Jitish Kallat | The Hour of the Day of the month of the Season

CAMP | talk on artist collective

Art historian Murtaza Vali discusses the Wharfage Project, an audio-visual-installation piece carried out by the Indian art collective CAMP at the 2009 Sharjah Biennieal. Recorded at the Cabinet art space in Brooklyn as part of ArteEast's Across Histories lecture series.

Asia Society President Vishakha Desai

NEW YORK, August 30 2012 — On her final day at Asia Society, outgoing president Vishakha Desai looks back on her 22-year tenure with the organization.

Artist Aniketa Deshpande

photos by - Pratap Morey

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Need, speed and greed.

A VISIT to Stockholm's Nobel museum inspired Vijay Vaitheeswaran, our global correspondent, to write his latest book. He talks about a world of 7 billion innovators in waiting...

Kannagi Khanna | Emerging Contemporary Photographer

Artist Statement

In these days of discord, disharmony, conflict and competition, finding affinity between two entities which are geographically far apart and no match to each other in respect of socio-economic or cultural semblance, is impossibility. But that is what this photo series did and went on to find the impossible - A small slum area in the heart of the posh new city of Ahmedabad called HOLLYWOOD. The actual name of the area is Gulbhaitekra but it has been popularly known as HOLLYWOOD for the last 4 decades for the reason that the women living here have a rustic beauty and glamour which is found to resemble that of Hollywood stars.

Svara-Kanti | SOUTHBANK CENTRE, London

Simon Thacker guitar
Sarvar Sabri tabla
Japjit Kaur vocal
Jyotsna Srikanth violin

Svara-Kanti is the latest Indian/Western supergroup from visionary guitar virtuoso Simon Thacker.

Four leading performers of Indian and Western music come together to present dazzling Indian classical traditions, Bollywood songs and evocative folk music, all reinterpreted with Western classical and jazz influences to create powerful and inspiring new sounds.

Svara-Kanti features award winning guitarist Simon Thacker, tabla maestro Sarvar Sabri, who has a musical lineage stretching back ten generations, Carnatic violinist Dr Jyotsna Srikanth, who has recorded over 200 Bollywood film soundtracks and is also a London Trinity College of Music Fellow, and the beautiful voice of Japjit Kaur.

Gandhi in Africa 1908-1909

A room at the house where Mahatma Gandhi lived from 1908-1909 in the Norwood suburb of Johannesburg. Once known as The Kraal, The Satyagraha House has been turned into a seven-room room guest house and museum.

AFP PHOTO/PABALLO THEKISO

Mithu Sen | In Transit

The Indian contemporary artist Mithu Sen talks about her inspirations, the making-of process and the shift in her artwork creations. Her work is strong and impactful. She uses images of moving objects, uprooted trees and plants, suitcases and luggage as metaphors for these journeys and migrations. Her work conveys both the apprehension that we may all feel when venturing into the unknown, but at the same time reveal the artist's inner strength and determined resolve.

INDIAN HIGHWAY IV | Lyon, France

Indian Highway IV

at

MAC LYON

February 24 to July 31, 2011

In the form of a road movie across 3 continents (Europe, South America, Asia), each stage along the Indian Highway is the occasion for a totally new episode. After London, Oslo and Herning, Lyon staged the fourth episode on 2000 m2, the exhibition presents a panorama of contemporary art in India and more than 30 artists.

Artists - Ayisha Abraham, Ravi Agarwal, Sarnath Banerjee, Hemali Bhuta, Nikhil Chopra, Desire Machine Collective, Sheela Gowda, Sakshi Gupta, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, N.S. Harsha, Abhishek Hazra, Shanay Jhaveri, Jitish Kallat, Amar Kanwar, Bharti Kher, Bose Krishnamachari, Nalini Malani, Jagannath Panda, Prajakta Potnis, Raqs Media Collective (avec Debkamal Ganguly, Ruchir Joshi, M. R. Rajan, Priya Sen, Surabhi Sharma (avec la collaboration de Gautam Singh), Kavita Pai / Hansa Thapliyal et Vipin Vijay pour Steps Away from Oblivion), Tejal Shah, Valay Shende, Sudarshan Shetty, Dayanita Singh, Sumakshi Singh, Studio Mumbai Architects & Michael Anastassiades, Kiran Subbaiah, Ashok Sukumaran & Shaina Anand, Thukral & Tagra, Hema Upadhyay

Curators: Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Gunnar B. Kvaran, Thierry Raspail.

