NALINI MALANI, years
MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA
On Friday, March 13, Nalini Malani was in Barcelona giving the finishing touches to a mural during his exhibition at the Fundacio Joan Miró. Last year she won the Joan Miró award and the Fundacio invited her to organize an individual exhibition. But her plans changed when she and her spouse learned that Spain was going to close this weekend.
“We ran to take the last flight to Amsterdam.And the next day, Barcelona was blocked,” Malani said.The closure of India came 12 days later.But the trajectories were different.” The exodus of migrant personnel has been a tragedy of immense proportions in India,” he added.”A tragedy that may have been avoided.”
Born in Karachi in pre-independence India, Malani’s art has been bold, bold to push the barriers of idea and action. His paintings are vividly imagined, occasionally depicted with splashes of excess, illuminated through memories of the joy of his family’s partition. This shattered power and strident political sensibility is also reflected in the paintings he makes using the graphic exchange format (GIF) and which he regularly posts on Instagram. Recently, these animated photographs have been framed through dramatic soundtracks, combined with quotes from featured writers or their own. non-secular or livid observations. It’s a remarkably flexible format in more tactics than one.
“Whether or not there was a studio in the face of this gigantic pandemic seemed to me to be the least of the disorders when there was the worry of devastating disease and isolation and loneliness in death,” says Malani.”But I want to draw as much as I want to breathe – drawing is a means of subsistence, in a different way I curl up.My iPad is my studio on the move.”
His recent Instagram posts reveal the sophisticated but intrinsic links between art and truth in his work.One represents a wrinkled skeletal shape, with the inscription “I am a skeleton, I am not” spinning around.Another depicts some characters, floating in and in the middle of a colorful tumult, with the word “Dystopia” flashing.
Despite the pandemic, this year has been a busy year for Malani. “Since the beginning of 2020, I have been concerned about the organization of 4 individual museum exhibitions,” he says. The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai opened in January, the Joan Miro Foundation was due to open on March 19, but was postponed until June 19. An exhibition is scheduled at the Whitechapel Gallery in London for September and Serralves in Porto, Portugal, in December. The seriousness of recent months has also been marred by a pleasant surprise, when he awarded the first scholarship from the National Gallery in London. “This will consist of a two-year exam era that will lead to 3 exhibitions at the Holburne Museum in Bath, the National Gallery in London and some other foreign museum,” Malani explains.
However, the pandemic and its imaginable consequences are never far from his mind. “We just hope it’s a revelation in many ways,” Malani said. “The way he healed the earth during those few months deserves other people to perceive that Mother Nature also wants a vacation. For us in India it is a revelation to the average and wealthy elegance of how they have exploited the elegance of running and turned a blind eye. to their plight for decades and decades.”
In the long run, we will have to find new ways of viewing art, Malani believes; this is already evident as galleries and museums attempt to shift to the virtual realm. “The next step is to book a time in the museums so that there is sufficient physical distancing,” she says. “The virus is here to stay for a long time.” —Somak Ghoshal
‘DON’T THINK, I TOLD MYSELF, JUST PAINT’
ATUL DODIYA, years
Mumbai
The last time Atul Dodiya left Mumbai, where he lives with his artist wife Anju and daughter Biraaj, was in early March.Biraaj opened his first solo exhibition at the Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata.Shortly after the circle of relatives returned home, news from Europe began to rain on the pandemic.Then India entered a lockout. Without help, there were pictures at home the day.The evenings were faithful to watch movies, basically the classics of world cinema: Fellini, Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Ray.”I stopped going to my painting workshop, which is a 15-minute drive from home,” says Atul Dodiya, but there has been no break with art.
Dodiya is known for large-scale paintings and installations but he is versed in many formats and media. He puts this adaptable temperament down to his travel schedule and the fact that he is used to spending time at residencies. “It’s not possible to work on large oil paintings during such periods,” he says. “The mechanics of painting with oil are elaborate and it takes much longer to dry. It’s heavy stuff, compared to watercolours.” Cut off from his studio, Dodiya got hold of watercolour supplies and sketch pads, converted the guest room of their apartment into a makeshift studio and started painting variations of an idea—of “a solitary figure in a landscape, roaming, moving, playing, making strange gestures in nature”.
“I felt a sense of freedom. With the whole world under lockdown, and no events taking place, it was the ideal time to be a recluse,” Dodiya says. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was working on, there was no assessment from others. Don’t think, I told myself, just paint.” He threw himself into the work, finishing a painting almost every day. There were only the skies and clouds and birds to look at from the windows and balcony. But nature was never far, at least in his imagination. “These paintings are not haikus,” Dodiya says, “each is a full-page poem.” He has finished more than 140 of them.
Dodiya works intuitively, starting a stroke that may remind him of a woman’s back, or an outstretched arm, as the rest begins to morph into a scene. Working on these 17×12-inch watercolours, with their relative limitations compared to oil on canvas (which can be manipulated easily and made changes to), has been rich and revelatory for him.—Somak Ghoshal
AN INSTALLATION THAT TRIES TO DECIPHER THE PRESENT MOMENT
SHILPA GUPTA, 44
Mumbai
At an exercise station in Chemnitz, Germany, a shutter has been suspended from the ceiling, the uncovered at airports and exercise stations indicating arrivals and departures, but instead of the same main points of routes and unforeseen delays, it has one instead of sending a text message: “We are closer”, “We are closer than you imagine”.
