2017: When art broke out of gallery walls and went public

Source New Indian Express by Trisha Mukherjee
Art has traditionally been used as a medium of expression but conversations have often been restricted within the four walls of a gallery, catering only to a niche audience. In 2017, however, public art took on a life of its own -- breaking down walls of confined spaces and spilling out to the streets, making the art experience accessible to all. So the 142-year-old Sassoon Docks, housing one of Mumbai's oldest fish markets, became a vibrant canvas and an old barge in Goa was transformed into an art space during the 2nd Serendipity Arts festival. Earlier this month, designer and artist Manish Arora embellished Mumbai's Jindal mansion with yards of cloth, hand embroidered and printed, as a symbol of love and peace. Walls in public spaces became canvases for those looking to expand their creative spaces, whether at the ghats in Pushkar or a Delhi Metro station wall.
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"Textiles of Bengal" at Mingei International Museum

Source Blouin Art Info
Mingei International Museum in San Diego, California is currently hosting an exhibition of works titled “KANTHA - Recycled and Embroidered Textiles of Bengal.” The show features traditional quilted textiles created from the remains of worn garments — the craft technique is known as Kantha. These works are created in West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. Historically, the area of Bay of Bengal where river Ganges flows into the sea has been the source of the finest cotton ever produced. The works on display are completely handmade and the embroidery is created through the use of thread from the colored borders of cast-off sarees. Kanthas depicts colorful sceneries from rural areas and elements drawn from a rich local repertoire.
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Discovering the best and brightest in contemporary art at Serendipity Festival

Source Sunday Guardian by Bhumika Popli
Primarily famous for the sun and the sand, for its churches and nightlife, Goa’s Panjim city readjusts itself to an entirely new setting for about eight days every December, to host the Serendipity Arts Festival. This year’s edition was held from 15-22 December, with a range of art events, exhibitions, talks and musical performances feature on the event’s week-long billing. “Goa is a pretty amazing place, it is scenically fantastic and December has a great weather,” said Sunil Kant Munjal, founder and chief patron, Serendipity Arts Foundation, on his choice of making Goa the base for Serendipity. “Goa celebrates all kinds of different cultures and is very inclusive of people belonging to different cultures, this is exactly what we are trying to show in this.”
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Les tout petits prix de Noël de l'art contemporain

Source Les Echos par Judith Benhamou-Huet
Enfin, Hervé Perdriolle, spécialiste de l'art indien contemporain, possède une galerie en appartement, rue Gay-Lussac, accessible uniquement sur rendez-vous. Il a consacré un catalogue entier à ce qu'il appelle des « affordable curiosities ». Une impression laser de 2008, éditée à 100 exemplaires, représentant un chasseur assis les jambes croisées par Atul Dodiya (né en 1959), un des noms célèbres de l'art contemporain indien est proposé à 600 euros. Le peintre de Vadodara T. Venkanna (né en 1980), qui a acquis un auditoire relativement international, aime bien, lui aussi, revisiter l'histoire de l'art à sa manière. Il a réalisé un ensemble de petites esquisses à l'encre (13 × 10 cm) qui montrent des personnages en mouvement. Ils sont à vendre 300 euros pièce.
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The core idea is to push contemporary art: Aparajita Jain

Source DNA by Manish D Mishra
Art purveyor Aparajita Jain started Seven Art Limited (a gallery based in the heart of New Delhi), a month-and-a-half after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Quite a daring step at that point in time. However, with her single-minded vision and tireless passion over the years, she managed to create a brand and nurture some of the game-changing artists of our times. In 2010, the dynamic visionary founded the Saat Saath Arts Foundation (SSAF), a first-of-its-kind initiative she built to catalyse international exchange between India and the world. The foundation is forging a plethora of close-knit artistic relationships with a panoply of international curators, museums and galleries.
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Art is about creative problem solving: Peter Nagy

Source DNA by Manish D Mishra
How significant is the role of the arts? - I’m not the person to be asking that as my entire life and world revolves around art. Honestly, I would ask why would someone not be interested in art? It doesn’t have to be contemporary art, as all art forms and from all times and cultures are connected. But culture in general is now the engine of the economy and art overlaps with all other disciplines and vocations. Art is about creative problem solving and critical thinking, and I think all aspects of our life and world have to be approached with more creativity.
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Tribal Art Forms: bringing Indian ‘tribal arts’ into the mainstream

