New York’s brush with Asian art

Source The Hindu by Lavina Melwani
Yes, it’s that time of the year when Asian art takes over New York City and art lovers from all over the world come to the Big Apple. Just before Asia Week opened (March 13 -21), I spent a day with a group of bloggers and journalists in hot pursuit of hidden treasures. We visited many galleries, some wedged into townhouses, hidden from the public eye. Not only did we catch the highlights of the festival but met with wonderful people - collectors, gallery owners and scholars and saw how art encompasses everything they do. Asian art certainly evokes great passion among collectors, dealers and academics. The very fact that dealers had come from Belgium, England, France, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Switzerland and the U.S., shows the great seduction of Asian artefacts.
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What you missed at Art Dubai 2015

Source Vogue India by Anindita Ghose
As the top-billed star of Dubai's Art Week (March 14-24), Art Dubai is growing rapidly into an art world destination, its geographic vantage allowing for an effective mix of European, Middle Eastern and South Asian art. Amongst participation from 39 countries, Indian galleries had a good presence at the fair's ninth edition. There were six in all, including Chatterjee & Lal and Jhaveri Contemporary from Mumbai; Exhibit 320, Latitude 28 and Gallery SKE from Delhi; and Experimenter from Kolkata. Indicative of their interest and investment at the fair, Chatterjee & Lal and Latitude 28 presented impressive solo exhibitions of Nikhil Chopra and Dilip Chobisa respectively, while Jhaveri Contemporary married two approaches to miniature with works by Alexander Gorlizki and Ali Kazim.
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Good Art Comes in Small Frames

Source Indian Express
Art is certainly not for the rich alone, it is no luxury but a dire necessity for large numbers of people — wrote K C S Paniker, founder of Cholamandal Artists’ Village, in a brochure for a small format exhibition back in 1971. ‘Small sized pictures and sculptures if priced low can reach a large art loving public and eventually help create a genuine boom for art,’ the article read.
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Cinéma du Réèl : Jangarh Singh Shyam

Source Cinéma du Réèl
Dans le cadre du Festival International de Films Documentaires Amit Dutta présente son documentaire sur les traces de Jangarh Singh Shyam. L'artiste tribal légendaire Jangarh Singh Shyam quitta son village et devint un peintre contemporain internationalement reconnu. Il se suicida au Japon en 2001. Le cinéaste part à sa recherche. Séances le 20 mars à 20h45 et le 29 mars à 15h45 au Centre Pompidou Cinéma 2.
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Artist Bharti Kher knighted with top French award

Source DNA
Artist Bharti Kher has been conferred with the prestigious 'Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres' (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), France's highest cultural award for her contribution in contemporary art landscape. French ambassador to India Francois Richier bestowed the honour on the 46-year-old artist in a ceremony here on late Monday evening. "You have become a global icon. Becoming a global icon has become dangerous though. You tend to turn into a product and this, you have resisted very well," Richier said.
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Focus Photography Festival: Where pictures speak a thousand words

Source Vogue India by Sana Goyal
Mumbai's gallery spaces and museums to the more eclectic stores and cafes—and even the sidewalks and streets—have been framed. The ongoing (until March 26) FOCUS Photography Festival Mumbai 2015 has returned to the art and cultural hub after two years. Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the photo fest, with over 30 exhibitions on display from Kala Ghoda and Colaba to Bandra, as well as numerous workshops on offer is turning up the photographic pulse of the city. The festival is free and provides open access to all, and functions on the principle of striving to give art a democratic character.
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The mask that make shutter bugs smile

Source The Asian Age
A series of photochemical drawings by Abraham George will be exhibited at the Gallery Maskara. The show titled The Smile of the Mask, has no overarching theme. Instead “it is rooted in a thinking-through-materials approach, to a process that I feel has the potential to create the kinds of surfaces, tones and forms I am interested in,” says Abraham.
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High Seas and Ether Highways: The Collective Works of CAMP Come to Light Across India

Source Artsland by Deepika Sorajbee
Chemould Prescott Road’s presentation of CAMP’s As If – IV: Night for Day, surrounds the viewer in an animated darkness framed by reflections of the outside world. These words—“outside,” “animated darkness,” “surround”—could sum up what CAMP (Critical Art & Media Practice), a Mumbai-based studio for transdisciplinary media practices, is setting out to do. Over the years, CAMP principals Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran have engaged with media in both the artistic, material sense and through the conceptual mediation of the world at large. Video, CCTV, artist, layman, inside, outside, real, altered real, land, sea, electricity, and the internet—these themes, subjects, and media creep repeatedly into their practice, as they visualize a world that we live in but perhaps are not aware of—the reality hidden in the virtual. Darkness here, then, refers not just to the nocturnal oblivion of the sun, but the darkness of digital ether too, an immaterial reality surrounding our quotidian lives—where community lives at once locally and globally.
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Granta 130 book review: Mystic country

