Disruptions…… the word spells havoc. But then who has ever been able to create anything without a little bit of depredation. Artists, for one, are known to have caused the greatest of plunders… Michelangelo was one of them. With his iconic work The Last Judgement, in which he depicted nude figures on Holy walls, he thoroughly upset the Catholic church.
Then there was Balthasar Klossowski de Rola’s The Guitar Lesson that ruffled so many feathers for its sadomasochistic representation of a teacher grabbing a student’s hair and touching her inappropriately, that it never reached an exhibition hall. Most recently, it was political cartoonist Mir Suhail who took a host of existing well-known artworks, and images of public figures and showed them as wounded victims of Kashmir’s insurgency with bandages.
So, to sustain and validate the importance of constructive disruptions for building societies, an exhibition by Art Aesthete is being presented to facilitate just that. It’s titled simple and straight—Creative Disruptionists and presents voices that exemplify that.
Conceptualised and curated by Vandana Haksar and Avantika Haksar Chopra, it showcases fine art and sculptural conversations by Krishen Khanna, S.H. Raza, M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Thota Vaikuntam, Manu Parekh, Akbar Padamsee, Sakti Burman, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Manjit Bawa, K.G. Subramanyan, K.M. Adimoolam, Himmat Shah, Jogen Chowdhury, Subodh Gupta, Jagannath Panda, GR Iranna, among other noted artists.
“Creative disruption is the buzzword of our times, a birthing process of bold and innovative ideas, be it Amazon or Airbnb in the business world or Netflix or multimedia creations and installations in the art domain. Led by the masters of the Progressive Artists group, mainly Raza, Souza, Husain and their friend Krishen Khanna, Indian art breaks free of the past revivalist nationalism of the Bengal School as featured in this meticulously conceptualised exhibition by Art Aesthete,” says Vandana Haksar.