State of the Art

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Posts tagged with South Asian Contemporary Art

Zarina’s Contemplative Art

February 5, 2013

Guest blogger Bansie Vasvani visits Zarina: Paper like Skin at the Guggenheim, New York

New York: Zarina Hashmi’s long overdue retrospective, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, at the
Guggenheim, New York, opened to an audience struck by the work’s serenity, quiet
dignity, and artistic impact. Combining her evocation of language and place to chart her
personal, itinerant trajectory, Hashmi’s work explores the notion of home and identity
with enormous depth and perspicuity. An established printmaker, she is often considered the precursor to a generation of artists for whom transience and its impact has permeated
through their work.

Zarina Hashmi
Homes I Made/ A Life in Nine Lines, 1997
Portfolio of 9 etchings and one cover plate printed in black on Arches Cover white paper, Chine Colle on handmade Nepalese paper; Image credit: Luhring Augustine, New York

In the front room, a portfolio of nine etchings titled Home I made/A life in Nine Lives, (1997) line the walls in geometric resplendence. Made on Arches Cover handmade Nepalese paper this series of simple, two-dimensional grids capture the structure of a basic dwelling. Zarina’s bare bone depiction can be best described by art critic John Berger’s definition of home as the center of the universe in an ontological rather than a geographical sense. Letters written by her sister Rani, that often described the passing of family members in Pakistan, become grist for her etchings and woodcuts. Her reductive images distill the sentiments of home to architectural forms and capture her nostalgia without being maudlin or dramatic. For Zarina, home becomes the place from which the world can be founded and it is the heart of the real. In these etchings, the original Urdu script of the letters is cut in metal for the prints, and the remainder of each image is rendered in woodcut. Zarina’s work underscores the sculptural aspect of her printmaking process acquired from the renowned British printmaker Stanley William Hayter while living in Paris in the 60’s. The painstakingly delicate renditions of Home I Made/A life in Nine Lives are steeped in a worldview inspired by the Minimalist tradition.

Zarina Hashmi, Cage, 1970. Relief print from collaged wood blocks. Printed by the artist. Image credit: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Zarina Hashmi, Cage, 1970. Relief print from collaged wood blocks. Printed by the artist. Image credit: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Untitled (1970), Cage (1970), and Kiss (1968) are a series of relief print collages made by inking assembled pieces of wood. Each work is constructed on handmade paper distributed by an organization founded by Mahatma Gandhi to promote Indian
handicrafts. The varying tones of the papers obtained from different regional workshops impart a particular character to each print emphasizing the quality of the material as much as the concept behind her creation. Using bits of wood assembled together, she
ingeniously creates a corral, a home, and a shelter suggestive of a protective surrounding.
The fragments and wood pulp produce dense fields that highlight the material properties
and spatial presence of an object in the convention of European Constructivism. Reminiscent of Carl Andre, her work appeals at a very basic, emotional level. Even in Kiss, inspired by Constantin Brancusi’s stone sculpture, the two pieces of wood placed side-by-side capture the primitive, folkloric precedents that Brancusi’s work expresses.

Zarina. Kiss, 1968. Relief Print From Collaged Wood, Printed In Black And Burnt Umber On Bfk White Paper
Image credit: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Perhaps one of the most riveting series in the exhibit is her Untitled (Pin
drawings), 1977. Here a sequence of works on pure white paper creates a meditative,
trance like effect on the viewer. Grid formations are devised through columns of
perforations from pinpricks. These three-dimensional mounds that rise above the paper
give the composition texture without disrupting its immensely soothing quality. Very
much in the vein of Agnes Martin’s biomorphic spiritual effect, and the visual impact of
Robert Ryman’s white on white paintings, Zarina’s personal, highly individualized art
stands out for the quality of its conception and the reductive feel of the cosmos on paper.

Zarina Hashmi, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999
Portfolio of 36 woodcuts with Urdu text printed in black on Kozo paper, mounted on Somerset paper
Image credit: Luhring Augustine, New York

Zarina’s most well known piece, Home is a Foreign Place (1999), examines the larger issue of identity by implying that a home is what you make of it. From her residence in many countries as a diplomat’s wife, the artist believes that the idea of home and identity comes from an amalgamation of diverse cultures and experiences without
attributing any one single influence. In this woodcut portfolio of 36 basic architectural
lines, the drawings reveal how evocative a simple gesture can be. Triggered by Urdu
words like door, threshold, warm etc. that are etched into the drawings, the geometric
abstractions of crisscrossing lines and circles evoke the actual experience of entering such
spaces. Deeply nostalgic of both the loss of moving away from her homeland, and the
gradual extinction of Urdu, her mother tongue, the artist is able to revive her memories
through the deliberation of her deft craftsmanship.