Source Livemint by Tanuj Kumar
Averse to presenting a fossilized version of “tribal arts”, the platform aims to show it as a “living tradition” that is in dialogue with contemporary practices. While the folk arts were traditionally intertwined with religion, mythology and ritualistic practices of indigenous people, their move from the village walls to the white cube of a gallery or people’s homes requires a sympathetic filter of research and curation that Tribal Art Forms can provide. If the platform could enable meaningful discussions, the term “tribal art” could perhaps be reclaimed. Many aesthetic terms were initially used pejoratively, to mock passing fads and fancies. “Gothic” was first used by its critics to describe barbaric or unrefined arts; “baroque”, to describe kitsch or the excessively ornamental. Both terms have been salvaged. Avenues like Tribal Art Forms, with an informed approach in curation, fostering relationships between indigenous artists and the public, could help redefine the term for our times and perhaps, someday, even render “tribal” altogether superfluous.
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Kochi-Muziris Biennale a major driver of art, culture in India: Report

Source The New Indian Express
KPMG in India Chairman and CEO Arun Kumar said, "It is exciting to see how the biennale has rapidly become one of the leading global festivals of contemporary art along the lines of its European counterpart, the Venice Biennale." The event also garnered huge support on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Within the first ten weeks of the first edition of KMB, it gained 12.3 million hits on Facebook and has 90,274 followers as on 18 May 2017 on this social media site, the report added.
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The British Museum Begins Its Big Makeover With a New China and India Gallery

Source Artnet News by Javier Pes
The Queen officially opened the British Museum’s Gallery of China and South Asia in early November in the presence of its benefactor, the Hong Kong- and London-based businessman, philanthropist, and former museum trustee Joseph Hotung. But it wasn’t until this past weekend that the public finally got to see the full reveal of the spectacularly revamped space. Formerly the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of Oriental Antiquities, the redesigned and renamed gallery runs the length of the museum building above its north entrance in Bloomsbury.
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FotoFest Announces Details for 2018 Edition Focusing on India

Source FotoFest
“The artists, all of Indian origin, are imagining and responding to what India means today in its myriad complexities, given its ancient culture and more recent emancipation from British colonialism,” says Biennial Lead Curator Sunil Gupta. “They were selected by a process of portfolio reviews and face-to-face meetings with nearly three times as many artists than are in the show. The final short list was arrived at by assessing the engagement of their works with both the issues and the technology that define photography in the world today.”
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An exhibition in Delhi brings together key political works of the late artist-pedagogue KG Subramanyan

Source The Indian Express by Vandana Kalra
The panels in black and white illustrated by him now occupy centre spread in a solo dedicated to the artist at Delhi’s Art Heritage Gallery. Coming little more than a year after his demise in June 2016, the show “Seeking a Poetry of the Real” brings together his key political works, that are also some of his most significant works 1969 onwards. The period before this, his close associate R Siva Kumar describes, was a “period of extended self-preparation”. In the exhibition catalogue, he writes, “During the first two decades of his career he appears to have had little interest in the social and political world around him — at least when we look at it both in relation to his later art, and to his activities in the decade between 1938 and 1948.”
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Jyoti Bhatt: Embracing rural rhythms

Source Milliennium Post by Uma Nair
Jyoti Bhatt brings to Rukshaan Art in Mumbai a show that captures his journeys across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar from the 1960's to the 1990's. Walking into India's villages and capturing women and children and huts and walls, this series of photographs is more than a documentation. It is an archive of the living traditions of India's rustic villages – the arts and crafts of the folk idiom that were not just forms, but living relics of the rituals that were integrated into the lives of humble dwellers embodying narratives that hark back to centuries ago.
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Folk Theorems

Source Open the Magazine by Ritika Kochhar
“Not since Pupul Jayakar’s times has anyone in the government looked at revitalising these crafts and artists,” Pundole says. “Now the private sector will have to take it up. The original traditions slowly started dismantling as education and developments in science caused people to question religion and blind beliefs. Now, as it continues to grow out of a collectible base, more people are producing it. But they have to ensure that they aren’t cloning the work of successful artists and focusing too much on stylisation and repetition.” What’s the difference between tribal and folk art? “Folk art is familiar. It’s traditional and passed on from generation to generation, mostly in agrarian communities. It’s used for decoration and aesthetics mainly. The spirit of the work is in the imagery. Tribal comes out of nomadic people and the imagery is based on certain practices or rituals. It’s mostly functional. It had no identity till J Swaminathan brought it to the public eye. Non-urban is a term I like to use. Tribal and folk has too many connotations,” he says.
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Leading Indian, South Asian galleries to woo visitors at India Art Fair 2018