Source Financial Express by Sudipta Datta
And, yes, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s eponymous photo essay is truly “another way of seeing” India, giving an insight into the Warli people who are known for their folk paintings. Vangad, a celebrated Warli artist, welcomes Gill into his village Ganjad, a small farming village in danger of losing its land and livelihood, four hours from Mumbai. What follows is Gill’s sweeping landscapes of village life and Vangad’s Warli paintings composed on the photographs.
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Artists power couple #Part3: Meet Anju and Atul Dodiya

Source Hindustan Times by Amisha Chowbey
“She was the most beautiful girl I’d seen, and above all, she was as passionate as I was about movies and art,” says Atul, about the start of their relationship. They met as students at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, Atul a few years senior to her. Anju always admired his work and they would visit galleries together. Coming from a conservative Parsi family, it took time for Anju to convince her parents to marry the bright young artist she loved and admired.
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Rare Amrita Sher-Gil portrait sells for record $2.92 million

Source The Hindu
A rare self-portrait by Amrita Sher-Gil has sold for $2.92 million in Sotheby’s New York auction, setting a new record for an Indian woman artist. Sher-Gil’s oil-on-canvas masterpiece fetched the highest total $2,920,000, well over the $1.2-$1.8 million estimate for a South Asian Art sale at Sotheby’s since 2007, auctioneers said in a statement today. Born in Budapest to an Indian Sikh father and Hungarian mother, Sher-Gil painted the portrait in 1932 when she was 19.
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Art review: ‘Fracture: Indian Textiles, New Conversations’

Source Livemint by Shelafee Vasudev
Fracture: Indian Textiles, New Conversations, the exhibition now on display in Gurgaon, Haryana, launches a war against clichés in the use, perception and potential of handmade textiles. Startling in parts, surprising and thoughtfully conceptualized, it assimilates work done by graphic and fashion designers, visual artists, master craftspeople, and a film-maker. It involves the art, design and technology of textiles. The show, co-curated by textile exponent and author Rahul Jain, who was recently awarded the Padma Shri, textile curator Mayank Mansingh Kaul and designer Sanjay Garg, builds on a project involving an array of textile-art commissions from 2000-14 by Lekha and Anupam Poddar, founders of the Gurgaon-based Devi Art Foundation.
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The heady art of Rummana Hussain

Source Livemint by Sanjukta Sharma
Here I want to revisit an artist whose last work, A Space For Healing (1999), is being showcased in India for the first time as part of this exhibition. Rummana Hussain may not be a familiar name for a new breed of art lovers and buyers. Most of her work has not been archived or preserved. Born and raised in Bengaluru, and a pioneering artist who practised for the most part of her life in Mumbai, Hussain died of cancer in 1999. Hussain’s Living On The Margins, performed in 1995 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) garden in front of an audience, was one of the first contemporary performative works in India.
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‘I am exploring how to use culture to address foreign policy’

Source The Hindu by Vidya Venkat Rajgopal Saikumar
My mother, who just passed away at the age of 100, was the founder of one of the earliest organisations working for women in India, the Jyoti Sangh in Ahmedabad. What is complicated in India is that this is the land of Durga as well as Sita. We have powerful women. A lot of banks and multinationals these days are run by women but we also have the extraordinary violence that affects women. It would be a mistake, therefore, if we only talked about the violence. Because the media is more vigilant, there is increased coverage. There is also perhaps some increased violence because of increased aspirations and changing social mores. India is a democracy, and it would be wrong to think we can’t handle the film that was banned.
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After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997

Source e-flux
“This is the fourth exhibition of Indian art the Queens Museum has mounted in the past 20 years, yet it provides a fresh look at two key periods in that nation’s cultural production,” said Queens Museum Executive Director Laura Raicovich. “The works on view, including many making their New York debuts, represent some of the finest work created in India over the past seven decades.” Critically reflective of the changes witnessed after the economic liberalization and waves of globalization, the 18 artists and collectives chosen for the contemporary section of After Midnight distinguish the exhibition not as a sweeping survey, but instead as an exploration of the particular avant-garde impetus within the two historical periods of Indian art. It seeks to engage with art practices that carry dialogues and questions emerging from an Indian context to be located within the larger global framework. After Midnight is the fourth exhibition of South Asian art mounted by the Queens Museum since 1997 following Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora, 1997; Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, 2005, in collaboration with the Asia Society; and Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, 2005.
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HONG KONG’S FORTHCOMING M+ MUSEUM ADDS DODIYA PAINTING TO ITS COLLECTION