Zarina Hashmi
Blinding Light, 2009
22 carat gold leaf on Okawara paper
Irregular vertical and horizontal slits
Image credit: Luhring Augustine, New York

In Zarina’s art beauty and aesthetics push the viewer towards new modes of
enlightenment. Her gold leaf piece that she initially felt might turn out to be garish,
connotes a sense of purity and sublimity that relays the quality of the metal itself. In
Blinding Light (2010) a 6 foot by 3 foot sheet consisting of layers of fine gold leaf
Japanese paper hangs from a bar. Vertical slits in a grid like pattern allow light to enter
and create shadows against the shimmering reflective surface. Imbued by Sufi
philosophy, the work resonates with the poetry of her imagination. Ultimately, Zarina’s
brilliant machination of paper that she believes is as malleable as skin compels us more
than ever towards a fulfilling experience.

This exhibition traveled to the Guggenheim , New York from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and will be on view until April 21, 2013.

Bansie Vasvani is an independent art critic based in New York City.  She has a Masters Degree in Modern and Contemporary Art, and has traveled extensively to art fairs all over the world.

Guggenheim Museum’s South and Southeast Asian Exhibition

January 27, 2013

Medha Kapur of Saffronart on an upcoming exhibition of Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia at The Guggenheim Museum. 

Mumbai: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, one of the world’s most renowned museums, will host the exhibition ‘No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia’. This inaugural exhibition of the  Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative presents works by 22 artists from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. It is a five-year program involving curatorial residencies, touring exhibitions and new acquisitions. After New York, the exhibition will be travel to venues in Singapore and Hong Kong. All the works featuring in the show have been acquired by the museum and will become part of its permanent collection.

The exhibition includes works by Tayeba Begum Lipi, one of Bangladesh’s leading contemporary artists, Filipino multidisciplinary artist Poklong Anading, Indian multidisciplinary artist Shilpa Gupta and more. Works showcased in this exhibit will vary across a range of paintings, sculptures, photography, video, works on paper and installations.

Here is a selection of the artworks that will be on show:

Tayeba Begum Lipi -“Love Bed”

Tayeba Begum Lipi -“Love Bed”
Image courtesy: http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=265185

Norberto Roldan F-16, 2012

Norberto Roldan
F-16, 2012
Image courtesy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Poklong Anading Counter Acts, 2004

Poklong Anading
Counter Acts, 2004
Image courtesy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo Volcanic Ash Series #4, 2012

Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo
Volcanic Ash Series #4, 2012
Image courtesy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The Ghost of Mohammed Bin Qasim

Bani Abidi
The Ghost of Mohammed Bin Qasim, 2006
Image courtesy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Save the Date: Lecture by Atul Dodiya at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Feb. 13

January 21, 2013

Manjari Sihare shares details of an upcoming lecture by contemporary Indian artist, Atul Dodiya

New York: One of the most sought after contemporary Indian artists today, Atul Dodiya will be delivering a lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on Wednesday, February 13, 2013. For those in this part of world or traveling here, please save the date.

4713-AtulDoyidaLectureEblast.100635The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a world renowned collection, and is one of the largest museums in the United States. One of the highlights of the museum is its extraordinary holdings of nearly 3,000 Indian and Himalayan works of art. These include the 1994 bequest of the department’s former curator Dr. Stella Kramrisch, as well as renowned collector and Trustee of the Museum, Dr. Alvin O. Bellak’s 2004 bequest of vibrant Indian ‘miniature’ paintings, among others. In the recent times, the department has also brought modern Indian art to wider audiences, including when it hosted the 2008 exhibition of the work of Nandalal Bose. To learn more about  this collection click here. For location, visiting details for the museum, click here.

‘Radical Terrain’ at the Rubin Museum of Art

January 17, 2013

Josheen Oberoi shares a note on the ongoing ‘Radical Terrain’ exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York

New York: In November 2011, the Rubin Museum of Art opened a three-part exhibition of modernist art from India. The thematic series, curated by the museum’s Assistant Curator Beth Citron, started with an exhibition titled Body Unbound focusing on figuration, followed by Approaching Abstraction. The final installment, Radical Terrain currently on view, opened in November 2012 and examines the genre of landscape in post independent India. Interestingly, this third exhibition also features contemporary artists, not all from India, whose praxis is centered within a broad definition of landscape. The resultant dialogue adds an incredible depth to the experience of viewing both the modernist and contemporary works on exhibit.

The museum also has an ongoing Artists on Art series which sees Assistant Curator Beth Citron in an informal conversation with international contemporary artists. Currently this series features the contemporary artists from the Radical Terrain exhibition. You can find the schedule for these talks here.

You can read Holland Cotter’s New York Times review of the exhibition here. It is a great, informative read as always.

Watch this space for more of our thoughts on the exhibition. Till then, enjoy a few images of the show and please go visit!

