This exhibition successfully traverses the terrain of art and geopolitics—an area often littered with clunkiness and earnest failure
Curated by Sima Familant, Breathing. Room opens October 18, showcasing renowned artist Ranjani Shettar’s first exhibition in Portland. Her monumental installation Morning Song—crafted from lacquered wood by Indian artisans—explores the balance between industrialization and nature. The exhibit invites viewers to pause and reflect on space and stillness. This exhibition also includes work from the following artists: Jeff Elrod, Naotaka Hiro, Kwangho Lee, Kwon Young-Woo, and Tsai Yun-Ju.
Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections examines how the cultural currents and consciousness-shifting artistic movements of the 1960s continue to be relevant today. Marked equally by hope and loss, the decade ushered in a transformative period of rapid social, political, and technological change.
The Barbican Centre hosts a spectacular site-specific commission by Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar. Cloud songs on the horizon, Shettar’s first major institutional show in Europe, features a series of new, large-scale suspended sculptures across the entirety of their iconic Conservatory.
In partnership with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA).
Rummana Hussain (1952–99) is widely considered one of India’s foremost conceptual artists. I had the great fortune of seeing her last solo show before she died, “In Order to Join,” held at Art in General in October 1998.
Every aspect of Ranjani Shettar’s artistic practice is rooted in the natural world. Her studio, where she often works out of doors, is located in rural Karnataka in India. That local context is important since she draws on established craft traditions to find the tools and techniques that might be adapted to contemporary sculpture.
Africa Rising is the inaugural exhibition of FAM’s new collection of 21st-century Africa photography, a sampling of the recent explosion of fine art photography on the continent. The exhibition includes photographs by internationally acclaimed artists Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Lalla Essaydi (Morocco), Aida Muluneh (Ethiopia) and Al-An deSouza (Kenya). Themes that recur across this visually stunning show include identity in the aftermath of colonialism, environmental exploitation and decay, female empowerment, and Afro-Futurism. Africa Rising, and the expansion of FAM’s collection, are supported by a generous grant from the Geneviève McMillan – Reba Stewart Foundation.
It's the Barbican Conservatory's first site-specific work.
Installations by the Indian sculptor hover harmoniously amid plant life — but with a warning about our need to respect the environment.
Brutalist architecture and an expansive urban jungle form the context for Shettar’s thoughtful and handcrafted sculptures.
Floating forms unfurl in Ranjani Shettar’s sculptural installation, Cloud songs on the horizon, responding both to the wildness of the conservatory’s planting and the surrounding Brutalist structure, writes Nyima Murry.
Ranjani Shettar’s ‘Cloud songs on the horizon’ suspends sculptures amid the Barbican Conservatory’s plant life.
Drawing from the natural world, the handcrafted sculptures are suspended across the entire 23,000 sqft space.
The Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar has been commissioned to respond to the space and she does so brilliantly. Using steel armatures cloaked in stained muslin cloth, Shettar has created sculptures that evoke fruits and seeds, insects and perhaps human forms, while remaining defiantly abstract.
Sculpture and nature collide at this unmissable exhibition that's currently on display at the Barbican Centre's adored Conservatory
Arriving at the Barbican Centre’s Conservatory space to experience the sculptural work of Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar, Cindy Huang gets lost within an ever-overgrowing jungle, leading to thoughts on post-colonial reimaginings of the botanical space.
Celebrated Indian sculptor, Ranjani Shettar, adeptly blends elements from the natural world with industrial components to craft expansive and immersive installations. She works with materials including beeswax, wood, organic dyes, vegetable pastes, lacquer, steel and cloth, creating environments inspired by her observations of the increasingly threatened ecologies of rural India.
Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network is a major exhibition exploring the history of Godzilla Asian American Arts Network, which was active in the 1990s. The exhibition will showcase the work of individual artists involved with the network at the time. Spanning two gallery spaces, the show includes established artists and also amplifies the voices of artists who have not been centered in the canon, and who made their careers showing in alternative spaces.
Must-see shows during Frieze London range from surveys of veteran artists Sarah Lucas and Marina Abramović to new commissions by Trevor Yeung and Farah Al Qasimi.
Kartik Sood’s solo debut in the US, “Elusive Spaces,” is an achievement of aching delicacy. Semitransparent, often partial renderings of human figures hover amid smoky forests and haunting crepuscular interiors.
In that moment: Artist Kartik Sood is creating waves with his painting exhibition at Talwar Gallery in New York. It showcases works created during the pandemic, besides other recent creations. As an artist who spent long hours in the studio, the lockdown wasn’t so “radical” for him, but he could see the shift around.
Shettar's engagement with expressive possibilities of wood and her interest in the beauty of the unexpected in nature brings to life this rosewood sculpture while incorporating the knots, grain, cracks and even her chisel marks.
‘Pour, Tear, Carve’ connects Phillips Collection to present and past. Crack, weave, pulse — many other verbs could be added to the three in the main title of the Phillips Collection’s “Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection.” The name refers to the 69-artist exhibition’s embrace of works that are not limited to paint on canvas. But the show also demonstrates the museum’s growing interest in art that’s local, contemporary and socially engaged.
April 3 – June 4, 2023
Celebrating India’s diverse culture and traditions through the works of contemporary Indian and global artists, ‘Sangam/Confluence’ marks the opening of the ARTHOUSE at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and celebrates India’s diverse cultural impulses and traditions. The inaugural exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote and Jeffrey Deitch include amongst others works by Cecily Brown, Lynda Benglis, Ranjani Shettar and Bhupen Khakhar.
Celebrating India’s diverse culture and traditions through the works of contemporary Indian and global artists, ‘Sangam/Confluence’ marks the opening of the ARTHOUSE—a dedicated space for visual arts at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre—and celebrates India’s diverse cultural impulses and traditions.
The Institute of Arab & Islamic Art has inaugurated its new space in Manhattan’s West Village with the first (and long overdue) U.S. presentation of Rummana Hussain (1952-1999), a pioneer of India’s conceptual and performance scene.
In her recent solo show, “Just like that,” Sheila Makhijani’s ongoing romance with line and color took on a pared-down, simplified form. Soft powdery blues and pinks, reminiscent of sunsets in the monsoon season, dominate the top rows, giving way to horizontal panels of lemony and mango tones before finally descending into darker shades of earthy and muddy browns.
Al-An deSouza has created art across various mediums for more than three decades, examining and embodying transnationality in spite of racism and colonialism
Rummana Hussain (1952-1999), one of India’s pioneer conceptual and performance artists, was born a secular Muslim into a well-placed political family in Bangalore. She began her career as a painter but her burgeoning political activism prompted her to expand her formal range. Feminism was a shaping force. So was the explosion of anti-Muslim violence by Hindu nationalists in 1992. Together they pushed her to make work that spun from her identity as a member of two embattled minorities.
Right now, the pioneering Indian artist Rumanna Hussain is having her first solo institutional show in New York at the newly reopened Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA). The exhibition, titled “The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal,” is not far from where she first showed her work in the city back in 1998 at Art in General. Then, New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote, “It begins with suspended pieces of dark cloth suggesting veils worn by Islamic women and continues with a few photographs.”
Al-An deSouza will present the third Migrations Visiting Artist Talk, “The Culture of Location,” in conjunction with their current exhibition at the Johnson Museum, Al-An deSouza: Elegies for Futures Past.
DeSouza will discuss the genre of landscape in relation to migration, settlement, and climate change. The title of their talk is a play on The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, now a classic of postcolonial theory. DeSouza’s transmedia practice explores the legacies of colonialism through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation.
Al-An deSouza’s experiments in photography routinely challenge everyday notions of the photograph as recording a fixed moment in time or providing reliable access to the past. This exhibition combines three recent photographic series—Flotsam (1926–2018), Elegies for Futures Past (and other Fugue States), and Anthology—with an earlier series, The Lost Pictures, in ways that question such notions about photography in relation to family memory, diasporic identity, and the broader sweep of historical change linked to colonial empire and its ongoing repercussions.
Women Painting Women is a thematic exhibition featuring 46 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works. This presentation includes approximately 50 evocative portraits that span the late 1960s to the present. International in scope, Women Painting Women recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. Painting is the focus of the exhibition, as traditionally it has been a privileged medium for portraiture, particularly for white male artists.
The artist’s new photographic series, “Flotsam,” at Talwar is similarly time-traveling and memorial in function. (The works are not documentary photographs but digital paintings based on a photographic original.) In this case, the pictures are of material possessions left behind by deSouza’s father after his death in 2018...
This occult quality permeated Kartik Sood’s solo exhibition “In Thin Air.” Featuring works from the past two years, the show drew on the romantic idiom.
Acclaimed painter-sculptor N.N. Rimzon talks about art and what inspires his life-size sculptures
A silent ruin recalls an untitled Mohamedi, but the whimsical elements are Sood’s own: a water glass under a tangerine sun, a bare tree in the sky, a small cloaked figure at the edge of a cliff.
On view
The artists and artworks presented in Individuals, Networks, Expressions form a complex web of connections. Together, they create a story of visual art that unfolds across time and intertwines individual and shared experiences. At the centre of this web is Asia, a geographic designation and a broad cultural space that informs a spectrum of identities, histories, and perspectives.
The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction with works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s. Far from being a mere catalogue, the exhibition reveals the decisive turning points that marked this development, the specific contexts for creation, the research conducted by the artists, individually or in groups, as well as the founding exhibitions.
Ark of Martyrs: An Autobiography of V (Sming Sming Books, 2020) is a rewriting — or, in the author’s words, a “polyphonic replacement” — of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness. In the vocal traditions of gospel, toasting, and rap, Allan deSouza (Art Practice) substitutes Conrad’s words with ones that loosely rhyme. DeSouza’s resulting text creates a portrait of dystopian contemporary life, replete with unspeakable desires, political antagonisms, and legacies of war.
DeSouza is joined by Lawrence Cohen (Anthropology and South & Southeast Asian Studies). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.
I’ve long turned to works of art as a way to process current events and wrestle with problems — both political and personal.
One of the most significant functions of a museum, after all, is to make space for works of art to console, inspire and prod us to think in new ways about the here and now.
