photographs of/from
JAK Printers, Byculla
Friday, October 20, 2017
Diwali
The smell of a lighting off wick, the camphor burning away, the jasmine incense, the sandalwood crushed with Kesar, the ghee burning Surma, the sweetness of savoury preparations, the flickering lamplights - fired or electric, the colours of Rangoli and flowers, the balcony lights, the shimmering coins, the red kumkum, the new books for prayers, the pattering crackers, the blooming flower pots, the sparkling sticks, the smoking wires, the constantly ringing telephone, the beeping WhatsApp messages, the endless forwards, the inventive Facebook statuses, the pleas to be quiet, the request to keep things unpolluted, the new clothes, the perfunctory rituals...
Another year of Diwali.
Friday, October 06, 2017
Louise Despont Works
Louise Despont / The Invisible Fold
Published in ART India Magazine - Volume 21 Issue 3
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Louise Despont
Louise Despont
The Invisible Fold
Columns for rates and transactions on ledger book registers become meta-grids for Louise Despont’s pencil colour drawings that are exhibited at Gallerie Isa, Mumbai, from the 10th of June to the 1st of September. Overlaying existing rules and records of the unthreaded spreads from old registers, Despont draws new grids to order her drawings. At a distance, the works seem to be guided by the symmetry of the book-fold itself. The imposing balance within the works, gently tweaked at places invite a comparison with Rorschach Inkblots that mirror their own halves. While klecksography (the art of making images with inkblots) allows a poetic exploration of the subconscious, Despont’s careful motifs refer to mythical diagrams through which the ancients imagined the structure of the universe.
The large surfaces created by joining several pages of the book come together like the tiles of a large mural. The overall scale and execution reminds you of the present day “working drawings” that architects prepare towards the final construction of a building on site. Despont’s meticulously detailed drawings alluding to iconographies of temple towers and sculptures are no less than site documents that record material, construction details, sizes, costs and project timelines.
The soft pencil drawings hide and reveal the sub-layers evoking historical and mythical connections with their substratum. A certain time-space compact collapses the spaces of architecture and economics, art and construction and makes hidden interrelationships apparent. The ways in which the abstract and concrete aspects of production take shape through the process of art making are subtly demonstrated in the works of Louise Despont.
Anuj Daga
Louise Despont. Fort. Coloured pencil and graphite on antique ledger book paper. 187 cms x 178 cms. 2017, Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Isa.
Samit Das's work at Tarq
Review: Samit Das's work 'Bibliography in Progress' at Tarq
published in ART India Magazine - Volume 21 Issue 3
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Drawing on the Past
Samit Das’s assemblages are mounted at the intersection of history and memory, suggests Anuj Daga.
Samit Das’s art practice requires a nuanced reading . Das juggles between the roles of a painter, sculptor, craftsman, on the one hand, and those of archivist, historian, and archaeologist, on the other. In Bibliography In Progress spread across Tarq and Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, from the 13th of April to the 20th of May, Das’s works hold questions informed by such multilayered engagements. Curated by Sumesh Sharma, Das’s show of sculpted paintings and installed pieces bring together a mélange of materials like canvas, cloth, wood, fibre, paper and metal. The resulting assemblages look fragmented and textured. Further, the constituent parts are brought together in a manner where one completes the other by means of overlapping, interjecting or juxtaposing. A unique way of seeing emerges – one that makes the viewer conscious about the ‘incomplete totality’ of our universe.
Often breaking neat boundaries, the frames extend themselves giving an impression of trays mounted on the wall. Such containers remind you of an archaeologist’s tools, within which she collects and sorts artefacts from a given site in order to arrange and narrativize them into a coherent, meaningful past. The act of looking into the tray is analogous to peeping through the window at the historical past as well as a personal memory.
For many of us, unpacking and packing our cabinets filled with memories may be a periodical activity. Why do we keep looking at our collections of tinker bits, bric-a-brac, taking things out and putting them away – they don’t necessarily go back in the same way every time. In taking things out (to create space for new ones, or otherwise), we may pile them in different ways, reconsider their categories, and regroup them to fit with other objects within our collection. However, we often miss the potentialities of the new juxtapositions that happen in the process outside the cabinet. Das’s works emphasize the dormant possibility of these unattended reorganizations that often scatter messily when pulled outside, but set themselves neatly within the cabinet.
