POOJA SOOD ON HER DECADES-LONG TRYST WITH THE ARTS

Source Verve by Shraddha Jahagirdar-Saxena
Destination One, Jaipur: The Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK). The multi-arts centre located in the Pink City was built — and is nurtured — by the Rajasthan Government with the intention of preserving the state’s arts, crafts and culture. Adapting and applying concepts from ancient architectural principles, the property — designed by renowned architect Charles Correa — is infused with local hues, feel and flavor. Destination Two, New Delhi: Khoj, the not-for-profit arts organisation in the country’s capital. Started humbly in 1997 as an annual workshop, Khoj completes two successful decades this year. It has built a powerful reputation, both nationally and globally, for being an alternative incubation space, with a focus on exploring the new and experimenting with interdisciplinary forms of creative practices.
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KIRAN NADAR ON BEING A COLLECTOR WHO FOLLOWS HER HEART

Source Verve by Sharmi Ghosh Dastidar
She is known for being on her toes. “How else would one run two museums? You have to channelise all your energies and work as if there are 12 instead of 24 hours in a day,” says Kiran Nadar, wrapping up work in Delhi before she leaves on a two-month-long voyage that will take her to the Venice Biennale and the Documenta art fair in Athens. The two Kiran Nadar Museums of Art (KNMA), in Saket and Noida, are emblematic of this prolific nature of their founder and director.
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A brief look at protest art in India, and how it is challenging bigotry and dogma

Source Firstpost by Radhika Oberoi
In India, collectives of artists, writers, scholars and activists, like Sahmat — The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust and Committee — have used the poster to challenge the dominant discourse around political events, particularly the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. Sahmat’s posters for a Sufi-Bhakti performance, titled Anhad Garje , or ‘the silence reverberates’, a phrase used by the medieval poet, Kabir, were 32 x 23 inches of silkscreen that responded to the razing of the mosque with a simple line printed at the bottom: Come to defend our secular tradition.
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Deux peintures de Chano Devi sont parmi les œuvres de la Collection agnès b. exposée à la Collection Lambert en Avignon

Source Galerie Hervé Perdriolle
Situé entre les contreforts de l'Himalaya et les plaines du Gange, le Mithila (aujourd'hui l'état du Bihar) a un passé des plus riches. Ce fut là que naquit le fondateur du Jaïnisme et que Bouddha eut la révélation. Ce serait aussi à Madhubani (littéralement : forêt de miel) que le Mahatma Gandhi aurait décidé de prêcher pour la première fois sa doctrine, grâce à laquelle il voulait libérer l’Inde de l’économie anglaise. Dans cet ancien royaume, ce sont les femmes qui peignent et qui transmettent leur savoir de mère en fille.
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HOW THE INTERNET HAS CHANGED THE CONSUMPTION OF ART OVER THE YEARS

Source Blouin Art Info by Ranjabati Das
Museums, galleries and auction houses all have their own websites and social media presence today, but they are still tying up with online trading platforms by the dozen to ensure a piece of that pie too. Mojarto.com, which sells original art, prints, and collectibles, has an enviable roster on its plate — including Emami Chisel Art and CIMA in Kolkata, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke and Pundole in Mumbai and Delhi’s Vadehra, Latitude 28 and Threshold. Allowing interested parties a peek into a broad cross section of works, it is a bona fide one-stop shop that works well for young netizens hardpressed for time, especially those staying outside the three metros where the major galleries are bunched up.
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Engaging in dialogues on contemporary curatorial practices

Source Deccan Chronicle by Soumyabrata Gupta
I think India has some absolutely fantastic curators who are breaking ground across the board. There are curators who have engaged with a particular artist over years even decades and have a deep understanding of their work. Some curators have done fantastic work in revisiting artists whose practices have been overlooked and have historically re-contextualized their contribution to the world of contemporary art. Art is at a crucial juncture in India at the moment and critical writing as well as exhibition making is going through a transformative phase. Curators and artists work in a symbiotic relationship and both Indian curators are curating and artists are being constantly shown in globally significant exhibitions.
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The sorry state of a multimillion-dollar art collection reveals deeper troubles at India's national airline

