India Art Fair 2017: Art Projects, 02 Feb 2017 — 05 Feb 2017
Fairs

India Art Fair 2017: Art Projects

NSIC grounds, Okhla Industrial Area, NSIC grounds, Okhla Industrial Area

RATHIN BARMAN: One, and the Other (Site 1-4)
Supported by: Experimenter
Urban architecture and architectural forms are one of the primal interests of Rathin Barman’s recent practice. Documentation of architectural sites in the form of sculptures & drawings unveils many facets of structural evolution to define the idea of contemporary urban landscape. “One, and the Other (Site 1-4)” is a series of architectural maquettes of century old buildings from Calcutta, that are about to be demolished. Such a process of transformation introduces a different idea of space, material and structural notions, which have been juxtaposed or emotionalized to mark a series of architecture in situations through the sculptural pieces.

KANU’S GANDHI: Photographs by Kanu Gandhi
Supported by: PHOTOINK
Kanu Gandhi (1917-1986) was the son of Narandas Gandhi, a nephew of Mahatma Gandhi. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, where Narandas worked as a manager. In 1934 Gandhi came to Wardha, in Central India, and founded Sevagram, which soon became a bustling ashram. Though Kanu wanted to be a doctor, in 1936 he was persuaded by his father to join Gandhi’s personal staff at Sevagram where he came to be known as ‘Bapu’s Hanuman’. It was during this time Kanu developed an interest in photography and persuaded Gandhi to allow him to photograph him. Gandhi imposed three conditions on Kanu: that he would never use a flash; that he would never ask him to pose; and that the Ashram would not fund his photography. Edited from a long forgotten archive, these painstakingly restored photographs offer an extraordinarily rare and intimate account of the Mahatma’s life and his interactions with political leaders of the freedom movement.

JOËL ANDRIANOMEARISOA: When the day belongs to the night
Supported by: Sabrina Amrani
Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present When the day belongs to the night, a project specifically created for India Art Fair 2017 By Joël Andrianomearisoa.For this project Joël made a research trip to India in early 2016 to discover India’s Rich and infinite offer on textiles, the preferred medium by the artist. He found Some interesting textiles, Including saris and Scarfs, and has incorporated this materials to his Practice. Addressing questions about Immigration, identity, belonging and Spectacle, proposes more a painting Rather than an installation and Toys with the notions of landscape and horizon, as it has Been more and More recurrent in his latest works.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES | INDIA & SRI LANKA
Conceptualised by Renu Modi, Director, Gallery Espace, New Delhi
Programming by Serendipity Arts Trust, New Delhi
In collaboration with Theertha International Artists Collective, Sri Lanka
This project that was initiated in the year 2015, is a strong step towards addressing the issues of shared histories within the sub-continent.
Six artists from Indian and five from Sri Lanka embarked on a journey to understand the politics of cities, religions and the stories that places tell. Both Anuradhapura and Varanasi in themselves are witness to the past, the present and serve as a trajectory to the future. The intention of this project at the India Art Fair is to engage, question and re-affirm the importance of the process over the end. The story of this engagement is being bought forth through audio-visual media documenting the interactions of the artists with the city and with each other.

AVINASH VEERARAGHAVAN: Dwell in possibility
Supported by: GALLERYSKE
The project consists of 3 laser cut veneer panels and a video in a room that’s covered with thousands of images from the artist’s visual archive. Placed within this sea of images that represents a tiny mirror to our vast consciousness, the physically layered laser cut panels describe a personal and mythic narrative. An empty discarded chair in ruins, a circus routine and a cartoon of skeletons dancing function as an open ended phrase of a poem. A video edited with found footage of mechanical principles attempts to hypothesise how the narrative may come to be.

ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: “ALL THE FLOWERS ARE FOR ME”
Supported by: Aicon Gallery
Aicon Gallery is pleased to present All The Flowers Are For Me, the first major piece by Anila Quayyum Agha to be shown in India. In 2014, Anila’s now iconic sculptural installation Intersections was awarded the Public Vote Grand Prize and split the Juried Grand Prize at the 2014 ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, MI. The installation has since traveled internationally and nationally with critical acclaim in exhibitions worldwide. In the floral beauty of All The Flowers Are For Me patterns and layers, the cuts and embroidery strive to capture the identity, beauty, and femininity of her mother and other mothers that become obscured by gravestone and shroud. These patterns pay homage to the organic to which death is inevitably linked but from which new life also emerges. The material of the work is stainless steel, painted red and cut with delicate patterns that reflect and refract light. The work encompasses the viewer totally and transforms any environment in which the sculpture is shown.

MITHU SEN: Phantom Pain
Supported by: Nature Morte
Continuing her explorations into language, poetics, drawing and installation, Mithu Sen will present a new work which straddles defined categories of art-making as well as the distance between the artist and her audience. Sen’s practice is auto-biographical and cathartic, she delves into psychological terrain and gives form to her emotions.

