State of the Art

The Saffronart Blog

Posts tagged with South Asian Art

In search of Vanished Blood: Nalini Malani @ dOCUMENTA (13)

July 4, 2012

Manjari Sihare on Nalini Malani’s work featured as part of dOCUMENTA (13) 

Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012 (installation view)
Image credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DOCUMENTA(13)_Malani-Nalini-In-Search-of-Vanished-Blood-by-OlafKosinsky_01.JPG

New York: The 13th edition of dOCUMENTA opened last month, and will be on view for its characteristic 100 days until September 16, 2012. Documenta is considered by many to be the mother of all international exhibitions, including the popular biennales and the triennials. It is a display of premium contemporary art that draws thousands of art lovers to the small German city of Kassel, some 120 miles north east of Frankfurt, every five years. Earlier in June, we shared details of a talk hosted by the Courtauld Institute of Art  about the contemporary South Asian artists being featured in the exhibition this year. Documenta’s list of participating artists is usually a huge hush-hush affair with the names not being released until the day of the exhibition opening. However this time around, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung managed to get their hands on this guarded list and published it in mid May. 

A significant feature in this year’s exhibition is Nalini Malani’s In Search of Vanished Blood.  Documenta customarily gives its artists at least two years to conceive and produce their projects, and the works are often cerebral, complex and large scale. This work is a colossal site-specific installation of the artist’s signature projections of light through revolving acrylic cylinders bearing painted imagery. As the cylinders spin, the images move on the walls, crossing one another in what Malani refers to as a shadow play. Issues of gender, feminism, and displacement are pervasive themes for the artist. Representations of early female archetypes, from Hindu figures like Radha, Draupadi and Sita, to such Western icons as Medea and Alice are recurrent references in her work. This latest work is inspired by Christa Wolf’s German novel, Cassandra, and Draupadi by Indian social activist and writer, Mahasweta Devi. It is a thought provoking commentary on gender, communal violence and religious fundamentalism. Watch the video for a glimpse of the work.

Malani is one of three international artists to be invited by Documenta to create an  artist’s book.  Titled after the work, In Search of Vanished Blood, this book includes texts by the Documenta 13 artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, New York based contemporary social-cultural anthropologist of Indian origin, Arjun Appadurai, and stills from a film on the making of this work by Payal Kapadia. A haunting trailer of the film is available for viewing on Malani’s  website.  Documenta as an exhibit is known to engage not just visual and performing artists but also philosophers, quantum physicists and social anthropologists. Malani has also joined Appadurai to create a collaborative work for Documenta (13)’s publication series, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts.  Read more about this project.

Malani is currently exhibiting in 3 more expositions around the world including the Singapore Art Museum where her video play HAMLETMACHINE is on view in a group exhibition, Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Asia featuring 24 artists from 8 Asian countries. Read more. Other participations include ALICE in the Wonderland of Art at the Kunsthalle Hamburg (20 June – 30 September 2012) and INDIA – LADO A LADO [India – Side by Side], a traveling exhibition conceived for the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil (22 May to 29 July, 2012). 
Read more.

South & South East Asia on Guggenheim’s radar

June 23, 2012

Manjari Sihare on Guggenheim’s UBS MAP Global Art Initiative

New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation recently announced the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, an ambitious five-year collaboration with UBS Wealth Management to graph contemporary art from around the world. The initiative is an attempt to extend the Guggenheim’s geographic outreach by building relationships among curators, artists, and educators worldwide in a comprehensive program of curatorial residencies, acquisitions and touring exhibitions. Starting from 2012, the project will focus on South and South East Asia in its first phase followed by Latin America in the second and North Africa and the Middle East in the last and final chapter. The Guggenheim will invite one curator from each region to participate in a two-year residency in New York, and work with the museum staff to identify the best of contemporary art from the region. June Yap, an independent curator based in Singapore, has been selected as the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia. Yap is known for her curation of the Singapore Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale and holds a background as Deputy Director and Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Assistant Director for Visual Arts at the National Arts Council (Singapore), the Singapore Art Museum. The selection was made by an expert panel instituted by the museum, which included Alexandra Munroe (Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Kavita Singh (Associate Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi).  Works selected by the UBS MAP curators will be included in the museum’s permanent collection and showcased in a traveling exhibit to inaugurate at the Guggenheim, New York, followed by two other destinations, one among which will be in the focus region. Singapore and Hong Kong are being considered as possible destinations for the 1st exhibit.

The initiative highlights two interesting facets of global art politics. It is reflective of the growing attention towards the east in recent years. While more and more western museums are now focusing on the East, mainstream art fairs tell another story. Fairs such as the New York Frieze and the recently concluded Art Basel have been said to be mostly focused on the West.

Image credit: The Art Newspaper: Art Basel Daily Edition, June 12, 2012
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/fairs/Art-Basel/2012/1.pdf

Of the total 2,500 artists showcased at Art Basel, 23% were American and  whooping 60% artists were from European nations. In spite of the hype surrounding Chinese artists, their participation along with their other South Asian counterparts amounted to a mere 4.3% of the total. This discrepancy between the commercial and institutional infrastructures is a point of curiosity. Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation sheds light on this and talks more about the MAP Global Art Initiative in this video.

On another note, it is also interesting that in a global climate of supposed economic recession, UBS Wealth Management, a Swiss global financial services company, has sponsored the initiative. Perhaps, Indian corporations can learn a thing or two from such international counterparts and display broader empathy for art and culture in the region.