Source Los Angeles Times by Shashank Bengali and Parth M.N.
Air India’s art buying days are long gone, but for a generation of painters the company was a crucial patron at a time when there was hardly any domestic market for their work. S.G. Vasudev, a painter who sold several pieces to the company — including a large 1977 canvas in exchange for a plane ticket to London — said he often wondered about the fate of work that he hasn’t seen in decades. Air India acquired many of its pieces at throwaway prices, but they are probably worth much more today. A Gaitonde abstract canvas recently sold for more than $4 million.
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The seventh edition returns 27 July with a weighty collection of key curators from today’s contemporary artistic landscape

Source Harper's Bazaar
This year, the three-day programme will include Barbara Piwowarska, curator and art historian; Lauren Cornell, chief curator, Hessel Museum of Art, and director, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College Graduate Programme New York; Reem Fadda, independent curator; Roobina Karode, director and chief curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi; Hammad Nasar, curator, writer and researcher; Olivier Kaeser, art historian, curator and co-director, Swiss Cultural Centre, Paris; Pedro de Almeida, programme manager, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Ruba Katrib, curator, SculptureCenter, New York; and Nada Raza, research curator, Tate Research Centre: Asia. The event will be moderated by Natasha Ginwala, curator of Contour Biennale 8 and curatorial advisor for Documenta 14.
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Agnès b. : une expo à Avignon cet été, une fondation à Paris en 2018

Source Culture Box par Corinne Jeammet
"On aime l’Art ! Agnès b.", c'est près de 400 œuvres de la collection de la styliste. C’est par le voyage que débute l’exposition, en convoquant les oeuvres brodées ou dessinées au stylo d’Alighiero Boetti, rappelant ses voyages en Afghanistan où il créa même un hôtel, le One Hotel, fréquenté par Cy Twombly... mais aussi Mona Hatoum, Jivya Soma Mashe et Chano Devi dont les grandes toiles s’inspirent des traditions indoues ou encore les photographies de Cecil Beaton et de Leila Alaoui, étoile montante de l’art prématurément disparue dans les attentats de Ouagadougou.
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DIVIA PATEL ON TAKING INDIAN ART ONTO FOREIGN SHORES

Source Verve by Amishi Parekh
As a child, she devoured stories that she found at her local library. Divia Patel was also fascinated by the physicality of books, how they smelled and felt, as well as the typography and illustrations within them. Born in Kenya but spending most of her life in London, she studied South Asian anthropology and history and is currently senior curator in the Asian department at the V&A. In 2015, she curated "The Fabric of India", a landmark show that highlighted the country’s rich handmade textile heritage and also published "India: Contemporary Design: Fashion, Graphics, Interiors".
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Raza and me

Source The New Indian Express by Vandana Kalra
I am grateful that I shared such a deep and uncompromised friendship with Raza sahib. We were best friends for over two decades (1984 to 2008) and like family to each other. The last time I met him was in Delhi in February 2016, he was in the hospital and unconscious. I paid my regards and left. Our first meeting was in 1984, when I was interviewing renowned artists of India for my PhD on Indian tribal art. I was at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, when he walked in. He immediately agreed for an interview. During our discussion, he asked what else I did and when I told him I was an artist, he insisted on seeing my work. To my surprise, we immediately took a cab for Pune where my studio was, and on seeing my work, he assured me that I had a bright future and that I should try to come to Paris.
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Sculpture Park brings Indian contemporary art to Bengaluru