Source Business Standard
Platform, which acts as a springboard for emerging art practices and art collectives from South Asia, will welcome Tribal Art Forms and Delhi Crafts Council (both New Delhi) for the first time. Pichvai Tradition & Beyond (New Delhi) will return, making vernacular arts a particular focus. Platform will also welcome back Britto Art Trust(Dhaka), Nepal Arts Council (Kathmandu), Swaraj Art Archive (Noida) and Blueprint 12(New Delhi). Complementing the fair's regional perspective, carefully selected international galleries will showcase globally-recognised artists, many of whom have never exhibited in India before. David Zwirner (London/New York/Hong Kong), Blain-Southern (London/Berlin),Karla Osorio Gallery (Brasilia), Mo J Gallery (Busan) and Richard Koh Fine Art(Singapore/Kuala Lumpur) will participate for the first time.
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Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 picks its first artist

Source The New Indian Express by
Versatile and provocative painter Nilima Sheikh, whose illustrious body of works is a scorching portrayal of the turmoil in Kashmir valley and a mystical depiction of women-centric issues, has become the first artist to get the curator’s nod for the fourth edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), which begins exactly a year later -- December 12, 2018.Anita Dube, the curator of the upcoming KMB that is hosted by the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF), announced Sheikh’s name today, formally setting in motion the process of selection of her artists for the high-profile contemporary art event that has redefined the cultural landscape in Kerala and India. During her over five-decade career, the 72-year-old Vadodara-based painter has produced an incredibly magnificent oeuvre, wielding her brush to make an intense depiction of subjects, with particular emphasis on Kashmir, Partition and displacement. Her strength also lies in the portrayal of grimness of contemporary life like oppressive patriarchy and the silent suffering of women that crack social fabric and she does it through use of traditional idioms and motifs.
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India’s First Public Sculpture Park Opens in a Spectacular 18th-Century Fort

Source Artnet News by Skye Arundhati Thoma
As for the impressive location, Nagy told artnet News that the majestic surroundings provide the perfect setting for contemporary artworks. “It was important to find something not too large and sprawling, where we would not have been able to maintain a focus. Madhavendra Palace is just so different in its architecture and modernist aesthetic—it provided us with the focus we needed.”
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Placing contemporary art in history

Source Livemint by Radhika Iyengar
Featuring works by artists such as Subodh Gupta, Thukral & Tagra, Bharti Kher, Stephen Cox and Evan Holloway, the Park boasts of larger-than-life bronzes, beautifully carved out wood pieces and stone works. Only three pieces have been made from scratch for this space, “everything else is borrowed and are older works”, says Nagy. Some even date back three decades, including a 1984 bronze creation by the late French artist Arman.
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Painting outside patriarchy

Source The Hindu Business Line by Rosalyn D’Mello
It is a universally unacknowledged secret that Amrita Sher-Gil struggled with facial hair — a characteristic potentially revealing of her Punjabi genes, despite her half-Hungarian matrilineal ancestry. In the postscript of her 1934 letter to her parents announcing her desire to return to India from France, primarily in the interest of her artistic development, she rants about her hairy woes. “My beard is growing and increasing hopelessly and it looks horrible and I am plucking at it all day long.”
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Jangarh Singh Shyam's Enchanted Forest

Source Millennium Post by Uma Nair

This New Sassoon Dock Art Project Shows How Barriers Could Be Broken

Source Mid-Day by Benita Fernando
This has been the case at Sassoon Dock, situated on the southern tip of the city, ever since the art project opened early in November. Famous for its historic association as the one of the oldest docks in the city and its fish market, and equally infamous for its stench, the character of Sassoon Dock has been transformed during the course of this initiative. The team behind it, St+Art India Foundation -- a New-Delhi-based non-profit committed to bringing Indian and international artists to create public art in urban spaces -- has aptly used the tagline Art for All, for this project.
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An exhibition brings together iconic works of art to tell India’s story in relation to the world

