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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 art of Paramjit Singh merges with the art of nature
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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 “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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
This winter the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, launched its new contemporary art space with Ranjani Shettar’s enigmatically titled show Dewdrops and Sunshine.
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 carefully unpacks a box containing large, carved hunks of wood.
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.
Abstraction hasn’t figured prominently in modern Indian art, critics often interpreting it as a foreign visual language.
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'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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, the installations of Rummana Hussain use everyday materials to portray less esoteric themes to her exhibition, Fragments/Multiples.