Previews

April - May, 2011



Gallery BMB, Mumbai
Nostalgia, Pride and Fear: A Group Show
March 9 to April 9, 2011
1Allison Kudla photographic prints Manicured Field from her Growth Pattern series began in 2008. In this piece, a living natural system takes on the form of a manufactured pattern. The process of generation and degeneration is an integral part of Allison's work.

Ratna Gupta's latex works that have been cast by the barks of specific trees and the root of the tree cast in fiberglass are all frozen moments of passage of time that she has captured and made immortal.

Tatiana Musi's installation Mind Fills consists of containers which are all used items either found, exchanged for new ones or bought around Varanasi, from tea stands, food stands, vegetable stands, recycling spots and even a beggar's money collecting pot. Her paintings are a visual, emotional and atmospherical reconstruction of the memory of the garden created in very painterly, but yet minimal style.

Teresa Gruber's characters are all portrayed in their autumn mood, standing naked within the dead leaves. Naked and already budding, already full of energy  which they gather from the moldering dead leaves and during the winter pause, months later they present themselves in innocent green.

Soazic Guezennec's anthropological boxes are also questioning the relationship between nature and civilization.

What seems like insects are displayed in real entomological boxes. At closer look, the insects are actually cutout of businessmen figures from management magazine. Looking at human nature, those boxes focus on what makes men animals, and may invert the direction of evolution theory from animal to man.




Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai
Stations of a Pause: Works by Jitish Kallat
March 22 to May 10, 2011
Jitish Kallat's 750-part photographic work, titled Epilogue, tracing, his father's life through all the moons he saw from the day he was born on 2nd April 1936 to the day of his death on 2nd December 1998. Measuring his father's life span with the approximately 22,000 moons that he saw in the 63 years of his life; every moon is replaced with the image of a waxing or waning meal, marking the cycle of life itself as periodical rotations of fullness and emptiness.

Moving once again from the personal to the urban another work within the space is a 7 part lenticular panoramic photo piece titled Aspect Ratio wherein the seven colours of the rainbow and the image of a Mumbai street will glint, and also flip and alternate between being a flat-colour and having an image of the street emerge from it, as one walks past the work or even if one moves in front of it.

Also part of the exhibition will be a new series of paintings, untitled (Stations of a Pause) which is a continued series of large scale paintings representing candid imagery of the ubiquitous Bombayite.




Project 88, Mumbai
Propositions: On Text and Space II: Works by Zuleikha Chaudhari
March 23 to April 26, 2011
Project 88 and Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai present On Text and Space II, an exhibition of light installations and video by Zuleikha Chaudhari.

On Text and Space II is based on texts from Roland Schimmelpfennig's play Before/Afterwards.

Zuleikha Chaudhari's work as a theatre director is essentially an investigation into the nature of performance. It explores how images are constructed and experienced: what is the relationship between the text and performer, the dynamics between performer and space, how narratives are created and understood, and finally, the role of the spectator in the performative experience.  At the same time, it is also an exploration of space and the part space plays in the construction and experience of narratives whether it is the space of the human body or the space of the place within which the performance takes place. Her light installations have, so far, been created as environments in which it is possible to view the performer from multiple perspectives - as a sculptural element in space and/or as a site for emotive expression, with the dynamics between the performer and spectator constantly changing, depending on the varying spatial relationships.




Indigo Blue Art, Singapore
Amber: Works by Manisha Parekh
March 24 to April 30, 2011
Manisha Parekh has worked with both graphic and the sculptural to create the experience of luminosity. She is interested to observe the movement of paint on paper, as well as the kinetics recorded in the drying process. The subsequent layers of painting create the graphic quality. The various shades of colour, so close to the blue of the paper, define forms which sit lightly, pulsating and breathing, expanding and contracting. Parekh's hand, in a form of mediated automatism, has recorded every little fluctuation, like a medical machine which monitors a patient's breath or a satellite which produces second by second imagery.




Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai
Collective Nouns: Works by Manjunath Kamath
April 1 to April 30, 2011
Sakshi Gallery presents Collective Nouns, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptural installations by New Delhi based artist, Manjunath Kamath.

Kamath revels in his humorous interpretations of the socially confirmed narratives. He is famed for his proficiency in a variety of media including canvas (acrylic paintings), paper (water colours and drawings), video (animation, claymation), sculpture (fibreglass, wood, brick) and digital medium (re-construction of photographic events).

This body of work, titled Collective Nouns, is the collection of Kamath's distinctive imagery rich with the narratives of everyday life, interwoven with mythologies and intimate stories. Most of his works have quote-unquote signs, speech balloons and blurbs which are employed not only as visual embellishments but also as strong metaphors.



Nature Morte, Berlin
The Land: Works  by TV Santhosh
April 5 to April 23, 2011       
The Land is the first solo exhibition of works by the artist TV Santhosh in Berlin. The exhibition is in collaboration with The Guild, Mumbai.

This group of new works by TV Santhosh is the outcome of his preoccupation with the images of the on-going and changing nature of war, memory and perception. The shift from theories of resolution to conflicts to the actualities of those who are victims, and oppressors, is becoming more complex while solutions seem to be more elusive, according to the international peace-keepers and nation states. T V Santhosh's paintings and sculptures employ the linguistic devices of colour codes and graffiti, as well as the inversions of positive images into their negatives. These works are a mapping of social unrest and its political implications by constructing multiple layers of metaphors, investigating the evolving histories of the nature of war, human rights and citizenship.