Source Business Line by Sangeetha Chengappa
Bengaluru has, over the ages, earned many sobriquets such as Garden City, Pensioner’s Paradise, Pub City and, more recently, the IT Capital of India. While a walk through the verdant expanses of the city exposes people to its various features, there are few avenues for people to discover the cultural context of Bengaluru through works of art. Addressing this opportunity, the RMZ Foundation has installed sculptures of six world-renowned contemporary Indian artists at the ground and Ecodeck levels of RMZ Ecoworld, a 52-acre campus in the heart of Bengaluru’s IT district Bellandur — which houses an IT Park, restaurants, premium shopping centres, amphitheatre and an art gallery. Aimed at inspiring and engaging both the 23,000 people who work in the campus and the public at large, the sculptures are open for viewing from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with no entry fee.
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ANITA DUBE: UNRAVELLING THE INNER WORKINGS OF A PROLIFIC THINKER

Source Verve India by Manisha Gera Baswani
Born in Lucknow in 1958 to doctor parents, Dube recalls how they “built a five-bed hospital below our house where my mother, a gynaecologist, assisted my father during his surgeries. Our home always had doctor friends of my parents visiting us, eating with us, discussing medicine and their patients. I vividly remember my dad coming up to show us a tumour from one of the patients he had just operated upon. It was placed in a big plate, blood still dripping. My father’s elder brother’s family stayed in the same house and we always had at home relatives and people from the village who had come for treatment. I remember the lack of privacy, but looking back, I feel that it was a good childhood filled with a lot of warmth and freedom.”
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SAHEJ RAHAL: FEEDING HIS INNER ‘MAD’ ARTIST

Source Verve India by Tina Dastur
Art might be his first love, but storytelling is equally integral to this 28-year-old’s practice. Born in Mumbai, Sahej Rahal’s multidisciplinary approach to his work includes drawing, sculpture, performance and moving image. Speaking about his artistic inspirations, Sahej promptly slips into narrator mode and weaves a bizarre tale to elucidate. “On 28th September 2008, I had left the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts early to play a few rounds of Counter-Strike at a cybercafe in Bandra, and I found a private server that was hosting a modified version of the de_dust2 map. As soon as the game loaded, I checked the score tab and saw that there was only one other player on the map; I read the name aloud — BASILISK. And that is when it happened. I got killed, but instead of respawning, my avatar froze and the other player’s voice whispered in my headset that it was an artificial intelligence that had been designed to archive the research of the Iranian archaeologist, Dr. Hamid Parson.
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Shailesh BR’s ‘Tarka' at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

Source Blouin Art Info
Foundation for Contemporary Indian Art (FICA) presents the solo exhibition of Shailesh BR, as part of Emerging Artist Award Programme. In this particular body of work, his first ever solo exhibition, Shailesh explores common practices that are used in rituals as metaphors. "Kshir Dhara (Milk Thread)" looks at the act of rubbing as a means of creating friction to produce something. Using paraphernalia that is commonly part of religious ceremonies, his kinetic structures question the notions of practice, the physical body and symbolic meanings that are often given.
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WHAT DOES THE FUTURE OF ART LOOK LIKE FOR INDIA?

Source Verve by Riddhi Doshi
Works by Amar Kanwar, Nikhil Chopra, Gauri Gill and Nilima Sheikh are being exhibited at Documenta this year, indicating that certain contemporary artists are well-received on the international circuit. But here too moderns are in the majority, with Ganesh Haloi, Amrita Sher-Gil, K. G. Subramanyan, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Benode Behari Mukherjee being featured alongside them. From October the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris will host artist Nalini Malani’s retrospective until January 2018. “I always remind people that all art was once contemporary,” says Weihe. “We are now looking out for artists who will be the modernists of the future.”
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ABRACADASTRAL

