Colour and Clay

Artful Mergings: Print and Place / London Original Print Fair 2025

 

Tracing Roots Through Prints: India Printmaker House at London Original Print Fair 2025
by Anuj Daga
April 25, 2025

published in India Art Review online journal

Link: https://indiaartreview.com/stories/tracing-roots-through-prints-india-printmaker-house-at-london-original-print-fair-2025/

ORIGINAL TEXT

Artful Mergings: Print and Place
Anuj Daga

(How) do traces of one’s roots find their way in one’s artistic work? This is the question that prompted India Printmaker House to bring together a group of seven artists at the London Original Print Fair 2025 from India and the UK Indian diaspora. The tightly curated show featuring prints by artist Shivangi Ladha, Ian Malhotra, Mahima Kapoor, Avni Bansal, Rewati Shahani, Saruha Kilaru, and Jaimini Jariwala at the Somerset House between 20-23 March 2025 opened up a host of means and methods through which questions of identity, belonging and memory of cultural past may be gestured in artistic practice. In creating such a landscape, this exhibition not only foregrounded contemporary experiments in printmaking by young artists but also strategized a channel for cross-border connections and collaborative exchanges.

Born to a family that fled from Pakistan to Mumbai during partition, Rewati Shahani continued to live in London after studying Fine Art at the Central St. Martins. She expresses the shift in her own space-time coordinates in her minimalist screen prints that impress translucent maplike cut out forms on solid rectangular opaque bases. At once, these appear like irregular stones placed on a planar surface. In overlapping these, she mixes up their characteristic values of the heavy and light, organic and geometric, natural and manmade, alluding the sedimented geography of a location to leak into a distant ephemerality of the horizon. In counter positioning the land and the sea thus, her works ask if horizons are mere imaginary datums or places may find their real geographies ever? In doing so, the work begins to speak of the location of culture as it moves through bodies and borders. 

London-based artist Ian Malhotra plays with the real and virtual in his ‘Monday-Sunday’ series where he etches videogame midnight skies onto paper. He explains, ‘[q]uite a lot of open world video games have diurnal cycles for realism, so the light and weather changes throughout the day as the character walks through the landscape…When the game's diurnal cycle arrived at exactly midnight, I took a picture of this sky.’ Referencing these frames in his sketches, Malhotra makes his canvas black, converting it into a digital screen, further marking white luminous lines to render the cloudy skies. The folding of the past over the present occurs in Malhotra’s works at multiple registers. The mass circulating virtual images are etched exactly in the manner of the imaginary landscapes etched by noted Western artists, eventually reproduced by print for mass consumption - highlighting the fundamental space-time dichotomy of engaging with images. Moreover, the endlessness of the sky and the screen - the two infinities that have united humanity historically as well as in contemporary times - find a common ground in Malhotra’s canvas.

Mixing of forms occurs through the deployment of transparency in Saruha Kilaru’s non-figurative  prints on a variety of  surfaces such as glass, ceramics, fabrics, sequins and paper. Kilaru carries forward the aesthetics of watercolour renderings in print, wherein colour-forms get defined by material textures. Her works invite us to enjoy the shapes that liquids take in resisting external forces, in turn acting like a stretched elastic membrane themselves due to the cohesive forces between fluid particles. The glimmering surfaces of Kilaru’s prints attract the viewer's attention to the constant slippage between light and colour, animating surface tension as impressionistic work of art itself. 

Mahima Kapoor’s prints allude to magnified images of environmental contamination as seen under a microscope. Strains of entropic bodies - those that appear foreign to each other - coexist within a single frame in her artworks. Her series ‘A Place of Oasis’ seems to be a snapshot of polluted wasteland that holds organic and inorganic matter decaying together, making us consider discordant colours and temporalities in simultaneity. In making the viewer stare at these, Kapoor discomforts the onlooker while surfacing the unwelcome chemistry of decomposition. She thus charts a map of pollution at different scales, inducing an affectual response to the chemical, biological and allergenic processes that are byproducts of human action.

Avni Bansal orchestrates the coming together of shapes into indigenous mythical patterns in her ‘Phallic Series’. Celebrating the unison of male and female sexes in her bilaterally symmetric block printed compositions, Bansal depicts sexual interplay with splendour and adornment. Bansal seems to expand the repertoire of ancient tantric symbols in her monochromatic crimson red prints that tell a tale of biological transformation and spiritual transcendence. In these compact prints, one observes a grammar of shape fractals that hold the energy of life in an androgynous balance. As one looks at her other prints, the orientalist gaze begins to dissolve into a more rational one, reminding the imaging of the world in print by naturalists and botanists when these very mythical forms begin to appear as cellular and scientific. 

