Different textures, moods and ideologies of art have taken over Bikaner House, one of the city’s most active houses of culture, this week. The sixth edition of the Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW) is a curated forum for contemporary art from South Asia, featuring over 50 artists from India and abroad. DCAW is the result of a creative alliance between six of Delhi’s prominent galleries, helmed, incidentally, by women.
Blueprint12, Exhibit 320, Gallery Espace, Latitude 28, Shrine Empire and Vadehra Art Gallery-all six are focusing on emerging voices, engaged in a panoply of mediums and a variety of styles, themes and techniques that reflect the ever-changing tapestry of South Asian creativity.
The tightly packed five-day programme includes exhibitions, workshops and a symposium, with the spotlight on a group exhibition of 18 artists from all the six galleries curated by Girish Shahane titled, ‘Conjunction of the Spheres’. Here is a list of our picks from the exhibition. All these works are for sale.
Fields Aflutter, Shashank Peshawaria
The Punjab-born visual artist Shashank Peshawaria’s series of photographs titled Fields Aflutter at Blueprint12 is a meditation on the landscapes of his home state. “My project foregrounds the flux in Punjab’s farmlands, which are witnessing sweeping economic change and migration as people leave in ever larger numbers for places in North America, Britain, Australia and beyond in search of more productive livelihoods”, says Peshawaria. The photographs featuring rural buildings on vast unpeopled fields with flags of foreign countries painted over them evoke a sense of alienation that has come to characterise agrarian lives in the country.
Drypoint, Jayathi Kaushik
A visual artist based in New Delhi, Jayathi Kaushik’s collection of sketches at Exhibit 320, Drypoint, is about the little things in life that are, indeed, much bigger than we tend to acknowledge. All the works are meticulously made with pencil on paper, and evoke feelings of familiarity and peace. They feature miniscule human figures taking a stroll under monumental trees; paths that seem to be straight out of memory; and a couple walking up ancient stairs, holding hands. Jayathi’s work seems to cherish everyday experiences like a solitary walk in the park or seeing, from afar, birds in a field, and demands that we pay attention.
In a Maze of Time, Ketaki Sarpotdar
A painter and printmaker based in Baroda, Ketaki Sarpotdar’s work at Latitude 28 is an interrogation of the human ability to rationalise lived experiences. In the Maze of Time shows a monkey-like individual hunched over a smart phone that has news running about the Covid-19 pandemic. The painting looks at our contemporary times as a period that does not lend itself completely to either rationalization or fantasy. It imagines humanity in a time and space torn between the primitive and the post-modern. The work is part of a series of paintings by the artist featuring personified animals and inspired by fables and folklore.
Memory Box, Samanta Batra Mehta
Samanta Batra Mehta’s Memory Box series presents wooden boxes containing little glass jars and containers that are filled with various objects including archival images and bits of text. It explores how memory lives on within us. “I invite the viewer to examine the relationship between experience and internal states of dreams, desires, fears and fantasies,” says Batra. Exhibited by the Shrine Empire gallery.
The Outburst, Shrimanti Saha
Shrimanti Saha’s painting, populated by organic forms and fragmented architecture, explores the anthropocentric human condition in the context of contemporary concerns like the global ecological crises, and issues about identity, gender and violence. Exhibited in ‘The Conjunction of Spheres’, the work is rooted in symbolism and is inspired by historical and contemporary sources of knowledge. Exhibited by Vadehra Art Gallery.
Bikaner House, Pandara Road. Till Sept 7.