Source E-Flux
Remai Modern is very pleased to announce its newest web commission, Passwords for Time Travel, by Raqs Media Collective. Passwords for Time Travel consists of a suite of text and image videos proposing a set of terms that anticipate and rehearse conversations with the near and distant future. Combining the enigma of a spell with the precision of a dictionary entry, these unexpected lexical combinations are presented along with images that elaborate upon the multiple meanings of the texts. In association with its pre-launch programs, Remai Modern has been inviting artists to realize original projects exclusively for online viewing.
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CURATOR SHANAY JHAVERI ON HIS LEAP FROM MUMBAI TO THE MET IN NEW YORK

Source Verve by Huzan Tata
At the opening of Gedney In India at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) in Mumbai a few months ago, his was the most animated face in the room; one could gauge his undeniable passion as he introduced the show of photographs he had co-curated. Shanay Jhaveri — always immaculately coiffed and exuding a style distinctly his own — radiates a contagious zeal every time you meet him. While work frequently brings him back to his hometown, Mumbai, the 32-year-old curator and art historian’s current home is New York City, where he holds the position of Assistant Curator of South Asian Art at the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art — a role that one might add, was created specifically for him in 2015.
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Mentoring young talent

Source The Hindu
Mumbai-based producer Eve Lemesle, Managing Director of the Mumbai Art Room, who has produced diverse exhibitions including the India-Pakistan pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale and Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh and supported artists and curators through her residency programme at What About Art?, says, “Right now, there are very few spaces in India where curators can apply their knowledge, research, and practice to produce their own exhibitions rather than act as the assistants of others. The Mumbai Art Room aims to become the space where the next generation of Indian as well as international curators can be mentored, nurtured, and supported at critical points in their career to grow as exhibition makers.”
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India at 70: Photographers trace the nation’s evolution without showing any of its historic events

Source Scroll In
A Million Mutinies Later has many associations. For one, it is part of the biennial Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography, organised by Ffotogallery. For another, it is part of Dreamtigers, a year-long collaboration between Ffotogallery and Nazar Foundation, which holds the Delhi Photo Festival. Besides these, it is also on the itinerary of events being held in the UK to celebrate 70 years of India as an independent nation: India-UK Year of Culture. The show’s idiom is inspired by the theme of the 2017 Diffusion festival – revolution.
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Here’s your chance to support Kochi Biennale and score stunning artwork

Source Vogue India by Shahnaz Siganporia
With a preview on August 1, the auction will be conducted by Dinesh Vazirani of Saffronart on August 2 at his auction house’s premises in Mumbai. Featuring 40 lots and more works from 35 marquee Indian artists such as Amrita-Sher Gil, Gigi Scaria, Manish Nai, Reena Kallat, Subodh Gupta and Vivan Sundaram, the auction is expected to match the 2.29 crore figure it raised last time. As Krishnamachari puts it, the auction also helps keep this artist-led event grounded to its core beliefs: “This auction is a sign of the solidarity that sustains an art event of the scale of KMB.”
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Is The Current Generation Witnessing The Death Of Painting?

Source Verve by Madhu Jain
For a while in this millennium, Indian artists were the flavour of the month. Francois Pinnault, the French billionaire who owns Christie’s, among much else, used to buy the works of contemporary Indian artists, most prominently Subodh Gupta. So did other European and American collectors. But art collectors have whims, and can also be fickle. Chinese artists have long been the favoured ones. Korean artists also appeared on the must-have lists. Currently though contemporary African artists appear to have become the Next Best Thing. The wheel never stops turning. And it is time to get real.
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Flow de Mario D'Souza

Source Chateau d'Oiron
Le château d’Oiron invite pour son exposition estivale l’artiste d’origine indienne Mario d’Souza. L’exposition FLOW sera présentée du 25 juin au 8 octobre. Le titre de l’exposition FLOW - « coulure » en anglais – est l’introduction de la proposition faite par l’artiste : venir s’infiltrer dans la mémoire riche d’un lieu historique aujourd’hui indissociable de sa collection d’art contemporain pour devenir le temps d’une exposition le nouvel habitant de cet écrin. Devenir nouvel habitant, c’est prendre possession des lieux… Prendre possession et se sentir chez soi, c’est aussi personnaliser celui-ci.
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What causes our blindness to art?