The relationship between the self and the world is further explored in the prints of Shivangi Ladha. Through an iterative process of printmaking, Ladha overlaps multiple states of being, within which a female body realises its existence within the world. Rigorously repeated sleepacts soon transport the viewer into a dreamlike space of the subconscious, evoked in the graded application of colour on or off the individually impressed bodies. Should her works ‘LightWeaver’ or ‘Rise I’ be mounted vertically, they shall begin to index the performative embodiment of her print practice itself. Ladha’s prints demonstrate the everyday rhythms through which one reconciles the inner self with the external reality. The viewer is invited to participate in the process of collective awakening in Ladha’s artworks - one that shall truly allow us to make the world one’s home.  

Jaimini Jariwala explores the question of home through the materiality of fabric that she has been surrounded with since her childhood. The historic port town of Surat, where Jariwala grew up emerged as a major textile industrial hub after independence. By using the cyanotype and stitch on paper, the artist at once brings the warps and wefts of the textile to dialogue with the oceao-mercantile ecology of her place. The figure of the home is held in tension between land and sea, recalling the life of sea-farers along the coast of Surat for whom much life is lived on the sail. The semi solid, skeletal, amphibian homes normalise transient living in a world that itself is on the move. 

The seven artists presented in this unique show have been brought together through the various programmes of the India Printmaker House, which is a platform dedicated to cultivating a vibrant art community united by a passion for printmaking. India Printmaker House (IPMH) believes in bridging cultures and expanding the global dialogue of art. The works presented by the IPMH at the LOPF 2025 have demonstrated a range of ways in which the question of place and belonging surfaces in the thinking and practice of the participating artists. Here, the medium of print begins to reveal the dualism of stabilization and destabilization, also reflective of the nature of lives that the artists who imagine homes within or outside borders constantly traverse, and effectually merge in their works of art. 

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Terracotta Temples, Bansberia, Kolkata

on Monophobia / On Hobbies

Being alone isn't about developing hobbies and interest and things to do when alone. Developing a greater tolerance for, and intimacy with, your experience - the emotional, cognitive, visceral, imaginative and sensory moment-to-moment arisings that constitute your basic aliveness. Many of us live in a state of chronic distraction from our experience. Being alone means being capable of entering more fully into your experience. It's about cultivating more unmediated presence to your experience and to the real, concrete world that surrounds you.

From Psychology Today dot com

Belur Math, Kolkata

Notes on Play - 2

Connected to Earlier Post

Cultures of play: A new book looks at how children play in the city
published in Hindustan Times, 24 March 2025

Link: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/cultures-of-play-a-new-book-looks-at-how-children-play-in-the-city-101742756856410.html

includes my essay:

Locating Play Across the Inside / Outside
Case of Mumbai apartments from 1970-2020
Anuj Daga

abstract:

This paper aims to trace the evolution in the cultures of play-spaces for children within the changing apartment living configurations of the middle class within the city of Mumbai over the last fifty years. The contention of the paper is to bring out the dialectic relationship between the forms of spaces and spaces of play that emerge in the densifying suburban residential neighbourhoods of Mumbai. In order to scope this study, I focus on three stages in typological forms of apartment configurations that have evolved in the city over 1970-2020, and the allied neighbourhood provisions to compensate for playspaces, that primarily come to characterise suburban living in Mumbai. These evolutions are reflective of the social, economic and political forces that shape urban development, and in effect the infrastructure of play as inscribed in the city.

Waterfront Clubhouse, Abin Chaudhuri, Bansberia, West Bengal

1 / 13

The first sight of the building is an elevated framed pavilion.

2 / 13

This elevated space is accessed by a grand stairway that doubles up as an amphitheatre.

3 / 13

An open cage holds a rather free space within the frame.

4 / 13

The outline of the cage is recessed into the open frame, creating access to a balcony behind, that overlooks the court below.

5 / 13

One side of the open frame sees the football ground.

6 / 13

The other side of the cage gives a view of the pond at the back side.

7 / 13

A small community auditorium is hidden behind the landscape on the lower level.

8 / 13

As one turn around, the simiple composition of two rotated rectangular volumes placed over each other is revealed.

9 / 13

The services are tucked behind neatly out of direct sight of the viewer.

10 / 13

The projecting triangular corner of the lower rectangle becomes the balcony above...

11 / 13

...whereas that of the upper rectangle shades the space as a chhaja below.

12 / 13

The two volumes talk to each other through their transparency.

13 / 13

and the hidden and revealed spaces.

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