Previews

March - April, 2011



Nature Morte
New Delhi
Labyrinth of Absences by Reena Saini Kallat
March 8 to March 26, 2011
Reena Kallat, who lives and works in Mumbai, often works with officially registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared. Her practice spans painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often including multiple mediums into a single work. Rubber stamp is one of her signature motifs, used both as an object and an imprint, suggesting the bureaucratic apparatus which both authenticates and blurs identities.

Among the works in the show will be a set of new paintings that depict monument sites in Delhi. Other works on paper are created from the names of people who have been denied visas on the basis of class, nationality or religion. In both cases, the images are fractured and deconstructed, creating maze-like maps that mirror a psychological dislocation.

Other works in the show will include Synonym, a series of portraits crafted as mosaics of rubber-stamps, bearing the names of people who are officially registered as missing and Crease/Crevice/Contour, a set of ten large-scale photographs tracing the fluctuating Line Of Control between India and Pakistan from October 1947 to December 1948.

Two video works will also be exhibited: Silt of Seasons I projects the names of people who have signed the peace petition in 2004. In Preface, the artist projects the text of the Preamble of the Constitution of India translated into Braille on to the surface of a large, opened book.
Reena Kallat has had ten solo exhibitions in India and abroad and contributed in a number of workshops and residencies all over the world.



Jehangir Art Gallery
Mumbai
Exhibition of Graphics, Painting and Drawings by Atin Basak
March 10 to March 16, 2011
Atin Basak's dedication to printmaking for more than two decades represents a singular contribution to our cultural life that is surely without very few equals. His works are generated by meditation on mind and matter, arising and passing away, constantly moving and changing phenomenon, impermanence which is the universal reality and truth.

He experiments with parity of form and dialogue between markers in juxtaposition producing a subliminal text.  The paintings and etchings showcased here in this exhibition, the figures waiting, inured to their own vulnerability, appear suspended in zones of unspoken communication, whose nature we can only speculate upon. This is perhaps the stillness of the forms of his earliest work, now rendered to suggest a separation between his subjects in an active world. Above all, even if there is a promise of pleasure, the suggestion of pain is never far away. Here the existential meets the topical and the present moment are fleeting, the lights announce as they pass by- seemed quite so fleeting and scripts them over with incised linear scrawls and sweep of the lines evoking painterly traditions.



Seven Art Limited Gallery
New Delhi
Episode 6: Liberation through Consumption by Jenny Bhatt
March 11 to 4 April, 2011
Seven Art Limited Gallery presents the Solo Exhibition of Mumbai artist Jenny Bhatt. Her present work is a suite of satirical works that critique urban consumer culture focusing on the means by which art, spirituality, media and emotion have been commoditized. Her works are inspired by the traditional Thangka or Mandala painting.

Besides the paintings and works on paper, the artist will also show an interactive video that employs the same elements of critique. As defined by Jenny Bhatt each individual can make his own MokshaShotTM out of anything they find fulfilling art, a chocolate brownie, a film, or a vacation.

Jenny Bhatt has also been a part of the auctions such as, Art for Concern by Christie's, Celebrating Women's Lives New York, and Sakhi for Women 20th Anniversary Benefit, New York and AGREES at the NGMA.

Apart from visual art, her ingenuity finds pace as a writer. She has been writing on art and spirituality for leading publications in India. Her poems were published in the literary journals The Little Magazine and The Brown Critique. She even wrote a book on Humorous Art.



Aakriti Art Gallery
Kolkata
Re-Vision by Birendra Pani
March 18 to March 31
Birendra Pani's Re-Vision is a continuation of his engagement with the once popular and now endangered traditional dance form called Gotipua dance and the past cultural tradition of Odisha in a broader sense. The present series of work is the refraction of the fantasy of a nostalgic past, a landscape of memory with change in space and time.

The exhibition is an invocation towards the phenomenology of a new vision of re-visiting and re-defining the interrelationships between cultural memory, identity and history in a situation of “loss” and “reinvention of self” in a globalize and yet localized world.

Vision creates a personal iconography by negotiating with the contingent spheres of influences in the global-local challenge and the cultural negligence of Odishan art by engaging with the tradition in an inventive way.



Art Chennai
Chennai
March 20 to March 26, 2011
The Art Chennai which starts on 20th March and continues till 26th March, will represent the best of Modern and Contemporary Art. The ensemble will provide a unique opportunity for art to be received by a large and discerning art audience.

As this will be the initiating year, the top 22 Art Galleries will open 27 art shows out of which some the special shows are 150 years of Rabindranath Tagore, 100 year of KCS Panikar, AP Santanaraj and MF Hussain. There will be around 20 openings spread in various venues such as independent art galleries and Taj Hotels.

There will be seminars addressed by art collectors/ historians/ curators/ critics and will be on topics such as collectors corner/ the art critic/ the curatorial eye/ the art market and artist in conversation. There will also be a special Video lounge which will feature works of 30 artists. The ensemble will also feature newly launched solo projects displaying a range of paintings, sculptures, photography, mix media, prints, caricatures, video installations and drawings. The Chennai Art Ensemble will offer visitors from around the world a rich and fulfilling art experience.



Lalit Kala Akademi
New Delhi
Ascending Energy, Merging Forms by Satish Gujral
April 7 to April 13, 2011       
In his new phase, the paintings indicate the source where dualities are fused, be it male-female, energy source-binding, animate-inanimate. Cymbal players, man restraining a bull by its horns, a bicycle rider with a horse harness, and a fisherwoman with an umbrella, with a light source in form of a bulb or a lamp are seen in his works. One of the masterpieces illustrates a relaxed meditative man shrouded in a faint halo, a being in communion with the divine but without any social and cultural restraints.

The rearrangement with changing milieu is suggested in this latest series through a confluence of forms-human, animal and mechanical. The elements of the created aspects are in union.

Despite the complexity of motifs and constituent elements, the works are direct, simple and balanced. The figures relate with each other and with the motifs and are altered into characters in a grand narrative.

The works amalgamate sinuous and undulating form of bodies, harnesses and ropes combined with the geometrical projections of mechanical objects such as umbrellas, kites and shafts and instruments. The show promises to be revelatory at many levels; visual-aesthetic, experiential and metaphysical.