An installation of works from The Met collection, takes its inspiration from Robert Colescott’s 1986 painting of the same name: a pointed, passionate rumination on the past and present of Black and Indigenous American experience, in which the painful legacies of colonialism and enslavement remain unresolved. Much like Colescott’s painting, the works here, a number of them acquired in the past five years and several given in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary, take measure of the social and political forces that animate contemporary life.
Another Energy focuses on 16 female artists in their 70s or older, from across the globe, who continue to embark on new challenges. Showcasing their wide array of powerful works from paintings, video, sculptures, to large-scale installations and performances, this exhibition contemplates the nature of the special strength - “Another Energy” - of these women who have all continued challenging throughout their long-standing careers.
Sometimes they pause, to listen to the music.
Dubbed "A tale of two stones", The Seventh Walk with its contemplative images and sitar score is a film meant to be slowly absorbed, a production following the creative process of an Indian artist Paramjit Singh, playing himself.
Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning sets out to examine the spectrum of the extended mind through artistic and theoretical means. The Biennale argues for the primacy of plurality, positing that points of origin and influence ought to be accessed not only through the dominant technological systems and machinic vocabularies traceable to the West but also relate to heterodox ancestries.
The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, celebrates its centennial with Seeing Differently. The exhibition marks the first major celebration of the museum’s permanent collection in over 10 years and includes works by Paul Klee, Mondrian, Rothko, Pollock, Picasso, de Kooning, Calder, Jacob Lawrence and Ranjani Shettar amongst others...
Nasreen Mohamedi’s works from the late 1970s—intricate monochrome lattices previously on fine display at the Met Breuer’s landmark solo in 2016—operate so powerfully in the realm of “pure” abstraction that the critic Geeta Kapur has placed her “within a great lineage of metaphysical abstraction in a way that no other [Indian] artist is.”
From mundane objects to rapidly changing surroundings and her own ponderings, for artist Anjum Singh the subject remained experiential. Her complex compositions held multiple layers within, including fragments of her experiences and fight with cancer, which she succumbed to on November 17 in Delhi. She was 53.
Eminent contemporary Indian artist Anjum Singh passed away on Tuesday after losing a prolonged battle with cancer, art collector Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, said. She was 53.
The artist, whose deeply autobiographical works investigated the internal worlds of the body, passed away today after a six-year-long battle with cancer.
The South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley is delighted to present a conversation between sculptor, painter and printmaker, Alwar Balasubramaniam and Atreyee Gupta - Assistant Professor, History of Art Department @ UC Berkeley.
The art of Paramjit Singh merges with the art of nature
The South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley is delighted to launch Crisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series, a new speaker series that addresses provocative and generative intersections between creative processes and societal, cultural, and environmental crises. The first event in Crisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series features a conversation between photographer, multi-media artist, and Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, Allan deSouza and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University, Gayatri Gopinath .
An enigmatic figure sits cross-legged in a meditative pose in the middle of a circle in N. N. Rimzon’s sculpture The Round Ocean and the Living Death, 2019–20, which lent its intriguing title to the artist’s most recent exhibition. The statue’s nose and closed eyes are vermilion, offering a vivid contrast to its grayish body...
When the pandemic struck, Ranjani Shettar was at her home in a village in Karnataka's Shivamogga district, 300km away from Bengaluru.
"One creates dimensions out of solitude." - Nasreen Mohamedi's diary entry, Sept. 1968
In 1968 the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi noted in her diary, ‘One creates dimensions out of solitude.’ An apt expression when most of the world finds itself in isolation, reminding me of her Untitled (circa 1970), a quiet and elusive work in which a realm of patterned, ruled lines appears to be subtly and effortlessly emerging from a gray wash...
STIR in conversation with Alwar Balasubramaniam about the nature-based processes, techniques and conceptual narratives in his work, at the Talwar Gallery in New Delhi.
One of the world’s foremost collectors of Indian art, Kiran Nadar founded her first museum in Delhi 10 years ago.
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art turns ten this year. We celebrate the past decade, bringing back vignettes that will highlight the museum’s multi-focal vision, its evolving mission, directions and journeys undertaken, mapping intersecting histories of the subcontinent.
Panel Discussion with Allan deSouza, Schwanda Rountree, Melanee Harvey, & Mel & Juanita Hardy
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, US
Taking as a point of departure her epistolary project Letters to Leena, a series of correspondences to her mixed heritage daughter, curator Jemma Desai and artist Jasleen Kaur present a selection of works from British experimental filmmaker Alia Syed.
Jyoti Dhar on the opening of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka.
Anjum Singh explores the dynamics of a disintegrating body, finds Shweta Upadhyay.
Anjum Singh has transformed personal afflictions to a more universal level of human experience in her layered images
Allan deSouza’s book, How Art Can Be Thought (Duke University Press, 2018), examines how we evaluate if art is good as well as art’s claims to be for the social good. The book provides an extensive analytical glossary of common terms used to discuss art, focusing on their current usage and adapting them to new artistic and social challenges.
Anjum Singh dissects the corpuscular. She enters the internal domain of her own body and imagines the drama that is unfolding at the level of the cellular. She performs this surgical act with a painterly hand that seems convinced of its curative capabilities.
The curatorial model of Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life posits itself against an art industry’s paradigms of efficiency and production, which stand into relation to real conditions of production and often deprive exhibitions of their potentiality. The exhibition is instead taken as a medium which gives us an opportunity to share knowledge and create new meaning.
Anjum Singh’s autobiographical exhibition I Am Still Here at Talwar Gallery in New Delhi, has easily been one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2019.
Migrating Worlds brings together work by eight of Britain’s leading film and video artists in the first exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art dedicated exclusively to the moving image.
This round table places in conversation three recently published monographs. The scholars discuss how their work approaches questions of aesthetics, visuality, and difference, and what it means to decolonize the practice of making, displaying, thinking, and writing about art.
Artist Anjum Singh’s time as caregiver to her body started in 2014, when she was diagnosed with cancer.
Rarely has an exhibition been as keenly anticipated as Anjum Singh's forthcoming, and autobiographical I am Still Here, almost an invocation by the artist whose absence from the current art scene has been the result of life-threatening cancer which she has been grappling since 2014.
Rummana’s works are of particular interest because of the controversial socio-political issues she addresses.
An interview of Alwar Balasubramaniam with Chitra Balasubramaniam of Sculpture Magazine.
Earth Songs for a Night Sky, a multi-faceted project by Ranjani Shettar (b. 1977, Bangalore, India) is on exhibit through August 25, 2019 at The Phillips Collection.
With pieces made of steel, wood, and other materials, the sculptor's work depicts elements of nature.
It is safe to say that little, if any, art is created in a vacuum. But rarely is the connection so direct as in Ranjani Shettar’s exhibition “Earth Songs for a Night Sky,” at The Phillips Collection.
This summer, Indian artist Ranjani Shettar debuted a new body of work inspired by the words and woodcut images in Klänge.
The Phillips Collection presents its first Intersections project of 2019, Earth Songs for a Night Sky, featuring seven sculptural pieces by Ranjani Shettar (b. 1977, Bangalore, India).
If you come at twilight, you’ll see them: the distorted circular shadows on the walls next to the original Phillips House staircase.
Earth Songs for a Night Sky is a multi-faceted project by Ranjani Shettar. Occupying two rooms and the staircase of the original Phillips House, the project is conceived in dialogue with Wassily Kandinsky’s artist’s book Klänge (Sounds)—which features 56 woodcuts and was published right after he had made his breakthrough into abstraction—and Klee’s late paintings in the Phillips’s collection, including Arab Song (1932), Efflorescence (1937), and Figure of the Oriental Theater (1934).
Allan DeSouza's book is both a reflective investigation exploring how artistic meaning takes shape and a functional handbook that clarifies terms often used in the art world without much lucidity.
Unhinged by events of 1992-93, Rummana embarked on a courageous pursuit to excavate the marginalization of the other, their means and sustenance. Now, over 25 years after they were first created by the artist they still resonate with renewed vigor, except what were local origins at the time are now pervasive around the globe, abundant in echoes of intolerance to secularism and self.
Arpita Singh was discovered by accident. In the early 1970s, scholar and costumier Roshen Alkazi-who, along with her husband, Ebrahim Alkazi, is responsible for hundreds of contemporary art exhibitions in India-found one of Singh's paintings mixed up with the works of another artist she was hoping to exhibit. Alkazi presented Singh's first solo exhibition at New Delhi's Kunika Chemould Gallery in 1972.
Artist and writer Allan deSouza speaks with James Voorhies, CCA Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice, about his recent publication How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change, which examines the popular terminology through which art is discussed, valued, and taught.
Abstract artist Sheila Makhijani asks viewers to make sense of her lines, brimming with a life of their own.
In Sheila Makhijani’s exhibition “This That and The Other,” a disarray of strange, vibrant objects lies before the viewer, as if they were artifacts from some underwater civilization revealed by the ebb. The glazed and unglazed ceramics...
Sheila Makhijani’s new show in Delhi, ‘This, That and the Other’, reaffirms her ideas of the language of art and what it must express...
Sinuating ripples along a shoreline, the sound of waves—one cannot underestimate the calming effect certain kinds of landscape have on the psyche. However, in Alia Syed’s work Meta Incognita: Missive II (2018)—the second in a trio of roman à clef–style films whose themes center around the River Thames in England—all is not what it seems.
In our many years of friendship I have never heard Arpita Singh talk about her art; it is a subject she studiously avoids.
A retrospective of one of the country’s most celebrated modernists maps six strong decades of her artistic trajectory. "My choice of words come to me organically, I can’t explain how or why I write certain lines or phrases," Singh says...
Arpita Singh’s paintings speak through whispers and silences. Her love affair with the printed word leads her to use letters and numbers
Arpita Singh is one of the most significant women artists in India. This retrospective exhibition at KNMA gives an extraordinary opportunity to view six decades of her art practice.
Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum is very pleased to host the launching exhibition Alchemy: Explorations in Indigo of the Arvind Indigo Museum. Seeing indigo as an art form, the exhibition will have national and international artists using indigo in multiple media and forms to create a world of all things indigo.
