What started as a playtime activity during childhood in Turin where she kneaded half-cooked pasta with her hands until it became dough and she created small animals from them has today turned into a fulltime profession. Italian food designer Natascia Feniglio now works with performative gestures and objects of functional use like food, paper and ceramics that elevate these to poetic works and ironic commentaries on design and art.
Fenoglio, who first visited India when 17 in 1993, will be at her creative best at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre today where she will design a series of dishes. The resultant food art pieces are exhibited at Visions in the Making exhibition that takes off today. Other participating artists are Amina Ahmed, Stefania Galegati Shines, Marta Roberti, Shilo Suleiman and Gopa Trivedi.
Curated by Myna Mukherjee and David Quadrio, the show is an altermodern art project that seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry, transformation and translation between cultures. The works on display provide a framework for modernity, reconfigured to an age of hybridisation, wandering between geography and history. The show has been organised by Art Hub Asia and Engendered, a transnational arts and human rights organisation in collaboration with Italian Embassy Cultural Centre.
“To work in collaborations across cultures is exciting and essential in times like these,” says Mukherjee, also founder-director, Engendered. “When we talk about cross-cultural collaborations, it is so easy to think about a transitional work. Instead, it is mainly a work based on trust that allows the limits of distance, time gaps and misunderstandings mutate in incredible occasions, energetic expansion,” says Quadrio.
“The project began with inviting three Italian women artists to New Delhi to research signs, forms and materials that have sustained over time in South Asian art practices, the works that help their own individual practices through collaborations with local and regional artisans and designers. Later, we included three South Asian women artists – artists whose work is a telescoping of the aesthetics and politics and pedagogic lineages and times in India and its contemporary global fora,” shares Mukherjee.
Italy-based Stefania Galegati Shines is presenting an articulated project Let’s Buy the Island of the Females – an island to be purchased by women, for women. In India for the first time, Shine is visibly excited. “This show is a new passport of experiences for me. The opportunity to bring and share in India the Island Project is huge. Isola delle femmine is about a local specific island but it could be anywhere, and I hope it can be used as a transfer of utopia,” she says.
When Italian yoga practitioner Marta Roberti got the invite for this show, she was reading books about ancient Indian culture. “I realised it would be a great chance to explore this culture with my drawings and imagination,” she says. India’s Shilo Suleiman uses wood and sculpturally painted cut-outs to create layered composites. Her artworks depict flora, fauna, body parts and mythic beings.
Altermodern art project
Curated by Myna Mukherjee and David Quadrio, the show is an altermodern art project that seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry, transformation and translation between cultures.
AT: Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, Chanakyapuri
TILL: February 28