Fair starting on Friday, February 1 (with a preview the day before). Each year since its inception in 2008, the fair has grown larger. The 5th edition is bringing together 105 exhibiting galleries from 24 countries, presenting over 1000 works by some of the most exciting artists from across the world. But the action is not just limited to just the Fair. Outside of the Fair, there are some collateral exhibitions and events that I believe are MUST ATTENDS. Here is my list:

KNMA Noida EInviteA private museum for modern and contemporary Indian art, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is known to line up an ambitious program each year to mark its birthday (three years ago in January 2010, KNMA opened its first location in the HCL campus in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi). The museum lives up to its reputation once again this year by unveiling an ambitious series of events. The first in line to open on January 18th was Zones of Contact an exhibition curated by three young and dynamic curators, Deeksha Nath, Vidya Shivadas and Akansha Rastogi. The curatorial note for the show notes that it is an attempt “to envision the museum as a site and an idea in flux, as a catalyst that by undergoing redefinition allows for concretized notions and experiences of modernity and post-modernity to be revisited and rethought.” In a country where there is really no state owned museum of contemporary art, an exhibition such as this one speaks volumes of the mission this private museum has set for itself to showcase and re-define contemporary art in the region.

On view from today is Difficult Loves , a trilogy of exhibitions curated by the Director and Chief Curator of KNMA, Roobina Karode. This includes the largest retrospective ever of the late Nasreen Mohamedi, an artist whose minimal works leave an unforgettable impression on the viewer, a tribute to India’s Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil, and a group exhibition featuring iconic installation works of seven leading contemporary  women artists – Ranjani Shettar, Anita Dube, Sheba Chhachhi, Bharti Kher, Dayanita Singh, Sheela Gowda and Sonia Khurana. My personal favorite is Sheba Chhachhi’s Water Diviner, a version of which I first saw at the National Museum of Natural History in 48’c public. art.ecology curated by Pooja Sood and organized by the South Asian Network of Goethe Institutes in 2008. This series of shows promises to be spectacular. Not to miss at all!

KNMA exhibition

Tomorrow, the museum will be hosting two talks under the Critical Collective Symposia conceptualized and organized by veteran Delhi based critic and curator, Gayatri Sinha. The first of these is panel discussion between renowned South African contemporary artist, William Kentridge and Indian veterans, Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani. The second one is a talk by UK based art historian, TJ Demos, who is best known for his published work on the conjunction of art and politics.

KNMA talkThe India Art Fair always ends with the opening of an exhibition at the Devi Art Foundation. This time, it will the third and last edition of the Sarai Reader, an exhibition conceptualized by the Devi Art Foundation and Raqs Media Collective. Sarai Reader 9 is a nine month long project envisaged to draw on ‘exhibition’ as an evolving process, introducing new forms of creative thinking and methodologies. Invitations were open to anyone and everyone with an interesting idea and an engaging means of presentation, limited to a fixed duration and applicable within a space. The first  episode opened for viewing on 13 October, 2012, followed by another on 15 December last year. Read more about these episodes. This current episode will be on view until April 16, 2013. For more information, click here.

Devi Art Foundation - Sarai Reader

All the activity is not limited to Delhi only. Mumbai will see the opening of the first ever exhibition of William Kentridge’s work in India hosted by Volte Gallery. Of South African descent, Kentridge has exhibited worldwide in major venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York. His works mostly deal with subjects of apartheid and colonialism. This show featuring Kentridge’s eight multichannel projection installation, sculptures, drawings, tapestries, videos and prints, promises to be a blockbuster. The exhibition will be on view from February 6 to March 20, 2013.

William Kentrdige @ Volte Gallery

Frieze London 2012

October 17, 2012

Elisabetta Marabotto of Saffronart on one of the most avant-garde fairs in the world

London: The time of the year when all contemporary art lovers descend on London for one of the greatest international art fairs has just passed. Regent’s Park in the heart of the city just hosted the Frieze Art Fair & Frieze Masters 2012 for four days (11-14 October).

With its overwhelming size and number of participants, Frieze allows you to view some of the best art from all over the world and immerse yourself in a sea of colours, shapes and unspoken words.