To Conquer Her Land | by Poulomi Basu

In September 2009, India’s first women soldiers were deployed at the India-Pakistan border in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir. Poulomi Basu followed these women, from different parts of the country, castes, and backgrounds, during their last days at home to the barracks, through training camp to active duty.

Stationed on a critical border, they try to come to terms with their new responsibilities while patrolling barren lands. This transformation is intense; it is impossible to recreate or restore what they’ve left behind. Theirs is a country so vast that all lines seem to disappear, yet contains a deathly silence so white, haunting, and exact that it can create peace even in a land on the brink of war.

More women in India are in the army than ever before. Yet most of them are painfully alone, as they make up less than 1 percent of the country’s 1.2 million-strong armed forces.

Military culture, which can be intimidating, has not been particularly tailor-made for women. The Indian woman in the army is not only battling against the enemy, but also against a largely patriarchal society. Most of the women Basu photographed joined the forces to fight their present state of affairs as well as to find an escape from their dire rural livelihood.

In “To Conquer Her Land,” Basu tried to humanize these complex yet intricate issues of poverty, conflict, psychological warfare, caste, youth, gender, love, peace, the concept of home, an undefined idea of patriotism, strength of mind, and a level of stress previously unknown to them. She says, "I have barely started my journey documenting the human impact of what an uncertain political, economic, and social situation can evoke."

Poulomi Basu is a freelance photographer born in India. She completed her Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2009 with a Distinction. Her work can be seen in The Sunday Times Magazine, Elle, andInternational Herald Tribune, among other publications. She was a selected Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photographers 2010 winner. She currently lives and works between London and Mumbai.

Source: http://www.guernicamag.com/

The Manganiyar Seduction | Sufi Seduction

The Manganiyar Seduction begins in almost complete darkness -- light bulbs faintly illuminate 36 human-sized rectangular boxes on a large four-tier set. Then the sound of a khamacha, an Indian stringed instrument, breaks the silence. Slowly, lights come up on one of the boxes to reveal the musician sitting cross-legged, dressed in white with an orange turban.

The Manganiyar Seduction are currently playing at the Lincoln Center, New York.

ANISH KAPOOR | Delhi & Bombay

PRESS RELEASE:

The first-ever exhibition of Anish Kapoor in India will be presented at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi from 28 November 2010 – 27 February 2011 and the Mehboob Film Studios, Mumbai from 30 November 2010 – 16 January 2011. The exhibition is presented by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India and the National Gallery of Modern Art, together with the British Council and Lisson Gallery in association with Louis Vuitton.

Organised across two sites, each exhibition will focus on a different strand of the artist’s practice and together will form one of the largest and most ambitious exhibitions of the artist’s work ever to be shown. It will feature a selection of sculptures and installations spanning the breadth of his career, from early pigment-based works of the 1980s, to his most recent wax installations. Both exhibitions will feature works which were included in the recent, record-breaking exhibition of Kapoor’s work at the Royal Academy, London, which attracted over 275,000 visitors in less than three months and became the most successful exhibition of a living artist ever held in London.

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. He was born in 1954 in Bombay and moved to London in the early 1970s where he has lived and worked ever since. He studied art at Hornsey College of Art (1973-1977) and at Chelsea School of Art (1977-1978). He quickly gained international attention and acclaim for a series of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries across the world. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, where he was awarded the ‘Premio Duemila’.

He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and he received the prestigious Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2002, which he realised with the much-acclaimed work, Marsyas. Among his major permanent commissions is Cloud Gate (2004) for the Millennium Park in Chicago, considered to be the most popular public artwork in the world. He was recently awarded the commission with Cecil Balmond for a permanent artwork for the London 2012 Olympic Park, the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi is one of the leading museums for modern and contemporary art in India. Recently re-furbished, the NGMA now includes three main exhibition buildings and the Anish Kapoor show will be the first major exhibition to be held in the gallery’s newly constructed Exhibition Hall.

The Mehboob Studios were founded by legendary filmmaker Mehboob Khan in 1954 to cater for the growing demand for quality film facilities in India. Situated on 20,000 square yards of seaside land in Bandra, in the heart of greater Mumbai, the studio soon became a favourite with some of the leading filmmakers of the time.