This 36-minute mechanical installation opens in Chemnitz on August 15 as a component of the city’s first foreign public art project, Gegenwarten Attendance, organized through Florian Matzner and Sarah Sigmund. Shilpa Gupta, who was unable to stop over at the site due to disruption caused by the pandemic, is running at this long-haul facility. “The flapboard is sitting in Germany. I accessed it through a web camera on LAN”, explains the artist fresco, who invited through the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz to participate in the project.
This painting perpetuates the artist’s long-standing commitment to the concept of transition and elements that include this sense of movement.We saw this on Gupta’s first flapboard, 24:00:01 (2010-12) as well, shown from its 2010 solo at Castle Blandy in France.
This specific work, created by blocking, begins with the perception of time.Date With Mom – Suspended reads one of the first texts.As words like “Inspire, exhale,” “Have Nmubers Gone Up,” “Have Nmubers Gone Dwon” flash on the shutter, one is transported to the moment the blockade had just been announced and those questions can be heard everywhere.
The extra artist explains the concept, specifically the concept of distance – perpetuated socially, economically or geographically, as well as with our own hands and faces, to maintain. The words in the text were intentionally misspelled, as they would be on a station shutter. The hum of the letters as they move from one text to another is a dominant feature of these paintings. “The human brain slides from one concept thread to another, just as we move from one link to another in the virtual world, a non-place where we spend more and more time locked up”, explains the artist. In the same way, snippets of text on the blind interlock and pop out and jump, he adds. Watching the paintings come to life with Gupta on a Skype call, different schools of concepts come to mind: from the growing awareness of his mortality (“How many will live”, “How many will die”), to touch and proximity, intrusion of the generation in our lives Array .. “At one point, she reflects on the transmission of fake news and asks the question: Are we following algorithms or are algorithms following us? She elaborates. At some other level, she examines the type of vigilance we allow in our lives and the dangers involved.
In addition to this installation, the smallest jobs he has worked on are graphics, virtual prints, about the numbers that are now part of our daily lives.Over the more than five months, says Gupta, there has been a lot of frantic graphics and knowledge to check to capture and make sense of our present.”Maybe we’re looking for predictions in rules, systems, and models; however, the future, for the time being, seems very evasive and exercises its unpredictability,” he says.Avantika Bhuyan
A MICROSCOPIC VIEW OF THE PANDEMIC
L.n. TALLUR, YEARS
BENGALURÚ AND SEOUL
During the confinement, the artist LNTallur saw a film called The Plague founded on the novel through Albert Camus, which left a deep impression.”I learned that nothing has replaced much between the 14th century and now in the way the human brain reacts to disease or a pandemic,” says the artist, who travels between Bangalore and Seoul.”But it’s great to see that art continues to provide an understanding of the time we live in.”
The pandemic, he thinks, has created an attractive moment to reflect and make art.For him, personally, this has led to a replacement for the worldview.In 2005, when he began spending part of the year in South Korea, the country had one.of the biggest high-speed Internet users, he assumed that citizens were used to knowing everything about the world, but over the years, Tallur realized that he was wrong, because most of the Internet was used to play and play.assumed that over the years humanity’s ability to cope with a crisis was immense.But the pandemic has also shattered this illusion.”We are one step away from living on the moon, but we have failed miserably in the fight against a small virus.Technology and wisdom are used on a limited basis and, of course, the mess we’ve created over the years has become even more apparent now,” he says.
And this consciousness has brought a sophisticated replacement in the way it approaches the curtains.Tallur has at all times discovered his practice in himself by exposing the absurdities of everyday life in fresh society through large-scale sculptures and site-specific installations.and commercial curtains to joke about the symbols of Indian development.Take, for example, Chromatophobia (2019), with a granite Buddha cut partly through a trunk, hammered with coins, with one part that says “Made in India” and the other, “Made in China”: a scathing observation about anxieties that afflict an increasingly consumerist and draperist society.
It is only now that it has gone from macro to microphone in the literal sense through the search for all fabrics under a microscope.”Recently, I was looking for coronavirus illustrations in magazines for genuinely that there were more than a thousand However, apart from the Rocky Mountain Laboratory of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Hamilton, Montana, none of those elements is a genuine image of the virus,” he says.This creation of a ‘symbol’ or belief in truth is everything Tallur discovers fascinating, and has used a lot in his recent work.
“At first I made cement sculptures and then placed them under the microscopic lens.Then I used the images to print this micro view on the larger sculpture.This allows the viewer to see a micro and macro view of the same sculpture in it It’s a bit like in the other aspects of the pandemic,” says. — Avantika Bhuyan
In the first story, Rekha Rodwittiya, Sudarshan Shetty, Jogen Chowdhury, Arunkumar H.G.and Ranjani Shettar tell us about his blocking art.Read it here.
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