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Alia Syed’s Eating Grass: On View at LACMA

January 12, 2013

Guest blogger Tracy Buck reviews Alia Syed’s Eating Grass currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Alia Syed, still from Eating Grass, 2003, 16mm film, transferred to HD DVD, sound, 22:56 min.Image courtesy: http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/eating-grass-qa-with-filmmaker-alia-syed/

Alia Syed, still from Eating Grass, 2003, 16mm film, transferred to HD DVD, sound, 22:56 min.
Image courtesy: http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/eating-grass-qa-with-filmmaker-alia-syed/

Los Angeles: In a far gallery of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) South Asian exhibition space is an installation somewhat out of step with the space’s other offerings. The South Asian collection at LACMA, housed on the fourth floor of the Ahmanson Building, is renowned for its Hindu and Buddhist sculptures, its Indian paintings, and its impressive array of decorative arts, dating largely from the pre-modern period. First-time visitors to the space may find it unexpected, then, to step in the far gallery and into a contemporary film installation – that of Alia Syed’s 2003 twenty-three minute video, Eating Grass. As such, the film offers an intervention into the otherwise largely encyclopedic model of LACMA’s South Asian collection.

Alia Syed, born of Indian and Welsh descent and today based in London, works mainly in the medium of film. She trained in the United Kingdom and has exhibited widely in Europe and North America, with shows in New Delhi and Sydney as well.  Her work deals with themes of identity, with public and private space and their boundaries, with speed and stillness and the pace of days and of our social and private selves within these rhythms of light and darkness. Visually, Eating Grass relies on impressions and on shadows; aurally, it is a swirling, dizzying but captivating mix of English overlaid onto, but not directly in-sync with, Urdu.

Alia Syed, still from Eating Grass, 2003, 16mm film, transferred to HD DVD, sound, 22:56 min.Image courtesy: http://www.lacma.org/art/installation/alia-syed-eating-grass

Alia Syed, still from Eating Grass, 2003, 16mm film, transferred to HD DVD, sound, 22:56 min.
Image courtesy: http://www.lacma.org/art/installation/alia-syed-eating-grass

The title Eating Grass refers to and questions a remark made by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in regards to Pakistani development of a nuclear bomb. Bhutto stated that, should India develop nuclear technology, Pakistan would go hungry, would eat grass or leaves if necessary, in pursuit of its own nuclear arms. The two countries – with so rich a shared past and so conflicted a shared present – are today pitted against each other and as such, Syed seems to say, the only possible result is to the detriment of each.  At a more personal level, the film and its title can be construed as referring to the diasporic experience of living in two cultures at once, of negotiating between two worlds and multiple identities. Its pace emphasizes the permeability of identity, and of the instability of the zone of “multiculturalism.”

Filmed in London, Karachi, and Lahore – one city, Syed has said, falls into another – Eating Grass is organized around the five daily prayers of Muslim traditional practice. Syed, who is also a poet, compliments this pace of the day as punctuated by calls to prayer with an underlying poetic and lyrical rhythm. As per a 2012 interview with LACMA assistant curator Julie Romain, Syed originally wrote a short story in relation to the early morning call to prayer, inspired by her realization one day in Karachi that the call she had originally taken to be the traditional one of a muezzin was actually a distorted tape recording. She then went on to write four additional short stories that relate to the remaining daily calls to prayer; together these five visual and audio vignettes comprise the film.

Calls to prayer, Syed has stated, serve as access points to memories. The stringing of these memories together in and through our daily lives results in a feeling of continuity; it is this flow she calls upon in the film. In an October 2, 2012 guest lecture given to art history students at UCLA, Syed suggested that the viewers allow themselves to “feel” the film, to follow it in a dream-like manner, rather than attempt to intellectually trace or decipher its meaning. Such instruction frees from viewer from attempting what tends to come naturally – finding a pattern or inventing a story – and allows him or her to instead give in to nuance and impression. Visually, the film has a “ghosted” appearance – a result of her filming and processing technique – that emphasizes a realization of the very real presence memories have as they juxtapose themselves in our daily lives. The lyrical rise and fall of the audio – comprised of English and Urdu voice-over – follows its own cadence. The two languages are not quite direct translations, do not quite line up either in meaning or in pace, and therefore portray both the disconnect and the complexity of language.

Alla Syed, ‘Eating Grass’, 2003Image courtesy: http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/images/130011

Alla Syed, ‘Eating Grass’, 2003
Image courtesy: http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/images/130011

Life, Syed has beautifully said, is littered with intimacies; this may take the form of a stranger on the bus with whom one has, at a distance, developed an imagined affinity with, or of a sound or smell that suddenly connects one’s immediate reality with some distant past. Her film Eating Grass, gives visual and aural form to these intimacies, places them within the flow of a day, and recreates the experience of the drift between public and private, outer and inner, realities. Throughout, Syed’s work recalls both the delicate balance and the inherent instability between the two worlds.

Tracy Buck is currently pursing a PhD in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds MA degrees in South Asian Cultures and Languages and in Museum Studies, and has worked in the Collections Management and Curatorial departments of several history and art museums in Seattle and Los Angeles.