The presence of South Asian art at the fair seemed to be more evident in this edition compared to previous years. Two Indian galleries, Chatterjee & Lal and Project 88, which was in the Frame section of the fair last year, confirmed their presence and many of well-known international galleries included works by Indian artists in their exhibits.

Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar, Memory Drawing IV, 2010

Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar, Memory Drawing IV, 2010
Image Credit: http://friezelondon.com/exhibitors/exhibit/4973/1083

Chatterjee & Lal focused its attention on performance art, with Nikhil Chopra and Hetain Patel, two artists who approach this form of expression in different ways. While Chopra mainly uses costumes, drawings and photography, Patel works with self-decoration, video and photography. The latter explores issues of identity using characters to which he contrasts and compares himself. Nikhil Chopra, on the other hand, expresses himself through live performances whose characters are quite auto-referential and discuss the issues of the modern world. Time is an essential element of his performances. The artist is fascinated by how things transform over time and how the repetition of events is almost ritualistic. However, once the performance is over we are left with pictures and drawings which document the act and have the task of bringing the emotions provoked by the performance back to life.

Hetain Patel, Mehndi 9, 2012

Hetain Patel, Mehndi 9, 2012
Image Credit: http://friezelondon.com/exhibitors/exhibit/4973/1058

Project 88 had on display a selection of works by Sarnath Banerjee from his project on the London Olympic Games, “Gallery of Losers”which ironically tackles the theme of winning/losing. For the first time in the history of the Olympics the attention is focused on the losers and the people who almost made it.

Sarnath Banerjee, High Jump (set of 16), 2012

Sarnath Banerjee, High Jump (set of 16), 2012
Image Credit: http://friezelondon.com/exhibitors/exhibit/4953/1381

In “Poise II” Neha Choksi engages with themes of detachment and disappearance using installation art. The piece comprises a mattress held up by vases containing faded flowers.

Neha Choksi, Poise II, 2010

Neha Choksi, Poise II, 2010
Image Credit: http://friezelondon.com/exhibitors/exhibit/4953/1377

The feelings of sadness provoked by this work are soon lightened by an installation by Raqs Media Collective called “Whenever the heart skips a beat”.

Raqs Media Collective, Whenever the Heart Skips a beat, 2011

Raqs Media Collective, Whenever the Heart Skips a beat, 2011
Image Credit: http://friezelondon.com/exhibitors/exhibit/4953/1379

The unusual clock moving forwards and backwards, skipping beats regularly, creates witty combinations of words. Also on display is Raqs Media Collective’s “The Philosophy of Namak Haram Revised”, a picture reflecting on all the things we should do but we cannot. One of these is the debt we have towards books which give us knowledge without being repaid. Thus, we all are ‘Namak Haraam’, innate debtors for the knowledge we constantly steal from books in our daily life. The other artists on display at Project 88 were Huma Mulji and the Otolith Group.

Raqs Media Collective, The Philosophy of Namak Haram Revised, 2012

Raqs Media Collective, The Philosophy of Namak Haram Revised, 2012
Image Credit: http://friezelondon.com/exhibitors/exhibit/4953/1378

Other Indian art works on display at Frieze were by Dayanita Singh at Frith Street Gallery, Shilpa Gupta at Yvon Lambert, Bharti Kher at Galerie Perrotin, and Anish Kapoor at Lisson Gallery. Corvi-Mora Gallery exhibited works by the Pakistani artists Imran Qureshi and Aisha Khalid.

Imran Qureshi, This leprous brightness, 2011

Imran Qureshi, This leprous brightness, 2011
Image Credit: Picture by the author.

This year, for the first time, Frieze opened the door to galleries displaying work by old masters as well, perhaps to attract visitors and illuminate some of the forms, techniques and concepts behind contemporary art. This newly opened section had on display different kinds of art up to the year 2000, leaving the exclusivity of the last 12 years to the main area of the fair. Frieze Masters enjoyed great success, rivalling TEFAF Maastricht, perhaps because of the merging of old masters, antiquities and some modern artists. In this section Indian art was on display at the booths of Sam Fogg and Francesca Galloway.

After this deep immersion in the art world, we will need a few days to process all of the images and the concepts behind the works. Frieze is definitely a unique yet overwhelming experience. Nevertheless, as always, I’m already looking forward to seeing what will be on display next year to please our eyes and stimulate our minds.