In Ranjani Shettar’s installation “Seven Ponds and a Few Raindrops,” looping, delicate steel forms covered in tamarind-stained muslin sway ominously in midair, evocative of parched flora or exoskeletons
Which female artist doesn’t dream of a solo at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York?
Solo Exhibition of the Year: Ranjani Shettar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Won for Seven Ponds and a Few Raindrops, where her shape-shifting stainless steel elements covered in tamarind-stained muslin speak evocatively of the threatened natural environment of rural India, showing both her ethical and aesthetic commitment to the natural universe.
After nearly a decade of limiting her marks, Singh returned to figurative painting with a vocabulary of abstract marks. It seems to me that Singh should be known internationally. Her figurative paintings and these abstract works on paper add up to an extraordinary achievement.
Though Ranjani Shettar, who turned 40 last year, is a mid-career artist (at least by Western standards), her work remains youthfully lyrical and close to nature in ways that evade her closest American counterpart Sarah Sze, whose work is busier and more mechanical.
International museums and galleries are organising retrospectives of Indian artists and acquiring their works for permanent collections.
New Cartographies delves into the unique ways that contemporary artists such as Tiffany Chung, Allan deSouza, Li Songsong, and Sohei Nishino are incorporating cartography into their practices as they look at globally relevant topics such as urbanization, economic migration, environmental change, refugee movements, and the repercussions of colonial legacies.
Allan deSouza’s Through the Black Country, or, The Sources of the Thames Around the Great Shires of Lower England and Down the Severn River to the Atlantic Ocean reenacts and upends iconic colonial narratives of discovery in Africa.
The Indian Artist Ranjani Shettar first exhibited in the United States in 2003, just three years after getting her MFA in Bangalore, and has shown here steadily ever since.
A review of "Liquid Lake Mountain" at Talwar Gallery, New Delhi. The invisible forces of nature and their effect on the material world continue to engage the artist.
Engaging with videos or films in a dark or semi-dark space, where things come closer to life or create a world of their own, the presence of colour, touch, sound, movement, apparitions, light and shadow, draws one into a complex technological environment. One is moved by the potentiality of the mediums used by artists, their diverse and occasionally precarious themes processed through the intricacies of looped time and nuanced languages. The world of today is disenchanting and distraught, yet alluring and demanding, desiring poise and equilibrium
Artist Ranjani Shettar, 41, on her ongoing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, her love for installations and why she takes inspiration from nature and tradition
"Can nature's fragility be perceived?" Ranjani Shettar on her installation Seven ponds and a few raindrops
The title of Ranjani Shettar's Seven ponds and a few raindrops (2017)—which joined The Met collection as a gift from the Tia Collection, and is on view through August 12—compels audiences to apprehend the sculpture's abstract elements as constitutive of a literal landscape of seven ponds.
Light in Wartime brings together photographers whose works shed new light on war, both forensically and symbolically. In a world so hounded by images of war, many of the photographers featured in Light in Wartime challenge the conventions and limitations of traditional reportage, underlining the tensions between art, fiction, and photojournalism.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has two big shows this season that attempt to caution us against a dystopian future.
Ranjani Shettar’s sculptures are often described as large. But although many of them stretch across a vast expanse, they tend mostly to float in, rather than occupy space.
Birds in flight and their chirping, trees with foliage, meandering rivers... the quietude of Ranjani’s work communicates to the onlooker, who experiences a sense of well being and happiness.
The Karnataka-based artist's exhibitions at The Met and the Talwar Gallery, in New York, affirms her ethical and aesthetic commitment to the natural world
The local became global with the arrival of Indian artist Ranjani Shettar’s installation Seven Ponds and a Few Raindrops (2017) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which brought a slice of her native country to one of the most international cities in America.
A process is often understandable only by the connections between its products, and it was with this in mind that Alwar Balasubramaniam’s recent show at New Delhi’s Talwar Gallery was a feat of curatorial ingenuity.
Usually composed of numerous nonrepresentational forms, Ranjani Shettar’s immersive environments are inspired by her observations of the now-threatened natural environs of her native India.
After more than two decades, artist Alwar Balasubramaniam has taken up the brush again, and chosen to wander into the realm of clouds.
I met the artist Alwar Balasubramaniam in Mumbai recently. What struck me about Bala, as he is popularly known, was the sense of serenity he seemed to possess - his calm demeanour, his scientific approach to life's problems and his determination to arrive at clear solutions, were quite impressive.
Pools of pigment and binder evaporate from Alwar Balasubramaniam's canvases in the solo Liquid Lake Mountain at Delhi's Talwar Gallery, leaving behind cracks that are evocative of atrophy in the natural world.
Artworks are commonly viewed as stand-ins for the artist, as the truth of the artist’s interiority manifested in material objects. Allan deSouza will consider his own work through this desire for “truthiness,” what possibilities there are for artistic doppelgangers and fictional stand-ins, and what roles they might serve in an era of “fake news.”
You Remind Me of Someone relies on mechanisms triggered by resemblance, mimicry, and reciprocity in order to explore our relationship to images in a world in which they multiply endlessly on a daily basis. The visual and gestural similarities between the works question affinities, elicit encounters, seek to find a common thread in this continuous flux.
Allan deSouza is chair of the department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, and the artist behind a fascinating new world map that premieres today at the Krannert Art Museum.
DeSouza’s most recent work reenacts and upends iconic colonial narratives of discovery in Africa.
Each of these exhibitions showed me something I had not seen before. An admired artist in India, Arpita Singh, who is best known for her figurative paintings of woman, often floating in an elusive space, rarely shows in America and that is our loss. These drawings will likely surprise those who know Singh’s figurative work.
If there is one word that describes Ranjani Shettar’s installations and sculptures, it is “happy."
Ranjani Shettar, arguably one of India’s foremost visual artists, is exhibiting at the gallery till 12 August. In every respect, Bubble trap and a double bow is a perfect show. With just 12 works on display, it’s a lesson in precision: small enough to allow quality time with each piece—a rarity today—and large enough to justify being called an exhibition.
Best known for her figurative paintings, Arpita Singh unveiled a series of early abstract works for her ongoing show, 'Tying Down Time', at New York's Talwar Gallery.
Echoes of the natural world reverberated through Ranjani Shettar's solo show "Bubble trap and a double bow."
Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora, organized by Asia Society Museum with the support of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, considers the work of nineteen contemporary artists from the South Asian diaspora who explore notions of home and issues relating to migration, gender, race, and memory across mediums and aesthetics
An admired artist in India, Arpita Singh rarely shows in America and that is our loss.
The images that inhabit the figurative paintings Arpita Singh has been making since the late 1980s spring to life with excitement and energy.
Eighty-year-old Arpita Singh spent almost a decade in this self-training, with an occasional urge to use colours, when small strokes of orange and yellow began to make appearances.
Arpita Singh’s first solo at New York’s Talwar Gallery offers a shorthand into the lexicon of the artist’s mind.
In the 1970s, the figurative artist went through a radical period of experimentation. Now those works are being exhibited for the first time.
Making films since 1986, acclaimed artist Alia Syed’s recent works combine her interest in storytelling with a compelling presentation of history as visual narrative. Her unique approach connects different subjective positions in relation to culture, diaspora, and location.
Immigrant, exile, refugee, traveler, stranger: these are the figures that define our time. They are alternately the fantasy and the nightmare of globalization—neoliberalism dreams of a “flat earth,” a world system where laboring bodies travel across borders as easily as capital, while populism fears those same bodies as dangerous, even deadly, parasitical drains on local economies and civil society.
Visions From India is a celebration of artists who proffer their own paths that link them to India and the rest of the world.
Visions From India is a celebration of artists who proffer their own paths that link them to India and the rest of the world.
Visions From India is a celebration of artists who proffer their own paths that link them to India and the rest of the world.
Allan deSouza, chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, presents an exhibition that reenacts and upends the traditional colonial relationship, positioning modern-day England as the object of investigation by an explorer from Africa.
The exhibition brings into focus the works of five artists who spent their formative years in Kerala and whose subversive art practice problematised the discourse of Indian Art in the 1980s and 1990s.
Experience meditative depictions of the sea with Sri-Lankan artist Muhanned Cader.
What is the self? What is reality? Far removed from the physical realm, the philosopher revels in the world of the abstract. Abstract artist Alwar Balasubramaniam applies such philosophical inquiry to his sculpture. We discover more about the life of the voraciously philosophical artist Alwar Balasubramaniam.
The Vogue Art Report highlights 10 other seasoned artists you must cast your eye on. Including artist Alwar Balasubramaniam.
It feels like the right time to reassert global consciousness in the universe of art. Even some of New York’s large and conservative museums have been thinking this.
For the 2016 Phillips Collection—University of Maryland International Forum, leaders across disciplines will discuss artistic and curatorial approaches to visual narratives of migration and immigration.
The work of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) seems both a textbook example of the complex fusion of intellectual, cultural and personal experience that constitutes international Modernism, and an ideal opportunity, particularly as one of the inaugural offerings at the newly opened Met Breuer, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to demonstrate how it might expand both the museum’s and the public’s understanding of the ‘global’, the ‘local’ and the ‘individual’.
Nasreen Mohamedi used the grid as a scaffolding to order her thoughts, feels Meera Menezes, as she moves through a major retrospective in New York
These immaculate, quiet, and perfectly disciplined drawings are exercises at one level, and at another, they constitute the very proof that lines drawn with the aid of a set square, a ruler and a pair of compasses can create the premises and conditions of art.
Alia Syed made her early 16mm films at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in the mid 1980s, using the Co-op’s optical printer as a means to explore issues of identity and representation. Her films draw from personal and historical realities in order to address gender, location, diaspora and colonial memory.
Thiruvananthapuram-based artist N.N. Rimzon is known to reflect his socio-political concerns through his works. His works — mostly figurative — are conceptual and minimalist in nature through which he pares down typical imagery in order to reach the core of things, basic states and fine qualities of humanity.
"One of the inaugural exhibitions at The Met Breuer is a retrospective of Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990). Organized by the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition spans Mohamedi's entire career, bringing together works on paper, photographs, and little-seen diaries."