PARUL GUPTA AND HEMANT SREEKUMAR
Supported by: Exhibit 320
Parul Gupta’s work is rooted in a performative subjectivity of body, perception and architectural space. For Gupta, drawing reflects a series of concerns prompted by repetitive action both fueled by internal (somatic & psychic) and external (drawing & environment) phenomena simultaneously. Hemant Sreekumar performs synthetic audio compositions using principles of emergence and noise. Artists Parul Gupta and Hemant Sreekumar’s collaboration started at 1After320 through its program ‘Artist Process’ which looks to enable formats through which cultural producers working within and outside of institutional spaces simultaneously, arrive at various possibilities that push their practice forward. Collaborating at various stages through 2016, the iteration at IAF 2017 includes site-specific drawings and interventions by Parul Gupta alongside an executable code and projection by Hemant SK titled PGX – ALPHA that is based on an instruction set by Gupta. Hemant in a sense unfolds the process – where the ‘growth’ manifests as a sequential decay into nothingness and re-emergence.

NO MAN’S LAND
Supported by: Britto Arts Trust (Bangladesh) & Shelter Promotion Council (India)
“No Man’s Land”, a community based public art project was held between 22-27 March 2014. The border and the huge fence between India and Bangladesh not only divide similar ethnic groups of people having similar culture, language and history but interrupt the natural flow of biodiversity as well. It was an attempt to do the project across the border to shape and understand the strong historical, cultural and sociological contexts that govern in Bangladesh and India.
Artists concentrated on the villages of Bholaganj in India and Puran Bholaganj in Bangladesh. They finally made it to meet with each other without passports on 27th March 2014 at the physical space of No Man’s Land.

SUDARSHAN SHETTY: Taj Mahal
Supported by: KNMA
One of the most innovative artists working with a radical contemporary sensibility, Sudarshan Shetty is interested in the journey that an object makes across its boundaries. Shetty’s sculptural installations with the amalgamation of incongruous objects and mechanized moving parts have an unpredictable element of poetry and shock. The subversion of scale and material radically transform the ready-made an enable new meanings. Sudarshan explores material and medium in order to examine history, memory, and desire.
“Taj Mahal”, is constructed with more than 250 miniature metallic reproductions of the monument, within which there is a video sequence showing the central dome of the actual building, a mausoleum for love, consumed by flames. One of the seven wonders of the world, its aura has been marketed and consumed as tacky metal and stone souvenirs. The multiple copies speaks of its commoditisation, asking us to consider how an icon representing immortal love, is abused and manufactured as mindless reproductions.

FRANCIS LIMERAT: Untitled
Supported by: baudoin lebon
A dark-red column stands erect, cutting into the void. It is made of wood-stick structures one may watch through. A sort of eye-catcher the lines of which draw limits in and out for the viewer to imagine perspectives deep inside or beyond the first-sight embrace. Its human-sized format invites anyone to wander when following the lines on the surface or making his/her way through the scope of his choice and allows a playful confrontation to anyone passing by.

NARAYAN CHANDRA SINHA: Liberating the soul
Supported by: JSW
As an artist, I perceive every human being as a free soul and essentially a part of Mother Nature. But the soul that is naturally free is subject to existential claustrophobia under the pressure of societal constraints and of course under the shackles of one’s own frantic pursuit of material objectives. This installation is my attempt to portray these aspects of human life through structures, and to address the question of existential choice: whether we do away with human qualities and become machines in the process of worshiping machines, or we connect with our primordial origin Mother Nature as a child is born of and get nourished by its mother.

BROOKHART JONQUIL: Ziggurat
Supported by: Floodlight Foundation
Floodlight Foundation is proud to produce and present its artist-in-residence, Brookhart Jonquil’s breathtaking light installation (not shown here), especially commissioned for the India Art Fair 2017. Central to his artistic oeuvre is his desire to represent nothingness, to imagine and present the immaterial, through materials like glass, mirror and light; materials which themselves have very little presence, but come into existence based on their interactions with other objects.
Brookhart Jonquil (b. 1984) was born in Santa Cruz, California and lives and works in Miami. Brookhart has had several solo and group exhibitions, in Miami, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Tuscon among others and part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscon, Fountainhead Collection, Miami, Fundacion Pablo Atchugarry, Uruguay among others.

AKHLAQ AHMED: Portrait of an Artist as a young man.
Supported by: Gallery Ragini
This title is taken from James Joyce’s novel, Joyce speaks of the political and socio-cultural changes of Ireland about the political climate of England . Dublin is the setting and while speaking of the life of the city he speaks of his own life.
Inspired by this grand narrative Akhlaq Ahmed attempts to capture the nuances of his life which are spread over rural Uttar Pradesh, Mumbai, Delhi and London. He reached Mumbai and started working on hoardings. He painted sign boards for the wayside eateries. He travelled to England to participate in several international exhibitions for street art and graffiti art.

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NSIC grounds, Okhla Industrial Area, NSIC grounds, Okhla Industrial Area
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