Vervemagazine.in November 2014

Concerned with water, a deep desire to investigate, immerse and experiment, Atul Bhalla’s show in Delhi is stark and moving

1964-born, Delhi and USA educated, Atul Bhalla is deeply interested in the environment particularly the eco-politics of water. His conceptual art creates an engagement with urban and metropolitan spaces, particularly those in his home city of New Delhi. He is also known as an environmental activist on the basis of his preoccupation with the distribution, regulation, commoditisation and pollution of water – and yet he stays on the right side of social concern. Bhalla describes his practice as an attempt to understand water, the way he perceives it, feels it, drinks it, swims in it and sinks in it. Possibly, with the world losing sight of the water crises, with the immense wastage of natural resources in movements like the Ice Bucket Challenge, it is prudent to have a speaker for the precious resource.

5 Questions with the artist, Atul Bhalla
1. Artistic Motivations “It’s the deep desire to investigate, experiment, immerse, push boundaries and communicate…to say it my way.”

2. Inspirations “Jeff Wall, Francis Alys, Andrei Tarkovsky, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Wislawa Szymborska, Fyodor Dostoevsky.”

3. On the wall at home “Francis Bacon, Giacometti, Gerard Richter, Tacita Dean, Jeff Wall, Francis Alys.”

4. Concerns that find place in your art “Water!”

5. If you weren’t an artist, you would be…“Still an artist!”

Ya Ki Kuchh Aur runs until January 2, 2015 at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi.

Vervemagazine.in October 2014

15 artists showing for over three months at Lado Sarai’s new gallery. There’s no way you can miss Zameen, curated by Ranjit Hoskote

Last year, ArtDistrictXIII opened it’s doors in Lado Sarai, and now they have a group show curated by Ranjit Hoskote with some heavy names in order. Gigi Scaria, who gave Verve ‘frame-able’ art (July 2013) is also present among names like Atul Dodiya, Gargi Raina, Baiju Parthan, Ranbir Kaleka and Jagannath Panda. Titled Zameen, Hoskote admits to the initial reference point of Husain’s Zameen and moves on to establish the various ranges of thought leading to a collection of 15 artists in Lado Sarai: starting from “the processes of gentrification and urban expansion” to “the aura of exile and diaspora.”

The artists have articulated their explorations of zameen through diverse media, ranging from woodcut, paintings, digital prints and installations to finding expression in domains like the blog or graphic novel or “the additive memoir into which a sequence of Facebook posts can develop”. “Taken together, I regard these outcomes – whether manifest or latent, exhibitionary or discursive – as travelling territories of thought,” writes Hoskote in his curatorial essay.

What may we expect?
In the curators words (excerpts):

1. Atul Dodiya and Baiju Parthan engage with the ideological and aesthetic resources of the contemporary Indian subjectivity, the varied pasts from which we in the present may derive critical inspiration rather than inflated pride.

2. Jagannath Panda and Gigi Scaria phrase hymns to despoiled environments and their endangered denizens and silenced mythologies; their paintings gesture towards the syndromes of war and expansionism.

3. Lost homelands preoccupy Veer Munshi and Zarina Hashmi; both artists explore mnemonic forms, Munshi through portraiture and Hashmi through cartography and the symbolic image.

4. Ravi Agarwal shares, with Hashmi, a concern with memories of space once inhabited by family, structured by rituals of kinship and inherited ways of being and making, now disrupted by economic and political shifts. Agarwal also shares, withArunkumar H G, a commitment to critiquing and resisting the toxic industrial threat to agriculture and the environment.

5. Land, in Ranbir Kaleka’s account, is the cumulus of the fantasies, stories, dreams and aspirations of those who inhabit or occupy it. Fantasies of belonging also animate Gargi Raina’s work: she explores sensory memories that modulate our sense of self, working beneath the levels of waking consciousness.

6. Elliptical family memoirs also define Ram Rahman’s work, which is charged with his intense experience of the neighbourhoods he has inhabited in New Delhi and New York. In Ashim Purkayastha’s work, the family portrait encodes the circumstances of oppression and terror that have constrained private life and compromised civil liberties in zones such as North-east India, where the mandate of militarisation often overrides democratic guarantees.

7. Praneet Soi’s work, like Ram Rahman’s, articulates the modes by which a transcultural subjectivity anchors itself in multiple locations.

8. Both Vishwajyoti Ghosh and Ryan Lobo record forms of community emerging within a hyperreal present dominated by metropolitan aspirations: their artistic projects capture the thrum of travelling subcultures, the momentum of societies in fast motion.

Zameen is on show until January 31, 2015 at ArtDIstrictXIII (F-213C, Lado Sarai, New Delhi).

Vervemagazine.in October 2014

What do mind maps and vacuums have in common? Find out in the artistic dialogue between an Indian and American artist in Delhi

This week in Delhi, a visual dialogue opens between two artists, Avinash Veeraraghavan (Indian) and Pieter Schoolwerth (American), about mapping minds and vacuums respectively.  It’s a bit of a brain twister pushing boundaries of the imagination into mental black holes and mapping the psyche through the collective unconscious and free association. In We do not see things the way they are, we see things the way we are, Veeraraghavan’s fictional maps are conceived as metaphors of the places his mind has seen; while Schoolwerth’s first exhibition in India, My Vacuum Suucks, brings to the table the vacuum of reality.

Through the materiality and liberated signification of We do not see things the way they are, we see things the way we are, Veeraraghavan expresses “delight in the coming together of difference.” Meanwhile, moving images, six paintings and a series of collages depict the “trials and tribulations of presence versus absence in the vacuum space of the world” for New York city based Schoolwerth.

The exhibition is on until December 17, 2014 at GallerySKE (1st Floor Shivam House, F 14 Middle Circle, Connaught Place, New Delhi).