The Indian artist invests abstraction with the weight of the natural world through the slow, controlled application of air and water.
Mohamedi’s retrospective feels like a private enclave, suiting a woman who wrote of creating art from solitude. The curators, Sheena Wagstaff with Roobina Karode of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and Manuel J. Borja-Villel of the Reina Sofia in Madrid, aim for spaces suitable to works on paper.
Any clear distinction between the human and the natural in Alwar Balasubramaniam’s refined sculptures has become increasingly blurred since he abandoned Bengaluru, India, for his ancestral village in Tamil Nadu. His latest exhibition features a series of textured monochromes, the surfaces of which uncannily resemble geological formations shaped over millennia.
This traveling career survey of the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) is in every way exquisite.
The galleries on the second floor of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s brand new enterprise, The Met Breuer on Madison Avenue, devoted specifically to modern and contemporary art opened with a retrospective of the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, indicating a commitment to non-Western art for the museum, and conversely securing the artist’s prominence within a global narrative of modernism.
In her art, she seems to have been released from the burden of comprehension and yielded herself up to that terrible void — which was also, say the mystics, the divine, the infinite.
Pianist Vijay Iyer has an unlikely backstory for a musician who’s been voted jazz artist of the year in Downbeat magazine’s critics’ poll, received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, and is a professor in Harvard’s music department.
N.N. Rimzon’s works explore the interplay between spiritual and material worlds claims Meera Menezes.
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Vijay Iyer team up on a new project.
In his first solo show in the capital in 23 years, N.N. Rimzon presents recent works that explore the themes of creation and annihilation and confirm his status as one of India’s most deeply intellectual artists.
“We are proud to present Nasreen Mohamedi in our first wave of exhibitions at The Met Breuer,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Met. “Mohamedi’s work calls on us to expand our understanding of graphic minimalism in a transnational context. It is a project that speaks to our interest in introducing a broad range of audiences to the innovative work created by artists across borders.”
In her landmark essay on the grid, Rosalind Krauss outlined the form’s reductive modernist ontology, and its exemplary capacity to align the work of art with its material support.
This traveling career survey of the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi is the smaller of the two Metropolitan Museum's two debut exhibitions in the Breuer Building, once occupied by the Whitney Museum, and it is in every way exquisite.
When a beloved building goes dark, a hole opens in the urban fabric: so it was when the Whitney Museum left its old home on New York’s Upper East Side, constructed by Marcel Breuer in blunt granite and concrete in 1966.
This week, thousands of miles away from the country she called home, one of our most important but relatively less remembered artists is having a retrospective in New York City.
With his new solo show in Delhi, artist N.N. Rimzon demonstrates why art cannot be separated from society and politics.
One of the most significant artists to emerge in post-Independence India, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) created a body of work that demonstrates a singular and sustained engagement with abstraction. The Met Breuer exhibition, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, is an important part of the Met’s initiative to explore and present the global scope of modern and contemporary art.
A new exhibition at the Met Breuer gallery in New York pays tribute to Mohamedi, a pioneering artist who quietly redefined South Asian modernism.
A retiring presence in Indian art during her life, Nasreen Mohamedi is now at the center of global issues of contemporary art.
The opening of the Met Breuer signals opportunity and responsibility in equal measure
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would be taking an eight-year lease on the Marcel Breuer building left vacant by the Whitney Museum’s move downtown, the first question everyone asked was: Why?
My whole life, I’ve entered the Metropolitan Museum the same way: up the majestic stairs, through the vaulted lobby, then right towards Ancient Egypt, left towards Greece and Rome, or straight ahead, down a hallway of ancient bric-a-brac leading back to the Middle Ages.
The Van Every/Smith Galleries and Davidson College are pleased to present Contents Under Pressure, featuring the works of Allan deSouza and Alia Syed.
As one enters his ongoing exhibition, Forest Of The Living Divine, at Talwar Gallery in New Delhi, one is struck by the spectacular appeal of his paintings and sculptures. Warm colours dazzle the eye, towering statues seem to grow upward, and tiny figurines sprout like saplings from the floor.
In 1995, Rummana Hussain walked through the precincts of the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, her mouth wide open in a soundless scream. In a performance titled Living on the Margins...
FT writers select some of the artists, performers or events that will make their hearts beat faster
One of India’s pioneering performance artists and conceptualists, Rummana Hussain is known for her bold explorations of female subjectivity trapped in discourses of family, religion, nationalism, and welfare.
The late Rummana Hussain’s ongoing exhibition displays the scars of religion, gender and sexuality
Indian artist Ranjani Shettar discusses how her sculpture is a concrete version of her experiences ‐ those transient feelings and environments that exist purely because of perceptions.
Time / Image explores the interrelationship of time and thought in contemporary art. The exhibition borrows its title and, loosely, its philosophical framework from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995).
Nasreen Mohamedi was one of the first Indian artists to embrace abstraction, moving away from the more conventional doctrines of Indian modern art in the early decades of the 20th century. The exhibition, organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, displays her work – combining thought and action – in the intersections between her life and her art.
“I first encountered Mohamedi’s work at the Walker Art Center, when my colleague [curator] Douglas Fogle included several of her photographs in an exhibition [“The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982,” 2003-04]. I found them extraordinary.
The Phillips Collection celebrates the fifth anniversary of Intersections, which since 2009 has presented the work of 22 artists—9 men and 13 women—from the US and abroad. This exhibition presents works by Intersections artists that have been acquired to date, both pieces that were featured in past installations and new works that are reminiscent or emblematic of the projects. Most importantly, the anniversary exhibition is a celebration of the Phillips’s mission to actively collect and display contemporary art.
The “gestural” exists as a shallow act of mere rhetoric—one that lacks what novelist and social critic James Baldwin described as the “integrity of the artistic practice”—and as a poetically precise and self-aware act, which we are so desperately seeking in order to move away from the fraught contexts that the art world often becomes immersed in.
In 2011, the Phillips Collection in Washington commissioned Allan deSouza to create a photographic response to Jacob Lawrence’s 60-painting “Migration Series” (1940-41), half of which is owned by the Phillips, the other half by the Museum of Modern Art in New York
You can almost feel a swish of wind in the gentle, at times almost imperceptible, grooves throughout Alwar Balasubramaniam’s fiberglass-and-acrylic piece Wind Waves, 2012.
Alwar Balasubramaniam is holding a solo “Layers of Wind, Lines of Time” at Talwar Gallery in Delhi. With the show, he challenges, yet again, the viewers’ perception of space, time, gravity and perspective through twenty-one works.
"My ideas are better represented in my works than they can ever be in my words," Alwar Balasubramaniam cautions before he begins to talk about his ongoing exhibition, "Layers of Wind, Lines of Time," presently on view at Talwar Gallery in the capital.
As a young student, Sri Lankan-born artist Muhanned Cader was enthralled by British adventurer John Still’s Jungle Tide, a 1930s-era memoir of his time on what was then the island nation of Ceylon.
You can’t pin down the ‘Indianness’ in his art. Yet few contemporary artists can match Alwar Balasubramaniam’s rise
This epic show takes Kazimir Malevich’s radical painting of a black square – first shown in Russia 100 years ago – as the emblem of a new art and a new society. The exhibition features over 100 artists who took up its legacy, from Buenos Aires to Tehran, London to Berlin, New York to Tel Aviv. Their paintings, photographs and sculptures symbolise Modernism’s utopian aspirations and breakdowns.
There are some shows where the spectator recognises value in it because of the ideas that it espouses or by the trajectories of thought that are fuelled by the viewing of a particular piece or the entire show as one unit.
Inspired by Derek Jarman, the Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of artist filmmakers in the UK.
Galle Fort, Fort Kochi presents a series of 29 seascapes, intricately rendered in graphite on wood panels. Originally created as an installation at the 2014 Kochi Muziris Biennale, Galle Fort, Fort Kochi engages with an environment, the seaside, that is both specific and, as Cader points out, remarkably universal.
One of Ranjani Shettar’s diaphanous, constellation-like sculptures of hand-molded wax beads and cotton thread, installed at the entrance to “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century,” at the Museum of Modern Art, made a stellar introduction to that 2010 show.
On a sunlit afternoon in Mumbai, surrounded by a handful of well-wishers and cultural peers, Rummana Hussain (1952–99) embarked upon her inaugural performance piece, Living on the Margins (1995).
With a population of over a billion people, a rising economy, and a rich visual culture, India is nevertheless underrepresented in what we call the "global art world."
Sri Lankan artist likes to keep his works 'simple' for commoners
For The Sketch, we take a look at the evolving practice of an artist who will be featuring in our next issue
Nasreen Mohamedi reveals the artist’s significant contribution to modernism that expands the boundaries of Western art history and offers an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of abstract art. Featuring more than 50 of her works, Nasreen Mohamedi charts the evolution of Mohamedi’s work, exploring how she, like Mondrian, moved away from a figurative style and developed her own unique approach to abstraction.
This exhibition brings together a group of international artists active between the 1950s and today, all of whom explore new frontiers for abstraction. The line functions in a variety of ways, including: writing, weaving, notating, diary-keeping, nature, the body, the environment, and the everyday; each resulting in expanded, eroded, and perverted grids generated by a liberating line.
In a world of complexity, simple ideas are hard to grasp. Born and raised in the beautiful country side of Karnataka, Ranjani Shettar is inspired by nature, and in 'Between Sky and Earth,' presents works that are simple yet complex as nature itself.
Ranjani Shettar on making wood float in air, metal fly and threads soar.
The Seventh Walk is a wistful and beautiful voyage into the world of dreams and the creative process by experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta. It is set entirely in the popular tourist landscape of the Kangra Valley and based on the art of landscape painter Paramjit Singh.
Abstract Drawing is Drawing Room’s fourth artist-curated exhibition, a strand of the programme that aims to provide insight into the ideas that inform the work of key contemporary artists.
Shettar’s solo in Delhi comprises eight new wooden sculptures, including a small work, titled Remanence from Last Night’s Dream, carved from rosewood and lacquered wood and fixed to the wall like a painting. This work draws from the artist’s memories of watching children of her generation play with Channapatna toys (toys made from lacquered wood in rural Karnataka).