ANISH KAPOOR: Delhi / Mumbai
www.anishkapoorindia.com

Delhi
Opening 27 November
Exhibition runs 28 November - 27 February 2011
National Gallery of Modern Art
Jaipur House, India Gate, New Delhi 110 003
www.ngmaindia.gov.in
Open Tuesday - Sunday from 10am to 5pm, except Thursday until 8pm. Closed on Mondays and National Holidays
Entrance fees: Indian: Rs: 10 / Foreign National: Rs: 150 / Student/Child: Rs: 1

Mumbai
Opening 29 November
Exhibition runs 30 November - 16 January 2011
Mehboob Studios
100 Hill Road, Bandra (W), Mumbai 400 050
Opens daily from 9am to 9pm
FREE ENTRY although booking required

Booking information: +91 22 40203660/61/62/63

GQ INDIA | Men of the Year Winners

Get a slice of GQ India Magazine if you haven't seen it yet!

GQ India Men of the Year 2010 - the shoots from Maya Hari on Vimeo.

The Capital of Accumulation | Raqs Media Collective Debuts in Bombay

Press Release
Raqs Media Collective
The Capital of Accumulation
20 October – 20 November 2010

Project 88 and Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai are pleased to announce Raqs Media Collective’s first solo in Mumbai titled Capital of Accumulation.

The Capital of Accumulation is a two screen video installation that writes an oblique narrative of the relationship between metropolises and the world in counterpoint to Rosa Luxemburg's exceptional critique of global political economy - 'The Accumulation of Capital'. Raqs trawls through a haunting, dream like landscape straddling Warsaw, Berlin and Bombay/Mumbai to produce a diptych for video which is part natural history, part detective journal, part forensic analysis, part cosmopolitan urban investigation and part philosophical dialogue to offer a considered and personal reflection on the remaining possibilities for radical renewal in our times.

Raqs develops a combined economic, political, social and urban story that could have happened in 20th century Berlin, Mumbai and Warsaw, but is equally the story of the 21st century and all its cities. In the iteration of The Capital of Accumulation produced for the exhibition at Project 88, Raqs annotate the extant video installation with a series of images, assemblages and objects that complete the project. These are a series of photographs titled The Perpetual Recall of the Penultimate Afternoon which are an itinerary in the footsteps of Rosa Luxemberg's last days in Berlin, with a detour into the yard of the former Rosa Luxemburg Electric Light Bulb Factory in Warsaw. A record of the different addresses where Rosa Luxemburg lived in the days before she was assassinated, these photographs are studies and scenarios for sudden departures and fugitive entries - traces of places to pause and consider the accumulation of restless afternoons. Apart from these, the exhibition also consists of a light installation titled REVOLTAGE and another sculptural object titled Rules to be Invented which is a chess board that scales peaks. The pieces, knights and dice, climb up and down a terrain as uneven as history. Nothing is certain, and so, new rules wait to be invented. Raqs has also produced a set of frames with found and assembled objects titled Over Time that construct a weekly calendar of accumulation and endurance.

THE ART CONSPIRACY FESTIVAL | Bandra, Bombay

There have been rumors in the air, about a certain conspiracy, which was born at dawn on September 1st inside THE ART LOFT. ACT has been the logo popping up here and there, teasing us all. In the past months, through a fascinating, energizing, creative and secretive journey, involving many night and day meetings, conspiracies and plans, we have arrived at the culmination point - an intriguing event in Bandra that will take you by surprise, and leave you on an artistic high!

THE ART CONSPIRACY, through 3 dramatic phases, is now poised to present to you art that is for us, by us and in us.

PHASE 1 saw The Art Loft sending out the ACT Signal to all artists spread across the city, the country, the globe for their best art works (photographs, paintings, installations, graphic arts, short-films, poetry, and live art) and got responses from over 350 conspirators.

PHASE 2 saw Anurag Kashyap, Brinda Miller, Jas Charanjiva, Mark Lapwood, Leila Tayebaly come together as the 'Art Inspectors' to select the art work that will be displayed.

We have been waiting for Phase 3 impatiently.

PHASE 3 will be THE ART CONSPIRACY FESTIVAL - spread over two days, across the trendiest spots in Bandra on Oct 23 & 24. Discover the winning art pieces at the venues, and get dazzled and dumbstruck by more than 40 live performers including Masumeh Makhija, Jas Charanjiva, Airport, Amar Muchhala, Ankuri Tewari, Nikhil D’Souza, Veronica Simas de Souza and many other talents!