Source The New Indian Express by Asha Menon
The educational system too has failed to give children an eye to appreciate art. “Our students do not recognise what is art and what is not,” he says. Bose even started the ABC Art by Children project, which selects a 100 schools and sends out various experts to educate them in aesthetics. Bose adds that art cannot be taught. “But you can learn to appreciate it by experiencing it,” he says. “Abroad children are taken to museums and introduced to works of Picasso or Dali.”
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SHIREEN GANDHY: I STOOD THERE THINKING, “IS THIS ART?”

Source Verve by Shireen Gandhy
Life is Art, Art is Life’ is a very entwined message that I began to live, understand and experience from my early days of running the gallery. Coming from a family with strong political inclinations, it became a natural proclivity for artists to gravitate to a gallery like ours where our little space became an adda for all things that we didn’t know could exist as ‘art’. My early memories are that of Vivan Sundaram’s mammoth works with engine oil, where he walked away from the conventional medium of oil on canvas. The early ’90s became fraught with the resonance of the Gulf War, which was the beginning of Sundaram’s work in multiple mediums. This was the beginning of installation art in India — which went on to take on so many other forms.
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L’Inde futur moteur de l’économie-monde

Source Le Monde par Edouard Pflimlin
L’Inde sera la base du cœur économique de la croissance mondiale au cours de la prochaine décennie, devant la Chine, selon une recherche de l’Université de Harvard, avertit The Hindustan Times. L’étude prévient également un ralentissement continu de la croissance mondiale au cours de la prochaine décennie. L’Inde et l’Ouganda seront les économies en croissance la plus rapide jusqu’en 2025, soit 7,7 % par an. « Le pôle économique de la croissance mondiale a évolué au cours des dernières années, de la Chine à l’Inde voisine, où il est probable qu’elle demeurera au cours de la prochaine décennie », ont déclaré les chercheurs du Centre for International Development de l’université d’Harvard.
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Surrealism, Indian art feature in BAMPFA summer exhibits

Source The Daily Californian by Audrey McNamara
This summer, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is featuring three distinct visual art exhibits — works from contemporary mixed-media artist Ugo Rondinone, early surrealist Charles Howard and a collection of five centuries of Indian painting. The galleries highlight art that has both been historically overlooked and won’t let you look away. The central gallery space belongs to Rondinone’s absorbing exhibit “the world just makes me laugh,” running through August 27. The largest room is dotted by the exhibition’s commanding centerpiece, titled “vocabulary of solitude.” 45 bright, seemingly sedated but lifelike clowns lounge, unconcerned and incremental. The realism is compounded by the fact that each clown was molded off a real person.
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JULIA MARGARET CAMERON: “IN SEARCH OF BEAUTY”

Source Art Asia Pacific by Billy Kung
Born in Calcutta in 1815, Cameron was a colonial expatriate with a liberal and informal education received from her maternal grandmother in Versailles, France. At the age of 21, she met her husband Charles Hay Cameron (1795–1880), a jurist and a member of the Law Commission of the Supreme Council of India, in South Africa. The two settled in India and had four children before relocating to England in 1848 where they had two more. In 1860, Cameron and her family moved to Freshwater village on the Isle of Wight after visiting the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892). It was here that Cameron began her photographic endeavor upon receiving her first camera as a gift from her daughter in 1863. Predominantly self-taught, she made photographs that transcended reality and spoke directly to the human spirit. In the following decade the camera became far more than an amusement to her: “From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardor,” she once wrote, “and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigor.”
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A treasure trove