About five months ago, I visited the Talwar Art Gallery to see Navjot Altaf's sculptural installation, and I ended up having a long and gratifying chat with the artist.
In an art scene dominated by blockbuster productions and larger than life installations, Ranjani Shettar is perhaps one of the few sculptors who insist on carving and creating her work by hand without the help of assistants.
At one level, the exhibition reflects upon the immediate and the impending political and social crisis through acts of resistance, and at another level, it becomes a site of recuperation and healing. The selected artists have been committed to a socially engaged practice since many years. Through their seminal works, themes that touch upon issues of oppression, violence, historical identity and cultural memory will be addressed in diverse formats and modes of representation.
In her last journal entry, she writes: “Vibrations multiply. Intensity of sweep. Undulative. Curve slowly comes to a ...,” and the writing falters, jumps, drifts off like a thread unspooling, but finally forms a closed circle. I can’t imagine seeing a more beautiful and tender gallery solo this winter.
I first wrote about Mohamedi’s meticulous line drawings and abstract photographs in the Brooklyn Rail (December 2008–January 2009) and now, five years later, I found that the work has grown more powerful over time.
The South African artist William Kentridge is best known for creating low-tech animated films, often based on charcoal drawings, that explore the painful effects of apartheid.
The installation will juxtapose historical objects and architecture with works by contemporary artists that employ traditional Islamic styles, materials and subject matter as their source. Framed beneath the Museum’s stunning 17th century Persian mosaic arch, visitors will see how contemporary artists are drawing upon their cultural and visual past to explore personal, political, and aesthetic concerns.
The current exhibition continuing through August 23rd at the Talwar Gallery, New York, entitled Found, features the work of Indian and Sri Lankan artists Aishya Abraham, Muhanned Cader, and Srinivas Prasad.
Set among the pre-modern Indian paintings and Hindu and Buddhist sculptures of LACMA’s South and Southeast Asia wing, Alia Syed’s Eating Grass (2003) is a dreamy filmic experience.
Unlike much contemporary Indian art, Mohamedi’s works feature an austere, mostly black-and-white palette and stark geometric compositions, mostly constructed through lines traced in graphite or pen and ink on paper, though at times she also captured the geometry of real-life through photography.
Is it a swallow in flight, or a slow dagger ascending, a map, a mask, the gruff mouth of a cave, or perhaps a nameless form?
Makhijani mostly works in a painterly tradition—hectic brushstrokes and jagged lines fill her art with a nervous energy. She manages to convey an intrinsic edginess without relying too heavily on impasto—the layering of colours—or outré iconography.
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago IL | February 14 - June 9, 2013
Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC | September 13, 2013 - January 5, 2014
Since 1989, the influential Delhi-based Sahmat has offered a platform for artists, writers, poets, musicians, actors, and activists to create and present works of art that promote artistic freedom and celebrate secular, egalitarian values.
The show shimmers with the artist’s formidable black-and-white prints that flash insights into the world around her
It is not often that museums furnish us with spaces for meditative contemplation—especially when they are located in bustling shopping malls.
In the history of Indian Modernism, Nasreen Mohamedi is a distinct figure who broke away from the mainstream art practice of the early decades of post-Independent India, choosing the less explored trajectory of the 'non-representational'.
The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is the Gallery’s flagship international contemporary art event, and the only major exhibition series in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia. APT7 continued the series’ forward-thinking approach to questions of geography, history and culture and how these questions are explored through the work of contemporary artists.
The poet Lord Alfred Tennyson might have characterized nature as “red in tooth and claw”, but Bangalore-based artist Ranjani Shettar would be unlikely to agree.
In a new show inspired by the elements, Ranjani Shettar continues to coax adamantine materials into elegant sculptures.
Ranjani Shettar’s Varsha, an artist’s book published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art in late 2012, evokes aspects of 16 phases of the monsoon and the classical Indian astronomy used to predict them. The accordion-folding volume, bound in hand-worked metal, includes 16 original prints, each corresponding to a specific period of the rainy season.
Shettar's large installations draw inspiration from natural forms recalling the surreal beauty of magical creatures and sensuous landscapes. She gives imaginative form to natural phenomena as diverse and unique as the interaction of light and water, the luminescence of fireflies and the kinetic response of plants to sunlight.
Through the work of artists from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand, Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia examines recent directions in contemporary self portraiture in Asia.
Now Here is also Nowhere is a two-part meditation and non-linear account of how—in making artworks about ideas and intangible concepts— artists continually question and destabilize the nature of the art object.
The rules of time, gravity and scale feel suspended, if only for a moment, in the immersive environment created by Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala for short) at Talwar Gallery.
LACMA's presentation of a special screening of selected works by artist Alia Syed in their original 16mm format, in conjunction with her exhibition Eating Grass, located in the Ahmanson Building. In between screenings, Elvis Mitchell, Film Independent at LACMA curator, join Syed to discuss her work.
Experimental filmmaker Alia Syed makes her West Coast debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with an installation of her film Eating Grass.
"I often take longer to pack my sculptures than to make them," says the 35-year-old Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar.
Appropriately titled Nothing from my Hands, Bala’s current exhibition continues to explore the theme of absence found in his previous works.
Straddling the threshold between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, the physical and the spiritual, object and space, Balasubramaniam’s deeply philosophical sculptural practice insists that the second term of each of these dyads be understood not as mere lack or negation, but rather an independent, empirical state, observable under appropriate conditions.
The 18th Biennale of Sydney, all our relations, was the first to be developed by a curatorial duo, Artistic Directors Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster. De Zegher and McMaster proposed that an exhibition that could function as a collaboration between curators, artists and audience; a ‘collective composition’ that championed values of connectivity, conversation and compassion as models for being in the world.
This winter the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, launched its new contemporary art space with Ranjani Shettar’s enigmatically titled show Dewdrops and Sunshine.
The exhibition Lines of Thought explores the work of 15 contemporary artists, whose practice has focused in particular on using line in creatively challenging ways. With works representing different generations, it is remarkable to observe how the meaning and use of line varies from one artist to another.
Alwar Balasubramaniam puts his palms flat against the wall in a small room in New Delhi’s Talwar Gallery and scoops out the fresh white plaster—or at least it appears that he does so—as he talks.
Rummana Hussain's politically aware, philosophically provocative, yet obstinately poetic, self-referential art presents us with a complex, if at times an uncomfortable, perspective of a lived experience, which continually reaffirms her significance as an artist and her installations that continue to blur the lines between aesthetics and activism.
Where did your fascination with art begin?
In 2004, Bangalore-based artist Alwar Balasubramaniam made a sculptural bust of himself cast from sand, fibreglass, and evaporating compound.
Ranjani Shettar says that she turned from painting to sculpture because "I realized I had to move around the object, it had to occupy the same space that I did and there was no illusion in it. Although I was little equipped for it, I knew that was what I wanted."
Artist Ranjani Shettar's light and form installations find place in an exhibition in Melbourne.
A wooden circle, like a polished industrial drum, sits on the floor as a triumph of craftsmanship. This fascinating object by Ranjani Shettar, an artist from Bangalore, is called Flame of the forest.
Enter the NGV International's newest gallery, Contemporary Exhibitions, and you will find yourself transfixed by an ethereal sight: gigantic, buoyant bubble-like creations with wings that seem to float in the air, casting strange but captivating shadows on the gallery's walls.
Ranjani Shettar: Dewdrops and Sunshine showcases the artist’s unique approach to sculpture including material experimentation, relationship to space, engagement with nature, exploration of tradition and resonance with modernism.
Ranjani Shettar carefully unpacks a box containing large, carved hunks of wood.
Allan deSouza’s new video and photographic installation, Close Quarters and Far Pavilions, consists of a four-channel video work of multiple sequences shot from inside commercial flights at the time of take-offs and landings. The title, influenced by M.M. Kaye’s 1978 novel about conflicting identities and split loyalties set in India and Afghanistan, suggests the aircrafts’ cramped spaces and the hand-to-hand combat of “close quarters,” as well as the exotic allure of faraway places.
barely there is a two-part group exhibition that explores issues of immateriality, presence, absence, performance, and the performative. The exhibition also considers the ability of art to engage broad and often intangible concepts by generating a series of connections rather than functioning as a prescribed whole.
Ranjani Shettar's highly intricate sculptural installations are being featured with increasing frequency globally.
Allan deSouza’s current exhibition at the Phillips Collection, produced through an initiative to encourage interaction between contemporary artists and the institution’s holdings, displays photographs conceived as a reaction to Lawrence’s canonical series.
Ranjani Shettar has succeeded in shattering that stereotypical image with her work. Inspired by life and her daily experiences, she resolves problems of weight, balance, space, composition, color and light to bring out the essential character of each material, manipulating how it looks and behaves.
Having spent much of the last couple of years showing at organisations statewide, like the San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art and Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. Bangalore-born sculptor Ranjani Shettar returns to India this month with a show at the Talwar Gallery in Delhi.
Titled 'Present Continuous', the show features Ranjani's new sculptural work in different materials.
Artist A. Balasubramaniam displays his signature brand of invisible and metaphoric works at the Phillips Collection.
The eight works in sculptor Ranjani Shettar's "Present Continuous" may be thought of as visual metaphors for a variety of subtle physical experiences- an obscure fragrance, a touch of the breeze, a hum of sound, a vibration that cannot be located.
The World Series (2010–11) features a group of 30 color photographs by Allan deSouza created in response to Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940–41), from The Phillips Collection.
Intersections is a series of contemporary art projects that explores—as the title suggests—the intriguing intersections between old and new traditions, modern and contemporary art practices, and museum spaces and artistic interventions. Whether engaging with the permanent collection or diverse spaces in the museum, the projects suggest new relationships with their own surprises.
Abstraction hasn’t figured prominently in modern Indian art, critics often interpreting it as a foreign visual language.
Conceived specifically for the Phillips, Sk(in) is a two-part installation occupying the Hunter Courtyard and adjacent gallery space, thereby playing off the artist’s idea of inside-out, outer and inner, and visible and invisible.