Dinesh Vazirani on a Panel about Contemporary South Asian Art

June 18, 2012

Elisabetta Marabotto of Saffronart reports about the talk, “New Directions in Contemporary South Asian Art”

From left: Jeffrey Boloten, Erik Wigertz, Dinesh Vazirani, Arianne Levene and Idris Khan

London: On June 6, 2012, the Arts Club in London hosted a panel discussion on contemporary South Asian art featuring Idris Khan, a contemporary British artist with South Asian roots, whose body of work explores concepts such as authorship and time; Arianne Levene, an art advisor for contemporary South Asian, Middle Eastern and Chinese art, and founder of New Art World Ltd.; Dinesh Vazirani, the co-founder of Saffronart; Erik Wigertz,  a well known Swedish collector based in Russia with an interest in South Asian art; and Jeffrey Boloten, the moderator of the panel and co-founder and managing director of ArtInsight.

The aim of the discussion was to examine the new directions that South Asian art is taking through the different perspectives and experiences of the guests on the panel.

In the initial part of the talk Dinesh Vazirani examined the reasons that prompted him and Minal Vazirani (co-founder Saffronart and his wife) to found Saffronart in 2000.  On moving back to India in the mid 1990s, Dinesh and Minal felt there was no access, transparency nor benchmarks, especially in terms of pricing, in the Indian art market and decided to establish Saffronart to fill these gaps.

Talking about the trends relating to infrastructure in the Indian art world, Dinesh argued that after an initial lack of infrastructure and support, things were slowly changing. In fact, private institutions like the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art which opened last year and the Devi Art Foundation, both located in Delhi, host regular exhibitions of modern and contemporary South Asian art and compensate for the lack of quality public institutions in the country. Arianne added that new museums and galleries, such as the one founded by Rajshree Pathy , are emerging in smaller cities like Coimbatore, spreading awareness about the arts beyond the metropolises.

The India Art Fair was another hot topic at the Arts Club, but the panel unanimously agreed that the fair had a great impact on the Indian art market, bringing together international collectors and galleries in one place, and that it also gave the opportunity to Indian collectors to meet foreign galleries and artists.

Also discussed was the fact that over the last few years, there has been a definite development and growth of an international market for Indian art. Many Indian galleries have opened branches in Europe or America, well known auction houses included Indian art in their Contemporary and Post-war art sales, and Indian artists featured in important international art fairs such as Frieze and Art Basel. Moreover, Erik Wigertz just hosted an exhibition of his collection in his native Sweden, which received rave reviews and great interest. However, a lot of the ground work for this growth was established by galleries and auction houses like Saffronart, which managed to reach non-resident Indians in various countries earlier, and helped the market for Indian art spread to all parts of the globe. Recently, however, the large established group of collectors, both individual and institutions, based in India has grown in importance and is dominating the market.

At the end of the discussion the panel was asked to make a prediction about future trends in the South Asian art world. Dinesh felt there will be a return to tradition and Indian heritage, so probably antiquities will be the next market to look at, while Arianne and Erik thought Indonesian art will be the next trend, and Idris jokingly added that he would be the most sought after artist in the coming years. So Dinesh as a joke suggested we should all buy Idris’s works before his prices reaches this peak. I guess we will have to wait to see who is right!

A very interesting Q&A session concluded the talk. One of the last questions was directed at  Erik, who was asked whether the recession and the falling prices of contemporary art ever dissuaded him from buying art. The collector promptly answered that he believes art should be bought following our personal passion and not market trends.

Audience at The Arts Club

Modern Indian Art at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York

June 9, 2012

Approaching Abstraction at the Rubin Museum of Art, New YorkManjari Sihare on the Rubin Museum’s Modern Indian Art Series

New York: The Rubin Museum of Art in New York is currently showcasing an exhibit of modern Indian art, with a focus on abstraction, featuring works by Zarina Hashmi, Tyeb Mehta, S.H. Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Krishna Reddy, Nasreen Mohamedi, Biren De, G.R. Santosh and Ram Kumar. Also on view are experimental films created by M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee in the late 1960s. Listen to a podcast of this exhibition, downloadable on iTunes. While many works in the exhibition have been culled from the private collection of the Rubin Museum founders, Shelley and Donald Rubin, the display also includes supplementary works on loan from various private and museum collections in the United States.

Approaching Abstraction (on view till October 16, 2012) is the second exhibit of the trilogy, Modernist Art in India, conceptualized by Beth Citron, the Assistant Curator at the Rubin Museum. The first exhibit in this series was based on figuration and the final one, Radical Terrain, centers on landscapes (November 9, 2012- April 2013). Citron holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where her specialization was Contemporary Art in Bombay, 1965-1995. Her next project at the Rubin Museum is an exhibition on the work of India’s first female photojournalist, Homai Vyarawalla (1913-2012). This exhibition will be presented in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. It will be on view at the Rubin from July 6, 2012 – January 14, 2013.

The museum website also carries an interactive timeline highlighting the historical events that helped shape art in India from 1857 to the 1990s. For a textual overview of this development, browse through our Art Guide.

These exhibitions with their specific focus on modern Indian art are the first of their kind to open in a New York museum. Previously cultural exchanges between India and Europe have been much more prevalent, but the US is fast catching up.