阿陀斯男人国900多居民一辈子没见过女人
一个在巴黎的印度当代艺术展，展览名为：年轻的当代印度艺术世界。试图探讨及预测作为中国之后即将火热登场的印度当代艺术市场以及年轻的艺术家们。参展的艺术作品包括录象，装置，照片等。
Indian Summer in a Parisian Fall
By Vasari
Paris—A shocking-pink sacred cow reposing placidly on a printed mattress half way up a grand staircase gave the game away immediately to canny contemporary art collectors who headed over the Seine from Paris Photo to the Ecole des Beaux Arts to catch Indian Summer: Contemporary Art in India, the show billed as 'la jeune scene artistique indienne.’
But hopes of spotting signposts in determining the important artists in what is beginning to be billed as the hottest new contemporary art collecting area (after China, of course) were somewhat dashed by the unevenness of the work.
Ranging from found-objects and ready-mades, to videos and wry retakes of traditional Indian visual life (such as the black-and-white portrait studio and pre-Bollywood magic lantern shows), this show yet had some plums.
First up were Atul Dodiya’s Shop Windows. The artist employs the history of 21st century European art in his work (Suprematism, Constructivism, Abstraction) together with kitsch and popular global images (Gandhi, Nehru, Clinton, Putin) here grafted on to the traditional Indian shop window and steel roller shutter. This was not new work, but challenging nonetheless.
New from Dodiya were two Mondrian-esque canvasses suspended from white rainwater pipes in which formless Rorschach motifs interrupted the referential geometry. Cracks in Mondrian Kashmir and Cracks in Mondrian Gujarat are both in the Shumita and Arani Bose collection in New York as were many other works in the exhibition—if they weren’t in that other prescient collection of Indian Contemporary Art assembled by Lekha and Anupam Poddar of Delhi. (Lekha told me recently that a selection from this huge collection is due to be shown in Hamburg next year.)
Let’s hope that Anita Dube’s reappropriations of existing objects in the Poddar collection will be shown in depth in Hamburg. Instrument 1: Song of Love, two primitive callipers in red velvet and steel, was particularly eloquent.
Ideal Living by Krishnaraj Chanat featured a chandelier, a sofa, a drooping pot plant and a carpet covered in fake pearls, reflecting this artist’s preoccupation with the infatuation of the Indian middle class for the flashy, ‘New Rich’ style which tips over into bad taste.
Amongst the many videos, ex-Royal College Sonia Khurana’s sprightly black-and-white Bird 2000, featuring a nude woman seemingly defying gravity was the stand out. In Bombay Photo studio, Mumbai 2000-2003, Pushpamala N. plays amusingly with the history of Indian studio photography and its attendant ethnic, colonial, popular and cinematographic iconographies.
Coming away from Indian Summer, which runs through Dec. 31, I realized that the Indian contemporary art scene is still bewildering to those of us not fully up on the purely ‘Indian’ iconography that is still its base, but the sheer sense (peculiar to India) of energy and magical fun embodied in many of the works will make this field more and more interesting to the contemporary collector.
Images (top to bottom): Courtesy Avinash Veerarghavan; Courtesy Anupam Poddar, Delhi; Courtesy Sunitha Kumar Emmart; Courtesy Navin Thomas; Courtesy Tejal Shah, Collection of the artist.
Indian Summer in a Parisian Fall
By Vasari
Paris—A shocking-pink sacred cow reposing placidly on a printed mattress half way up a grand staircase gave the game away immediately to canny contemporary art collectors who headed over the Seine from Paris Photo to the Ecole des Beaux Arts to catch Indian Summer: Contemporary Art in India, the show billed as 'la jeune scene artistique indienne.’
But hopes of spotting signposts in determining the important artists in what is beginning to be billed as the hottest new contemporary art collecting area (after China, of course) were somewhat dashed by the unevenness of the work.
Ranging from found-objects and ready-mades, to videos and wry retakes of traditional Indian visual life (such as the black-and-white portrait studio and pre-Bollywood magic lantern shows), this show yet had some plums.
First up were Atul Dodiya’s Shop Windows. The artist employs the history of 21st century European art in his work (Suprematism, Constructivism, Abstraction) together with kitsch and popular global images (Gandhi, Nehru, Clinton, Putin) here grafted on to the traditional Indian shop window and steel roller shutter. This was not new work, but challenging nonetheless.
New from Dodiya were two Mondrian-esque canvasses suspended from white rainwater pipes in which formless Rorschach motifs interrupted the referential geometry. Cracks in Mondrian Kashmir and Cracks in Mondrian Gujarat are both in the Shumita and Arani Bose collection in New York as were many other works in the exhibition—if they weren’t in that other prescient collection of Indian Contemporary Art assembled by Lekha and Anupam Poddar of Delhi. (Lekha told me recently that a selection from this huge collection is due to be shown in Hamburg next year.)
Let’s hope that Anita Dube’s reappropriations of existing objects in the Poddar collection will be shown in depth in Hamburg. Instrument 1: Song of Love, two primitive callipers in red velvet and steel, was particularly eloquent.
Ideal Living by Krishnaraj Chanat featured a chandelier, a sofa, a drooping pot plant and a carpet covered in fake pearls, reflecting this artist’s preoccupation with the infatuation of the Indian middle class for the flashy, ‘New Rich’ style which tips over into bad taste.
Amongst the many videos, ex-Royal College Sonia Khurana’s sprightly black-and-white Bird 2000, featuring a nude woman seemingly defying gravity was the stand out. In Bombay Photo studio, Mumbai 2000-2003, Pushpamala N. plays amusingly with the history of Indian studio photography and its attendant ethnic, colonial, popular and cinematographic iconographies.
Coming away from Indian Summer, which runs through Dec. 31, I realized that the Indian contemporary art scene is still bewildering to those of us not fully up on the purely ‘Indian’ iconography that is still its base, but the sheer sense (peculiar to India) of energy and magical fun embodied in many of the works will make this field more and more interesting to the contemporary collector.
Images (top to bottom): Courtesy Avinash Veerarghavan; Courtesy Anupam Poddar, Delhi; Courtesy Sunitha Kumar Emmart; Courtesy Navin Thomas; Courtesy Tejal Shah, Collection of the artist.