Ranjani Shettar coaxes sensuous, almost erotic, sculptures using lacquered natural forms, writes Madhvi Subrahmanian.
Installation artist Ranjani Shettar draws in the air and creates ethereal sculptures that are rapidly winning plaudits, write Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop.
Ranjani Shettar’s installation at Third Floor-Hermès embodies the magnanimity and enigma of the “Flame of the Forest” – a majestic tree considered sacred by Hindus. Its structure and resonance are the basis for this ethereal, sculptural installation that permeates physical and psychological space.
Ranjani's works have been described as calligraphic curves in flight, and as open, hovering articulations says Gridhar Khasnis.
A top Indian artist is transforming the space at Third Floor Hermes with her wooden works
Sheila Makhijani's abstract drawings edgily acquire an added dimension, observes Sophia Powers.
The participating artists will conceive the works based on the perception of sound and ambience, gesture, memory, passage of time, the laws of the world and the social mechanism that go by unnoticed in our daily life.
She plays with light and form, the intangible and the tangible to create work that defies the traditional axis of art. Here's what lies behind artist Ranjani Shettar's canvas.
The gallery spaces are very quiet. Well suited to works like those of Karnataka-based artist Ranjani Shettar. As compellingly soft footfalls take you past the neatly nurtured greens that wait in welcome as you tread beyond the drive into the building, up towards the artworks, what strikes here are the pristine white hues that pervade the dignity of uncluttered spaces.
The exhibition focuses on two new series by San Francisco-based performance and photo-conceptual artist Allan deSouza. The artist uses digital manipulation to play with notions of artistic and technological mastery and to blur the boundaries between photography and painting.
Today’s younger and more experimental artists are reaching beyond the canvas and using three-dimensional spaces to express their concerns and concepts. Anjum Singh in her latest solo show ‘The Skin Remembers’ explores the urban industrialized environment through works that are more sculptural than painterly.
Wispy shapes hang from the ceiling, defying the stark white cube gallery space that houses them.
First City deconstructs Alwar Balasubramaniam's walls. Even as he rebuilds them for us.
As if in direct response to its overscaled, canon-cementing Abstract Expressionism display, the Museum of Modern Art is also giving us something quirky, speculative, physically light, a show called “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.”
As if in direct response to its overscaled, canon-cementing Abstract Expressionism display, the Museum of Modern Art is also giving us something quirky, speculative, physically light, a show called “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.”
NASREEN MOHAMEDI
A. BALASUBRAMANIAM
SHEILA MAKHIJANI
ALIA SYED
RANJANI SHETTAR in
On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century
Rummana Hussain's installations of terracotta pots and mirrors seem to reflect riot-torn bodies, says Shweta Upadhyay.
Ranjani Shettar's large installation makes a splash at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this month.
For Touched, Ranjani Shettar experimented with bronze and presents an elegant installation in the Vide at the Bluecoat that provoked a conversation about the touch between materials and architecture. Cast using the ancient lost wax process, Shettar’s work drew attention to the process of casting bronze.
The Farthest Point brings together new and recent works by the internationally recognized photo-conceptual artist Allan deSouza.
Dreamlands develops a new purpose: to show how international fairs, world exhibitions and leisure parks have been able to constitute models that have influenced the design of the city and its uses. Indeed, if such models have shaped the imagination, nourished utopias as well as the creations of artists, they have also become realities, in which real-life comes to be inscribed, modifying our relationship to the world and geography, to time and history, to the notions of original and copy, of art and non-art.
Bengaluru-based artist A. Balasubramaniam's sculptures and installations are best known for the ways in which the use of different materials, compositions and lighting can undermine the sculptures' defined form, illuminating their physical presence and confounding the audience with visual tricks.
As Assistant Curator of Collections, Exhibitions and Commissions at the SFMoMA, John Zarobell is an innovative figure in the San Francisco art scene.
Since its opening in 1959, the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim building has served as an inspiration for invention, challenging artists and architects to react to its eccentric, organic design. The central void of the rotunda has elicited many unique responses over the years, which have been manifested in both site-specific solo shows and memorable exhibition designs.
The large suspended pieces, each called “Bird Song,” in her third solo at Talwar, are based on armatures made of stainless-steel tubing bent into curves.
Housed in the airy precincts of a light-filled gallery, "Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes-Reflections on Indian Modernism" was an invitation to look and linger.
Beeswax, resin, muslin, tamarind kernel paste and lacquered beads, wood, sawdust and latex - add a little light and shadow, and you have the ingredients for a magician's cauldron.
When is a garden art? When is art a garden?
A square mirror table with a cross drawn across the surface, a circle in the centre, four earthen bowls containing sea sand, a rock and ashes, a shell and water.
Ranjani Shettar constructs poetic, handmade sculptures that refer to the ancient crafts and natural environment of her home and studio, located seven hours outside of Bangalore in the Indian countryside.
A. Balasubramaniam explores metaphysical thought, corporeal presences, and abstract absences in his investigation of spaces as Ella Datta watches enthralled.
Since her “discovery” at Documenta 12 in 2007, Nasreen Mohamedi, who passed away prematurely from Parkinson’s Disease in 1990, has swiftly become a favorite “unknown” among certain art elites.
Alwar Balasubramaniam's sculpture plays with time, shape, shadow, perspective: four tricky sensations that can reveal -- or conceal -- what's really out there.
The only dated works in the exhibition ‘Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes’ at Milton Keynes Gallery are the four pages cut from the artist’s diaries.
His creations stand out among the hundred-odd artworks by contemporary Indian artists on display at the 'Chalo India!' exhibition organized by art collector couple Karlheinz and Agnes Essl at the Essl Museum on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria.
MK Gallery presented a major solo exhibition of work by important Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi.
Nasreen Mohamedi was a major, late-20th-century Indian artist who remains surprisingly under-recognised in the west.
TEDIndiaʹs list of speakers is an inspirational and unusual mix of people from diverse disciplines.
A. BALASUBRAMANIAM'S "In Between", at Talwar Art Gallery in Delhi, is a show that suggests some exciting new approaches to reinventing and recombining Post Minimalism's diverse strains, especially the emphasis on language and the use of dispersed, decentered installations.
The simplicity of A Balasubramaniam’s works is deceptive, masking layers of meaning.
It is, I feel, appropriate to enlist Emily Dickinson’s poetry for my attempt to read and understand Nasreen Mohamedi’s images.
Artists continue to investigate new media by reaching outside of traditional disciplines; categories that define an artist - as a sculptor, painter, textile artist, etc.- are becoming less relevant.
For me the practice of making sculptures comes from around me.
Seen from afar, down the long enfilade of galleries on the 2nd floor, Ranjani Shettar’s Sing along floats above the other more floor- and earth-bound artworks on view.
With extreme discipline, Nasreen Mohamedi’s drawn lines seek to chart the rhythms of wind across desert sands, ocean tides, the play of shadows on outdoor stairways, or across the facades of the Islamic architecture she so admired.
Commercial galleries’ group shows often have the unpalatable taste of stockroom leftovers thrown together at random, less exhibitions than showroom displays, replete with sample works by all the represented artists.
“Focus: Ranjani Shettar” showed the Bangalore-based artist caught in a moment of transition, must like the mix of sculpture on display.
Ranjani Shettar’s first solo museum show included three impressive multipart sculptures.
A traceable evolution of tempered restraint is apparent in this multigenerational group exhibition: The oldest works are drawings that share a sense of moderation with several recent sculptures, despite the distinct physicality of the latter
Ranjani Shettar tells Shilpa Sebastian R. that museums are central for an artist and the audience.
Though consisting of only six works, Ranjani Shettar’s current exhibition of recent works at SFMoMA shows off the depth and range of her capabilities.
Bangalore-based artist, Ranjani Shettar, is only thirty one years old and already an artist of international acclaim-participating in biennials in France, United Arab Emirates, and Australia.
Unlike many contemporary Indian artists currently exhibiting their work internationally, Shettar has maintained close connections to Bangalore, India, where she was born and educated. Her artistic vocabulary is akin to those of postminimalist artists such as Martin Puryear and Eva Hesse, insofar as she explores a variety of materials and displays an interest in both handwork and the conceptual dimensions of art objects.
More than forty years have passed since minimalist artists first began incorporating the space of the gallery into their artistic work, but the impact of sculpture that reflects the inherent possibilities and limitations of its setting has hardly diminished. This practice is fundamental to the work of the artist Ranjani Shettar, although her focus is not solely on the display environment or even the notion of sculpture as it is understood in this realm.
The work of the English artist of Indian descent Alia Syed (Swansea, United Kingdom) is on display for the first time in Spain at this exhibition. Her work Eating Grass (2003), is a succession of sequences in public and private spaces of three cities (London, Karachi and Lahore), assembled as a collage.
Ever lie back, look up at the clouds, and see faces, flowers, and other images?
Artist Anjum Singh’s work, says Bharati Chaturvedi, uses waste, including aluminium, acrylic, commonplace industrial materials, to build up a dynamic, organic urbanscape.
How does Anjum Singh aestheticize litter as she critiques the idea of waste in the city? Meera Menezes finds out.
In Ranjani's first solo exhibition 'Home' (2000), the ambition of the work was to capture the intrinsic beauty of the delicate fabrications made by birds, insects, bees or silkworms - cocoon-like forms, web-like constellations or clusters of berries.
Ranjani Shettar creates large-scale, abstract sculpture by combining manmade and natural materials such as wood, beeswax, cloth, thread, rubber, PVC pipe, wire, steel, and beads. Her works, which appear to be as impulsive and random as they are patterned and logical, are frequently arranged as sculptural installations that interact with and articulate the space around them.
The drawings and photographs of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) are slowly but surely becoming better known to a wider American audience.
Ranjani Shettar's father was convinced his daughter should become an artist from the time she was five years old, Ranjani made the decision for herself at the ripe old age of 13.
Seeing is Believing. In Alwar Balasubramaniam’s case, seeing and believing are two separate acts, depending on your discernment and perception. His prints, paintings, and sculptures, with their constant plays on the visible and invisible, illusion and certainty, challenge notions of the real and the unreal.