Source Artnet News by Annah Ghorrashi
M+, set to be Hong Kong’s first major museum for international contemporary art when it finally opens in the West Kowloon Cultural District in 2018, has acquired the painting S.S. Rajputana leaving the port of Bombay – 29th August 1931 by contemporary Indian artist Atul Dodiya at Art Basel Hong Kong, where it could be seen hanging at the contemporary Indian gallery Chemould Prescott Road.
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FOCUS Photography Festival Mumbai 2015

FOCUS is a celebration of the democratic nature of photography. Its core aim is to engage not just those in the photographic sector but to make the art form accessible to everyone across the city – every event at the festival will be free and open to all. As well as exhibitions in Mumbai’s leading galleries and museums, the festival will bring photography outside of traditional spaces and into an eclectic range of venues. Exhibitions will take place in stores and cafes and literally on the streets of the city, to reach out, excite and engage new audiences of every age and to build a community of interest around photography. This year, the theme of the festival is ‘CROSSOVER’. We live in an era of great change, in a restless world now being captured from multiple viewpoints. Perhaps nowhere embodies such change and diversity than Mumbai. The city’s dynamism is fuelled by the intermingling of people from different states, faiths and social structures. The theme celebrates photography’s role in challenging the way we see and understand both our city and the world, not only questioning collective notions of geography and history but also telling the intimate stories of the construction of identity and the exploration of self in today’s age.
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Sun, Sand and Art: Goa is transforming into a hub for contemporary art and culture

Source Indian Express by Sunanda Metha
A few kilometres away, another experiment is slowly taking shape. An artist-in-residence facility has been set up by well-known performance artist Nikhil Chopra, who combines theatre, painting, live art, sculpture and photography in his shows. Chopra, Sheroy and Mehta are not the only recent imports to the beach state. They seem to be part of a larger silent movement that has seen creative people gravitate to the state, drawn to its natural beauty — from writer Amitav Ghosh and photographer Dayanita Singh to multi-disciplinary artist Tejal Shah and photographer Prashant Panjiar.
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The Greatest Indian Art Show Of The Spring Is Happening In America

Source The Huffington Post by Mallika Rao
Taken together these exhibits offer a more complete view of Indian concerns than most singular shows. In the work of the country's well-known artists, there is forward energy. The Queens Museum tracks this historic rush ahead via the path of the Bombay School to today's blue-chip practitioners, though it is a story that can also be told in statistics, or in the changing homes of ordinary people. "Postdate" shows the forces that can hold a country back: a shadow of oppression, or ingrained feelings of cultural inferiority, rich matter for artistic transfiguration. Either way, it's a good time to be an Indian artist.
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Kochi Biennale high-value tourism product: Kerala minister

Source Business Standard
"Kerala has ayurveda, backwaters and beach tourism. And now we have a different product that has made its mark in the world," he said. Figures reveal that one of the biggest beneficiaries of the event is Kerala's tourism industry where in the first month (December) saw a 52 percent rise in domestic tourist arrivals and over eight percent rise in international tourist arrivals to Kerala. The second edition of the KMB that began on December 12 last year is now on its last phase and ends on March 29.
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Sporting fame demands sacrifice of childhood. Just ask this precocious young athlete

Source Scroll In by Chatura Rao
At the beginning of the year, 10-year-old Tai Bamhane, a Warli tribal from western Maharashtra, won a silver medal in the 400m track event at the 60th School Games Nationals in Ranchi, Jharkhand. She ran in the under-14 category, beating girls three years older, most of them half a foot taller than she. Her huge stride length must surely have come as a surprise to her competitors, especially since Tai, at rest, moves so little that you barely notice her.
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Power of Art

Source Mumbai Mirror by Reema Gehi
Dressed in a dark suit, the 64-year-old settles into a couch at the boardroom of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (where the exhibition is being held). He lauds the museum "for opening doors for the city and making connections with the rest of the world by bringing to Mumbai great works of art." And, it is perhaps for a similar reason that Serota was ranked in ArtReview's 13th annual Power 100 list last year, 'the world's most powerful person in contemporary art', recognising the role that Tate plays in an increasingly global art world.
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India Belongs Only To Me, Amrita Had Said

Source Artinfo UK by Archana Khare-Ghose
Once upon a time, there lived a girl called Amrita. She was pretty, vivacious, bold, and loved to paint. Sadly, she died young, before she could turn 29. Amrita didn’t live to see what a phenomenon she would become as Amrita Sher­Gil (1913­1941), one of the most influential painters to create a truly Indian idiom for the country’s modern art.
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Where Art Is a Woman’s World