Source The Hindu by Ranvir Shah
Fashioned out of white quartz, two little hand axes sit together at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS). They look similar — jagged, oblong, unremarkable. But these tools, dating back 1.7 million years — one from Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) and the other from Attirampakkam (Tamil Nadu) — are here for a reason: they tell the story of shared ancestry across continents. And this is the starting point of ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’, an exhibition that tracks the country’s interactions with the rest of the world over a million years through over 200 iconic objects — tools, seals, sculptures, paintings, pottery, textiles. The objects have been brought together from collections across India and the British Museum to commemorate 70 years of Independence.
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Climate for change

Source Financial Times by Melanie Gerlis
To mark its 25th anniversary next year, Dag Modern gallery, headquartered in New Delhi, plans to make its mark with a show of around 1,000, mostly 20th-century Indian works from its collection. They will be presented across 18 exhibitions under one structure in the grounds of the city’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Slated for February, the month-long show will overlap with the India Art Fair (February 9-12). Both events will focus attention on India’s art market, which is still small in the scheme of things — accounting for about half a per cent of global auction sales in 2016, according to the Tefaf Art Market Report.
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What happens when some of India’s biggest artists display their work in a tech park?

Source Scroll In by Nikhita Venugopal
Anu Menda, the managing trustee of RMZ Foundation said that over the next few years, they plan to add roughly 20 more sculptures as well as expand the collection to Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai. The foundation is an initiative of RMZ Corp, one of India’s leading commercial real estate developers. Although the artists showcased at Ecoworld have gained both international success and recognition, their work needs a platform for greater exposure in India, Menda said. By creating a public gallery, the foundation offers both employees and visitors a chance to experience and enjoy the presence of good art.
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Indian Art in Paris

Source Frieze by Skye Arundhati Thomas
In the film I am Twenty (1967) by Indian filmmaker S. N. S. Sastry, the narrator asks a group of young men and women – all of whom were born on 15 August 1947 (the day of Indian Independence) – how they feel about the 20-year-old nation state of India. A young man with a mop-top, unimpressed by the question, replies: ‘I don't have any love for the country, I don’t want to show off like other people and say, “Oh, I’ve got a love for the country” – whom shall I tell? Whom shall I tell that I have a love for this country?’ He bursts into a Beatles song instead: ‘I should have known better with a girl like you.’
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Arts What’s Behind the UK’s New Love Affair with Asian Art?

Source The London Economic
This September the Saatchi Gallery launched its annual START art fair. The event serves as a showcase for emerging artists around the world. Among them this year were a number of exciting Asian artists: contemporary Indian artist Owais Husain, Chinese performance artist Liu Bolin and Vietnamese painter Nguyen Van Du. This is part of a growing trend which has seen Asian art explode in the UK over recent years. The work of Asian artists has sold for huge amounts at auction, and has been displayed in wildly popular shows around the country. As works sell for record sums and the public floods to Asian exhibitions in record numbers, what is behind this new fascination?
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Read between the dots

Source The Telegraph by Srimoyee Bagchi

Bengaluru festival 'Experimenta' celebrates experimental cinema

Source The New Indian Express
Dubbed as Indias first and only international biennial celebrating experimental films and moving image art in India, "Experimenta" kicks off on Tuesday. The festival offers over 70 contemporary and rare historical films from across the world over 6 days at the Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan here. The programme sections include Artist Profiles and Talks, Curated Programs, International Competition, Feature Focus and Performances. In its endeavour to celebrate the history of experimental cinema, the festival will screen rarely seen archival restorations of critically acclaimed films from Mozambique, Algeria, the US, Italy and India.
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Sold! Camille Claudel art sells at $4.1 million in Paris, breaks records

Source Hindustan Times
The star of the auction late Monday, a bronze called “The Abandonment”, went for nearly 1.2 million euros, twice its estimate. The statue is one of a series inspired by the Indian myth “Shakuntala” about an overlooked wife from the Hindu epic “Mahabharata” from which Claudel drew parallels with her own tumultuous relationship with Rodin, who was both her lover, boss and artistic rival. It was snapped up by an “international collector”, auction house Artcurial said. Interest in the “unprecedented” sale of bronze, plaster and clay works still owned by the artist’s family was intense, it added. French museums also stepped in to try to stop 12 works that were sold at the auction to stop them falling into private hands or going abroad.
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