In 1996, Muhanned Cader, then a recent graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, rented a studio overlooking Bolgoda Lake, a picturesque reservoir outside the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. Bolgoda was a prepossessing location to the young Cader, who was attracted to the quixotic local landscape.
In his most recent works, Bala realizes the immaterial by making physical that which is tactilely undefined.
This show of large abstract drawings is the third New York solo of work by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) and the most beautiful yet, which means it’s about as beautiful as gallery shows get.
Using lines like the rhyme scheme of poetry, Nasreen Mohamedi created an inventive repertoire that is evocatively poignant. A representative collection of her works will be on display at the Talwar Gallery, New York, till November 15.
Active in the international art scene for the past ten years, A. Balasubramaniam, or Bala as he is better known, has followed an interesting and challenging artistic path.
Third Triennial opens at Guangdong Museum of Art and its satellite museum, Time Museum, consisting of 181 artists from over 40 countries. The curators GAO Shiming, Sarat MAHARAJ and Johnson CHANG Tsong-zung brought together artists that examine the limits of multi-culturalism in a post-Colonial era and the effects on contemporary art production.
The Biennale aims to contribute to “blurring distinctions between center and margin” as well as to a “break from the past of discrimination and exclusivity”, and is organized by Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor, with Co-Curators Hyunjin Kim and Ranjit Hoskote. deSouza will participate in MYDADA, a group effort with the artists Yong Soon Min and Abdelali Dahrouch.
London-based artist Alia Syed presented two new films and a photographic series at New York's Talwar Gallery in late April.
The four series comprising this excellent exhibition – “UFO”, “Lost Pictures”, “Divine” and “Threshold” – pay tribute to ten years worth of work by photographer Allan deSouza.
Karin Miller-Lewis looks at the dialogue between structure and surface in the works of Seher Shah and Allan deSouza.
Ranjani Shettar is a young Indian artist currently working in Bangalore, India. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA; Ninth Lyon Biennale in Lyon, France; and the XV Sydney Biennale in Sydney, Australia. Currently, her work can be seen at “Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International” in Pittsburgh, PA.
Inspired by 'life,' 30-year-old installation artist Ranjani Shettar has created a buzz among the art circles, particularly in the US.
Known as one of the preeminent international surveys of contemporary art, the International was founded simultaneously with the Carnegie Museum at the behest of Andrew Carnegie. It has consistently been among the most innovative and challenging exhibitions of contemporary art-the only regularly scheduled global survey in North America, and the only one presented in a museum.
Carnegie International 2008 artist Ranjani Shettar works on her installation "Just a Bit More," comprising thousands of tiny hand-molded beeswax balls positioned on cotton thread webbing.
The artist's first solo presentation in a U.S. museum will feature a new work entitled Sun-sneezers blow light bubbles. The suspended sculpture made with steel, tamarind kernel powder and muslin, and fashioned into organic shapes reminiscent of soap bubbles, containers of light, or multiplying cells hanging throughout the gallery, creates an immersive, ethereal environment.
Allan deSouza, born in Kenya of Indian parents, has lived in California for years, commuting between a home in Los Angeles and a teaching job in San Francisco. Partly to pass the time on the routine intercity flights, he got into the habit of taking photographs from the plane windows before takeoff, and in the air, and on landing.
Ranjani Shettar's recent solo show, containing two sculptural installations and four woodcut prints, dressed the mundane in the garb of the mysterious.
As Walker Art Center chief curator Phillipe Vergne's pick for the Lyon Biennial - where Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stephanie Moisdon invited fellow curators, or "players" to select "an essential artist of the decade"
Given the depth and maturity of her works, it's surprising that Epiphanies is Ranjani Shettar's first show in India, and that she is only 30 years old.
Mohamedi's Modernistic Idealism
Atsuko Tanaka, Agnes Martin, and Nasreen Mohamedi (Documenta 12, Kassel)
Like the luscious bougainvillea blossoms she pays homage to in her installation In Bloom (2004), Ranjani Shettar's beeswax balls and lacquered bead installations expand into space as if thet had freed themselves from their natural surroundings.
Thierry Raspail, creator of the Lyon Biennale, named this year's 00's-The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named, reflecting his vision of a biennial as a visual history book written by several hands. 60 "players" form two circles, one of curators and critics, and one of artists, to decide which artist or work defines the decade. Co-curated by Stephanie Moison and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Ranjani Shetter, extensively exhibiting abroad but least in the country, continues with her project of weaving multiple moods and memories, light and shades together in her current/ongoing solo show, “Epiphanies: between the bodily and the aural”, at Talwar Gallery, New Delhi
If one leaves Venice annoyed, if not indignant, one goes on to find oneself disoriented in Kassel.
Documenta 12 investigates three questions: is modernity our antiquity, what is bare life, and what is to be done (concerning education)? Artistic Director Roger Buergel and Curator Ruth Noack sensitively address these issues with all conceivable media, very few art star names, and work form diverse countries.
Still Life Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change, aims to be both a "celebration of the natural world and a response to the countless alarms being set off as a result of human thoughtlessness." Mohammad Kazem, Eva Scharrer, and Jonathan Watkins, with Artistic Director Jack Persekian and Director Hoor Al Qasimi, create an eclectic show of artists whose work addresses ecology.
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego | March 4 - July 16, 2007
Vancouver Art Gallery | October 4, 2008 - January 11, 2009
The first comprehensive exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, Wack! focuses on 1965 to 1980, during which the majority of feminist activism and art-marking occurred in North America. Comprising work in a broad range of media, the exhibition considers geography, formal concerns, and collective aesthetic and political impulses. Curated by Connie Butler.
The metropolis with it’s changing skyline provides the grist for the creative mills of Anjum Singh and Sheila Makhijani, two artists who live in New Delhi.
Over the course of the last year, San Francisco has experienced an influx of artists and curators from around the globe. The appointment of Documenta Xl curator Olcwui Enwezor as Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice-President at the San Francisco Art Institute back in July 2005 has been a magnetic force drawing new faculty from around the world such as artist-educator Renee Green, curator-critic Hou Hanru, and artist-writer Allan deSouza.
Paramjit Singh may take you by the hand for a walk into his painted woods.
The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is Queensland Art Gallery's flagship international contemporary art event. The fifth APT (APT5) is the opening exhibition at the new Gallery of Modern Art-the largest gallery of modern art in Australia. APT5 is directed by Doug Hall, and curated by the Queensland Art Gallery team: Lyne Seear, Andrew Clark, Suhanya Raffel, Julie Ewington.
In its inaugural year, the Biennial addresses relationships between natural, social, and economic environments and effects on people and landscapes in and between countries.
Drawing and speaking are very close. ‘Freeing the Line’ brought together old and new works by both familiar artists and others less well known.
For her latest solo exhibition, Ranjani Shettar creates two new installations and a print that respond to the natural world.
Singapore's inaugural international Biennale of contemporary art and the anchor cultural event for Singapore 2006: Global City. The theme is Belief, wherein artists reflect upon their own beliefs as well as the nature of belief itself-combining street culture and visual art in order to make art part of everyday life. Directed by Fumo Nanjo, Deputy Director of the Mori Art Musuem.
Curator Catherine de Zegher flies high in her first show since leaving the Drawing Center.
Catherine de Zegher, former director of the Drawing Center, continues the fine work she did there with this light-as-air, largely sculptural group show.
Freeing the Line, curated by Catherine de Zegher, considers the departure of the line from the paper and into space, juxtaposing "drawings without paper" (as Gego titled them)-works made of wire and thread by artist in the late sixties and early seventies-with contemporary drawings.
This biennale included 85 artists and collaborations from 57 cities in 44 countries, exploring the theme "Zones of Contact." Dr. Charles Merewether, the Artistic Director and Curator described the theme as about places where people live and move, concerning cities, settlements, and the merging and separation of public and private areas where people encounter one another.
Enveloped by Ranjani Shettar's works, one may recall the ancient concept addressed by all cultures - one of the music of the spheres.
Alia Syed is primarily a filmmaker, but she is not a filmmaker whose activity takes place within the established conventions of cinema or television.
International Center of Photography, New York | March 10 - My 28, 2006
Miami Art Central, Miami, FL | June 29 - August 17, 2006
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City | February 14 - May 6, 2007
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN | February 29 - May 25, 2008
An exhibition of some of the most forceful propositions by contemporary artists and photographers on how to look at Africa.
Douglas Fogle selected Ranjani Shettar to be an International-Artist-in-Residence at Artpace. Shettar's project involves two works that utilize biological research in a considered treatment of material-incorporating native woods to join with the local environment. Ranjani Shettar is the first artist from India invited to this prestigious residency.
Unfixed Being: Sculpture by A. Balasubramaniam (Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, October 14-December 7, 2005) features six recent and surreal works by the Indian artist known as Bala.
The colorful paintings of Delhi‐based artist Sheila Makhijani swim with movement. Energetic and sensual, they convey an impression of controlled chaos.
Unfixed Being features six recent works by A. Balasubramaniam. Convincing, his trompe l'oeil sculptures posit illusion as the means for viewers to access the works. Curated by Brad Thomas.
An exhibition of twenty-four young contemporary Indian artists, most of whom emerged during the 1990s-when both globalization and post-modernization were consolidated as the "New World Order." The exhibition aims to present a wide range of work to an audience that has had no exposure to contemporary Indian art. The works evoke something of the texture of life in India today.
In the most intimate moment of the Drawing Center's graceful exhibition of the late East Indian artist, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), a diary page smudged with black ink, Untitled, (1978) speaks volumes about the artist's profound sensibility.
Now in its sixth incarnation, the British Art Show is widely regarded as an essential guide to the most significant art from Britain. As an expression of the recent and the imminent, it offers a wide-ranging account of contemporary British art and is the most ambitious exhibition of its kind. The exhibition is organized by Hayward Gallery, and it tours every five years in cities across the UK.
Allan deSouza's poignant exhibition explores the failings of both memory and photography as means of recording and preserving the past from aging, loss, displacement and historical change
Ranjani Shettar and Alwar Balasubramaniam in Dialogue by Barbara O'Brien
Out There brings together artists from Britain, Australia, Africa, Brazil, Japan, India and Poland for a three-week residency. They are invited to make site-specific works in the woods and parkland next to the Sainsbury Centre. In the woodlands, Ranjani Shettar constructs a work about transformation via a fence of branches which support webs of bright red fabric.