Source The New Indian Express by Reeni Susan & Nejma Sulaiman
Inside a colonial style building adjacent to a stylish cafe and a design shop situates Kerala’s only visual art library, Laboratory of Visual Arts (LaVA). The Visual art library at Pepper house, Fort Kochi has a unique collection of valuable books and DVDs on art, fashion, photography, architecture, theatre, history and culture of the nomadic artist Bose Krishnamachari, Artistic Director and Co-Curator of The Kochi-Muziris Biennale. This library is originally a travelling installation titled ‘LaVA’ by Bose. Through LaVA, Bose has beaten down perpetually the traditional concept of a visual art library and the said assumption of viewing it. “Traditional libraries tend to have fewer collection because they collect books only of specific genres. But an art library in my concept is a quite different one.
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Arles 2017: The Promise by Vasantha Yogananthan shortlisted for the Author Book Award

Source British Journal of Photography by Diane Smyth
The Promise is book two in Vasantha Yogananthan’s ambitious seven-book project, A Myth of Two Souls. Inspired by the epic story The Ramayana, which was written by the Sanskrit poet Valmiki in around 300 BC, The Myth will retrace The Ramayana’s route from North to South India, and show scenes from everyday life that evoke its imagery. Yogananthan is producing one book for each chapter of the original story; he started the project with a book called Early Times, which helped him win the ICP Infinity Award Emerging Photographer of the Year. Book two, The Promise, has been nominated for the 2017 Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles (along with image-makers such as Antoine Agata, JH Engstrom, and Roe Etheridge).
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Lively street art takes Capital by storm

Source Daily News & Analys by Chhavi Bhatia
The mention of city walls often conjures up images of paan, tea, and other unrecognisable stains, apart from ugly concrete structures that have taken on the colour of dust and smoke of the city.Off late, however, the Capital is coming alive in a riot of colours as various groups take on the work of beautifying the drab and dreary walls with street art and graffiti. These huge canvasses also serve as a media to promote indigenous as well as international art forms, while spreading messages of social relevance. Yogesh Saini, Founder of the Delhi Street Art (DSA), which is often credited with revolutionising the way the citizens look at the walls, said: "Having travelled all over the world, I personally felt that graffiti and street art form should be replicated in Delhi as well. It provides a breather to the indifference and coldness we associate with these stone configurations."
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Portraits of India

Source The Indian Express by Divya A
The five floors of Rubin Museum in New York City’s bustling Chelsea neighbourhood are teeming with people even on a weekday afternoon. As you enter the elevator, instead of the respective floors, the buttons are marked by the exhibits that one is looking to visit — “The World is Sound”, “Sacred Spaces”, “Masterworks of Himalayan Art” or “India in Full Frame”, the India-centric exhibition by master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Even though the exhibits traverse Asia’s diverse cultures, regions and narratives, one is surprised to notice most people looking to visit the India exhibit. Or not so surprised actually. As its curator, Beth Citron, puts it: “The exhibition shows many of Cartier-Bresson’s most iconic and important photos from India, which have not been shown together in the US before.” Citron adds that the 69 photos on display in the exhibition were selected by Cartier-Bresson himself, so the intended audience was not specifically American.
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Art: The Best Of Both Worlds

Source Business World by Carol Goyal and Tanya Goyal
We have often debated whether working (and living) abroad gives Indian artists a superior aura, and an unfair advantage over their brethren who live and operate out of India. Francis Newton Souza lived in London from 1949 to 1967, and then, in New York from 1967 to 2002. Syed Haider Raza made Paris his home starting 1950, till he finally returned to New Delhi in 2010. Sohan Qadri left his home in Punjab to migrate to Copenhagen in 1968. He died there in 2012. Eric Bowen lived in Oslo from 1971 to 1988, and then split his time between the US and his Oslo home between 1989 and 2002. One can look at many more examples: Krishna Reddy, Sadanand K. Bakre, Sakti Burman, Avinash Chandra, Mohan Samant, Natvar Bhavsar, Velu Vishwanadhan, Rajendra Dhawan, Ambadas, Zarina Hashmi and Sujata Bajaj. Each of them lived abroad, or continue to live abroad, paint and prosper.
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