Das has in the late 1990s and the early 2000s documented the Tagore Museum in Kolkata and recorded the confluence of design, social history, cultural resonance and architectural intervention in an exhibition titled The Idea of Space and Rabindranath Tagore that has been exhibited locally and internationally. The artworks in the current show possess a topography of their own – they refer to the Ajanta frescoes as well as to Buddhist viharas; they draw from abstraction as an art genre and bricolage as a strategy. They are cavernous, mysterious and dynamic. Amongst other references, embedded within their landscapes are drawings of rock-cut architectural structures or sculptures along with other relics, which were originally carved out of the hills, often to be inhabited, and decorated. Entering the cave is much like diving into the dark space of a treasure chest of old memories. The co-existing duality of the part and the whole resonates with that of the actual situated-ness of the Buddhist monuments which can seldom be experienced devoid of their contexts. The site is as much a part of their reading as the artefact itself.
History is often stitched, stapled and stacked – much like Das’s works. The freestanding sculptures and black and white drawings transform the gallery into an archaeological site – assembling things that seem important, provoking us to think about the ones you would choose to keep.What should stay back in the archive or as an archive? Stones, blocks, paintings and the spaces they occupy beckon us to be conscious of the quality of their negotiations. In a manner similar to American artist Joseph Cornell, Samit Das’ works sort and reveal history that is hidden within the process of its own creation.
Samit Das. From the series Bibliography in Progress. Mixed media. Variable size. 2014-2017. Image courtesy Abner Fernandes and TARQ.
published in ART India Magazine - Volume 21 Issue 3
--
Drawing on the Past
Samit Das’s assemblages are mounted at the intersection of history and memory, suggests Anuj Daga.
Samit Das’s art practice requires a nuanced reading . Das juggles between the roles of a painter, sculptor, craftsman, on the one hand, and those of archivist, historian, and archaeologist, on the other. In Bibliography In Progress spread across Tarq and Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, from the 13th of April to the 20th of May, Das’s works hold questions informed by such multilayered engagements. Curated by Sumesh Sharma, Das’s show of sculpted paintings and installed pieces bring together a mélange of materials like canvas, cloth, wood, fibre, paper and metal. The resulting assemblages look fragmented and textured. Further, the constituent parts are brought together in a manner where one completes the other by means of overlapping, interjecting or juxtaposing. A unique way of seeing emerges – one that makes the viewer conscious about the ‘incomplete totality’ of our universe.
Often breaking neat boundaries, the frames extend themselves giving an impression of trays mounted on the wall. Such containers remind you of an archaeologist’s tools, within which she collects and sorts artefacts from a given site in order to arrange and narrativize them into a coherent, meaningful past. The act of looking into the tray is analogous to peeping through the window at the historical past as well as a personal memory.
For many of us, unpacking and packing our cabinets filled with memories may be a periodical activity. Why do we keep looking at our collections of tinker bits, bric-a-brac, taking things out and putting them away – they don’t necessarily go back in the same way every time. In taking things out (to create space for new ones, or otherwise), we may pile them in different ways, reconsider their categories, and regroup them to fit with other objects within our collection. However, we often miss the potentialities of the new juxtapositions that happen in the process outside the cabinet. Das’s works emphasize the dormant possibility of these unattended reorganizations that often scatter messily when pulled outside, but set themselves neatly within the cabinet.
Das has in the late 1990s and the early 2000s documented the Tagore Museum in Kolkata and recorded the confluence of design, social history, cultural resonance and architectural intervention in an exhibition titled The Idea of Space and Rabindranath Tagore that has been exhibited locally and internationally. The artworks in the current show possess a topography of their own – they refer to the Ajanta frescoes as well as to Buddhist viharas; they draw from abstraction as an art genre and bricolage as a strategy. They are cavernous, mysterious and dynamic. Amongst other references, embedded within their landscapes are drawings of rock-cut architectural structures or sculptures along with other relics, which were originally carved out of the hills, often to be inhabited, and decorated. Entering the cave is much like diving into the dark space of a treasure chest of old memories. The co-existing duality of the part and the whole resonates with that of the actual situated-ness of the Buddhist monuments which can seldom be experienced devoid of their contexts. The site is as much a part of their reading as the artefact itself.
History is often stitched, stapled and stacked – much like Das’s works. The freestanding sculptures and black and white drawings transform the gallery into an archaeological site – assembling things that seem important, provoking us to think about the ones you would choose to keep.What should stay back in the archive or as an archive? Stones, blocks, paintings and the spaces they occupy beckon us to be conscious of the quality of their negotiations. In a manner similar to American artist Joseph Cornell, Samit Das’ works sort and reveal history that is hidden within the process of its own creation.
Samit Das. From the series Bibliography in Progress. Mixed media. Variable size. 2014-2017. Image courtesy Abner Fernandes and TARQ.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
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