ALLAN DESOUZA: 'THE LOST PICTURES' New pictures by this conceptualist photographer meditate on the photograph as a memorial object. Mr. deSouza placed prints made from old family slides around hishome, allowing them to become faded and abraded and to accumulate hair, dust and other debris. He then turned them into large, glossy digital prints in which the ghosts of the original images haunt the new, busily textured, semi-abstract surfaces.
Offering a fresh look at undiscovered talents, J'en Rêve captures the energy and promise of youth, shedding light on the lifestyles and desires of a new generation. The exhibition includes the work of more than 100 artists in their twenties from such diverse places as India, Argentina, Iran, and Thailand.
In conjunction with its exhibition of visionary abstractions by Agnes Martin, Emma Kunz, and Hilma af Klint, the Drawing Center’s annex presents photographs and works on paper by Mohamedi (1937-90), an Indian artist rarely shown in this country.
Nasreen Mohamedi (1944-90) is still little known outside of India, though she is a much-admired figure there. In New York, a few of her abstract drawings have turned up in group exhibitions, and Talwar Gallery has surveyed her photographs. Now samples from both are united in this hushed but magnetic show in the Drawing Room, across the street from the Drawing Center.
For an experience of contemporary South Asian art different in look and tone from that in "Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India" at the Asia Society and the Queens Museum of Art, try this small group show of eight artists from Talwar's stable.
Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines among Lines, introduces the contemplative abstract drawings and photographs of the influential yet under-recognized Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990). Lines among Lines will be the first solo exhibition in New York to focus primarily on Mohamedi’s drawings.
This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of Ranjani Shettar and Alwar Balasubramaniam, two leading young artists from Bangalore, India. Their work, in common, explores boundaries between personal and cosmic dimensions, physicality and immateriality, the man-made and the natural, and tradition and modernity. Curated by Loretta Yarlow.
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH | January 29 - May 1, 2005
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX | July 23, 2005 - September 11, 2005
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA | February 5 - May 7, 2006
This exhibition brings together the work of thirteen artists expanding the boundaries of traditional landscape painting. They embrace the decorative and blur distinctions between art and craft, using materials and techniques that range far beyond paint on canvas.
The work of this exceptional young artist, based in India, is about the play of material solidity and illusion.
Ranjani Shettar at Talwar Gallery. Indian artist Ranjani Shettar's fragile ceiling installations charm with their innocence and joyfulness. These large and meticulously made works of art suspended from the ceiling on thin strings radiate a rare freshness and tenderness, almost like that of a blossoming tree in a village untouched by the anxiety and angst of urbanization.
Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany | July 24 - November 7, 2004
Hayward Gallery, London, UK | February 10 - April 17, 2005
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France | May 25 - August 8, 2005
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan | May 27 - August 31, 2006
Ranjani Shettar, a young Indian artist based in Bangalore, makes her New York solo debut with this two-sculpture show, and it's a beauty.
''Eating Grass,'' the title of the short film that constitutes Alia Syed's second New York solo show, carries a specific political reference.
To anyone who has witnessed the growth of the contemporary Indian art scene in the last twenty years, the name Nasreen Mohamedi is legend.
Since one is used to seeing Asian art that is either rooted in a specific cultural context or has a strong imprint of the artist's own culture on it, Nasreen Mohamedi's black and white photographs come as a surprise because of their pure, minimalist beauty that is not tied to any particular context.
The photographs of Nasreen Mohamedi are a recent supplement to the drawings of this underknown Indian artist/ photographer/ writer. Fascinating in and of themselves, these 25 silver gelatin prints are being exhibited for the first time at Talwar Gallery.
Museum for African Art, New York, NY | November 14, 2013 - March 1, 2004
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA | March 27 - June 20, 2004
Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI | September 11 - November 28, 2004
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal | January 25 - April 3, 2005
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA | April 6 - July 10, 2006
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN | October 11, 2003 - January 11, 2004
Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA | February 8 - May 9, 2004
Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain | May 28 - September 19, 2004
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland | November 19, 2004 - February 20, 2005
Miami Art Center, Miami, FL | March 11 - June 12, 2005
The work of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) made an unforgettable impression in ''Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora'' at the Queens Museum of Art in 1997.
Allan deSouza's second show at Talwar continues a kind of work begun in his first: photographs of tabletop studio models of cities and landscapes.
This ambitious display of 170 works by 130 artists aims for the first time to reveal the full range, variety and originality of Britain's film histories, from films made close to the cinema's birth in the 1890s to work realized at the start of the 21st century. Many of the works have not been seen before in a gallery context, and some have been seen publicly since their first screenings.
In the early sixties, I first encountered a painting by Paramjit in a not so well-lit Delhi Shilpi Chakra group show - a deserted park of grey green, a lonely garden bench silhouetted against it on a gloomy winter day.
This is the fifth annual exhibition sponsored by the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, an international network of artists.
The India‐based artist A. Balasubramaniam, 32, already has an impressive résumé of international appearances, primarily as a printmaker.
Secret Films and cinematographic emotion: A conversation.
New Art Gallery Space, Walsall, UK | February 1 - March 10, 2002
TheSpace@inIVA, London, UK | February 6 - March 15, 2002
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland | June 7 - September 8, 2002
Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, UK | June 22 - August 4, 2002
Features evocative and poetic film works made over a period of fifteen years by the British Asian artist Alia Syed.
Allan deSouza's photographs alternate between two images omnipresent in recent news: rocky, desertlike landscapes and the Manhattan skyline. In fact, Mr. deSouza's pictures are taken of hand-made tabletop studio setups and were, with two exceptions, shot early last summer during an artist-in-residence stay at Art in General in TriBeCa.
Deepak Talwar's new art gallery with Zarina Bhimji's displays are a balm to terror-hit New Yorkers.
Zarina Bhimji's artwork on display at the Talwar Gallery in Manhattan is a rich exploration in history and perception, a thin line between fact and fiction as the artist herself puts it, and compelling with its strong metaphorical statements.
This show brings a double debut: the first solo New York appearance of the London-based artist Zarina Bhimji and the inauguration of Talwar Gallery, in an eastern annex of the Chelsea art beat.
Not opening his gallery in Chelsea was a deliberate decision on Deepak Talwar’s part
Carving city blocks out of discarded computer chips and building forests from lampshades, Artist-in-Residence Allan deSouza creates a new photographic landscape series out of industrial debris and detritus found in the area. deSouza recylces the city's castoffs to create microcosmic representations of the city iteslef. The result is the Terrain series of chronographic prints.
The first that I remember of Paramjit's works was years ago at Silpi Chakra. The works were in a corner. I have not forgotten this detail. It only goes to show that the compositions had left an impress upon my mind, though I neither knew the painter nor the group which had arranged this collective exhibition. Of this show I cannot recall any other composition, by any other painter. What was it that could have worked its charm on me? - well, it was something akin to a fairy wand hypnosis itself. Not prettiness, but some supernatural fascination, some spell which detained me in its witchery.
Roobina Karode seeks out Sheila Makhijani at her studio in Delhi and unearths a hoard of energetic works.
Rummana Hussain, a painter and conceptual artist who was also active in Indian politics, died on July 5 at her home in Bombay.
Art India inaugurates a column by Geeta Kapur, India’s most distinguished art critic, who takes the turn of the century as departure point for questioning existing frameworks for perceiving art. In her first essay she traces the development of Rummana Hussain over the past six years.
The Indian artist Rummana Hussain, 46, evokes a long journey in a small span in this installation.
Thus, Telling Tales' also pointed uncomfortably to the way in which our utterances — our words, or the objects we have created to 'speak' in our stead, and about us — are apt not only to produce degrees of misrepresentation, falsification and, at best, uncertainty, but also to betray, to reveal what was thought to be hidden. The creative possibilities as well as potential hazards of tale-telling, so it seemed to me, were both explicitly explored (and implicitly present?) in Rummana Hussain's The Tomb of Begum Hazrat Mahal.
The young artist's sculptures have more intellectuality than emotionality, a characteristic common to a majority of Trivandrum School sculptors, writes M. Ramachandran.
Reacting to the recent political climate within India, Rummana Hussain abandoned painting allegorical canvases that relied on myth and fable - both traditional and modern - for a more challenging conceptual approach to art.
I feel as though I have lived my life in exile— in exile from my family, from society and from mainstream culture. I feel rootless, nomadic like a gypsy. And this is reinforced by what I see and read around me. All information is fragmented. I seem to be on an odyssey— move from one class to another; there is no fixed point, no continuity
N.N. Rimzon, The Artist in Exile (1990)
Rummana Hussain continues in the post-Modernist footsteps of Vivan Sundaram's installation at the Gallery Chemould. Instead of discarding the xeroxed letters stuck to the wall, the leftovers from his Shergil Archives installation, Rummana has "cancelled" them painting them over with white-wash, leasing the viewer (like Joseph Kosuth with his 1986 environment of Cancelled Texts) into reading the still discernible letter forming the backdrop for the photographic images in her own installation.
The year 1994 went by with only a few artists stirring us out of our reveries and a fewer still who overwhelmed us with their concerns.
Rummana Hussain's show of installations and paintings, 'Multiples and Fragments,' is revealing in the links she makes between what she believes in, the means and the medium she used to express herself, and the reality she speaks of.
Rummana Hussain, whose exhibition is on at the Chemould Art Gallery, has subjected her own art-practice to a searching examination, scanning it for ways to passionately protest against the Ayodhya events, writes Ranjit Hoskote.
Rummana Husain's exhibition, which opens at Gallery Chemould tomorrow, brings together a variety of materials like prints, pencil drawings, plastic pipes, kidney trays, and light bulbs.
Most of his work is about life and death, where violence from the outside gets mediated by the timeless, reflective image of man. Yashodhara Dalmia on the artist's on-going show in Delhi.
On the other hand, the installations of Rummana Hussain use everyday materials to portray less esoteric themes to her exhibition, Fragments/Multiples.