This revolution urges you to come, feel, and be a part of an Art Masala of contemporary, original, and underground forms of art - Musical Graffiti, Live Fire, Belly Dancing, Live Painting, Heartbreak Hour, Film Screenings, Live Band performances, Tango, Secret Library, Anti-Fashion Show, Sensation Lab, Stand-up Comedy, Tarot Reading, Poetry Reading, Live Aquarium, in addition to the art exhibitions, conferences & workshops.

Free your mind, tease your curiosity and get entertained!

The Art Loft Team

Download the Schedule here.

PUBLIC NOTICE 3 | Jitish Kallat at ARTIC

'PUBLIC NOTICE 3'
ON THE ART INSTITUTE’S GRAND STAIRCASE
September 11, 2010 through January 2, 2011


Public Notice 3, a site-specific installation, brings together two key historical moments: the first Parliament of the World’s Religions, opening on September 11, 1893, in what is now the museum’s Fullerton Hall, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon 108 years later, on that very date.

In 1893, during the World's Columbian Exposition, the museum's building served as the site of one of the most important gatherings in the history of modern religion, the first World’s Parliament of Religions. One of the opening speakers was a young Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda, who stunned and enthralled the audience of 7,000 with an address that opened one of the first dialogues between Eastern and Western traditions and, importantly, argued passionately for universalism and religious tolerance. Exactly 108 years before the attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, Swami Vivekananda called for an end to all “bigotry and fanaticism” and pleaded for brotherhood across all faiths, a speech that was met with a standing ovation and was heralded by journalists as one of the pivotal moments of the Exposition. (Even today, the stretch of Michigan Avenue in front of the Art Institute is the honorary “Swami Vivekananda Way.”)

Kallat has chosen this historical event as the basis and site for his monumental installation. For Public Notice 3, Kallat will convert the complete text of Vivekananda’s inspiring speech into LED displays on each of the 118 risers of the museum’s Woman’s Board Grand Staircase, which is itself adjacent to what is now Fullerton Hall, where Vivekananda made his original presentation. Drawing attention to the great chasm between this plea for tolerance of 1893 and the very different events of September 11, 2001, the text of the speech will be displayed in the five colors of the United States’ Department of Homeland Security alert system—red, orange, yellow, blue, and green.

This historical coincidence—and the fact that the speech was delivered at the earliest attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths—heightens the potency of Vivekananda’s persuasive words. The resulting work, Public Notice 3, creates a trenchant commentary on the evolution, or devolution, of religious tolerance across the 20th and 21st centuries. The installation will serve not as a passive commemorative act but rather as an actively contemplative space.

Bant Singh | Word, Sound & Power

Badang Bang by Words Sound and Power

Bant Singh is a revolutionary singer in Punjab, India, whose 2 years old daughter was raped by upper caste men. When he sought justice, they cut of his limbs. But he can still sing, and in this video letter he expresses no self-pity. Film by SANJAY KAK

★ Word, Sound & Power ★

An attempt to showcase the legendary dalit icon Bant Singh and his songs of rebellion, inter-caste violence and equality. Bant Singh from Jabbar Village in Punjab is a legendary singer and activist of Kisan Mukti Morcha.

The Word, Sound & Power is a brave collaboration covering wide uncharted areas of music and socially harking issues - the mash-up of Electronic Beats and Sounds of Chris McGuinness and the erudite gangsta flow of Delhi Sultanate attempt to spread the message to urban masses via popular forms such as dancehall, dubstep, ragga and poetry.

The project also features a short film shot in Jabbar Village - filmed on location, by photographer Lakshman Anand. The film critically examines the need for the voices of dissent in todays capitalized urban society.

Also a deeper look into Bant Singhs background, his lyrical inspirations, 20 years of the unsung dalit struggle in Punjab, followed by the mash up of genres between Chris, Delhi Sultanate and Bant Singh. A bold attempt to fuse socially relevant issues and lyricism across two different languages.

The venture is directed by Samrat B a.k.a Audio Pervert. He contributes his electronic flavor with a remix as well.
The project is a joint collaboration between the above artists & The Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhawan New Delhi.

The launch of the film and music is scheduled mid September 2010.

★ Spread the message .. bring on the rebellion, stand up for the message via songs, via the folk & urban counter culture mix ★

Source -http://wordsoundandpower.org/