Source New York Times by Ginanne Brownell Mitic
According to Antonia Carver, director of the Art Dubai fair, 75 percent of the galleries from the Middle East and North Africa that take part in the annual event are run by women. Touria El Glaoui, who founded the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, said that most of the African-based galleries that attend have women at the helm. On the Indian subcontinent, many major fairs are headed by women — from the India Art Fair to the Colombo Art Biennale, the Dhaka Art Summit, the Kathmandu International Art Festival and the yet-to-be-organized Lahore Biennale.
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Asia Week Celebrates an Array of Art as Vast as a Continent

Source New York Times by Martha Schwendener
This is a great moment for Indian painting. In April, an exhibition of art from the Deccan Plateau, in southern India, from 1500 to 1700, will open at the Metropolitan Museum, followed in June by another Met show devoted to royal hunting images. Some of Asia Week’s standouts include a gorgeous exhibition of classical Indian paintings at Carlton Rochell (121 East 71st Street) with 18th-century illustrations of the Gita Govinda set in the lush Punjab hills. Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch (9 East 82nd Street), another local dealer, has an extraordinary signed painting from around 1720 of the famously handsome Moghul emperor Farrukhsiyar, decked out in pearls and Burmese rubies.
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The art versus the market: Abhay Maskara’s crusade

Source The Sunday Guardian by Akhil Sood
That's not necessarily been the mindset; the goal has never to only find artists from the fringes or a more radical form of art. It's partly got to do with my own interests, what I feel is relevant, what I feel about artists working with authenticity. We have artists working with complete freedom, without thinking whether their art is sellable or not, whether critics are going to love it, whether curators are going to love it, whether audiences are going to buy it... artists who are true to themselves and have been working with that central focus...
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Art attack: What's new in the art world?

Source Vogue India by Anindita Ghose
The new artist: Experimental filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul has her first solo exhibition. As her films played on a loop through December at Mumbai's Jhaveri Contemporary Gallery, experimental filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul caught our attention with her varied techniques such as photograms—made without a camera, by placing objects directly on photosensitive film. Kaul (she was born on a film set!) grew up under the influence of her father Mani Kaul, a pioneer of avant-garde Indian cinema, and her work tries to address questions that revolve around identity, culture and politics.
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Hervé di Rosa et Hervé Perdriolle Conférence au Centre Pompidou le 12 mars à 19h

Dans le cadre du cycle In Vivo Hervé di Rosa et Hervé Perdriolle proposent une conférence allant de la Figuration Libre au MIAM (Musée International des Arts Modestes) en passant par le Tour du monde entamé par Hervé di Rosa en 1993. Jeudi 12 mars 2015 à 19h Centre Pompidou cinéma 2 entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles.

When Souza came back and other stories...

Source India Today by Gayatri Jayaraman
In one black and white portrait, Francis Newton Souza, returned from Europe in 1962, is met with the resistance of stiffened body language and threatened turf, by Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh on the opposite side of the room; the conciliatory figure of a woman, activist Maya Kulsreshta, and the lingering hint of ambiguous possessiveness, between them. In another, is a face-off between Mulk Raj Anand and Geeta Kapur, in which he questions why they must protest the Lalit Kala Akademi at all, in 1969.
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Food cafe by Sharan Apparao: State of the art

Source The Financial Express by Sushila Ravindranath
This stint at Grindlays made Apparao plan an art gallery. There was really no standard to live up to in Chennai. Apparao, at that point, did not quite see a gallery as a business, but more as an adventure. “I was not afraid. I was not inhibited about approaching artists.” She met Amrita Sher-Gil’s husband to hold an exhibition of her paintings. He did not have any of her works. MF Husain being as quirky as Apparao took the risk and agreed to exhibit with a young girl.” Among others, I exhibited Souza, Sabavala, Husain, Raza, Anjolie Ela Menon and Laxma Goud.”
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Delhi Art Gallery opens location in New York City

Source The American Bazaar by Sujeet Rajan
Demand for Indian contemporary art in the US, which had waned during the recession, may be back, going by Delhi Art Gallery – which has India’s largest repository of modern masters and locations in New Delhi and Mumbai – opening a location at the historic Fuller Building in Manhattan, and will inaugurate it with an exhibition India Modern: Narratives from 20th century Indian Art, from March 18 through June 6, 2015.
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Cunnilingus in North Korea

Best movie theme...Si vous avez aimé le générique de Bird Man, please look at the original... Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries... si ce n'est pas eux qui ont fait ce générique c'est vraiment une simple copie... j'ai eu le plaisir de les exposer/montrer/entendre il y a une dizaine d'années au Centre d'Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie et n'aie pas trouvé mieux depuis...
> Bird Man écouter/voir/lire
... et pour le plaisir un petit cunnilingus
> cunnilingus in north korea