If we think of memory as a time machine – every archive becomes a portal. The ongoing show ‘Impact: design thinking and the visual arts in young India’ is a labyrinth of many portals, each of which travel into a different era. The show is a culmination of an extensive research project that traces the points at which art and design intersect. It is the first of a series of exhibitions aimed at charting design thinking in India from the 1950s to the 1980s by excavating two key institutions: the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, and the pan-India initiative of the Weavers’ Service Centre. It’s their cross-disciplinary thinking that has cemented the foundation of these institutions. As the viewer bears witness to testaments of historic collaborations, the interstices along the borders dividing art, design and craft come alive.
Press
Nikhil Chopra in frieze.com
Published in Frieze | October 1, 2019
‘He’s going all rogue on us,’ comments a woman to my right. She is part of a group of museum staff and camera crew that has assembled on the balcony of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Robert Lehman Wing. Together, we gaze down at the courtyard toward the artist Nikhil Chopra, who is seven days into his nine-day durational performance, Lands, Waters, and Skies, where, as the museum’s 2019–20 artist-in-residence, he has chosen to eat, sleep and move through the galleries. Chopra has the air of an amused, if silent, reprobate as he slinks sock-footed through rooms housing medieval European diptychs and engravings, 19th-century ceramics and sculptures, before arriving at the hallway housing Sol LeWitt’s monochromatic Wall Drawing #370 (1982).
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Feature on Nikhil Chopra | Canvas Magazine | May/June 2019 issue
In this issue entitled Whose East is it Anyway?, we focus on rising South and Southeast Asian voices in the UAE cultural landscape, marked by the arrival of new initiatives and institutions centered on the subcontinent. Looking at regions linked by colonial histories, trade routes and cultural flows, we break down notions of singular identity and cultural specificity by reconsidering our own frames of reference. While the UAE is always our point of departure, here, we keep our eyes on the horizon by problematizing the notion of the Global South and the various connotations of the ‘East’, examining transcultural connections that exist between Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
VOICES
Featuring a range of artists who work across different mediums and geographies, our one-on-ones are tied together by an investigation of human movement through the Global South’s postcolonial context. In Singapore, Ho Tzu Nyen’s redefines Southeast Asia algorithmically. Both Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Nikhil Chopra explore postcolonial histories, the former with French colonization of Vietnam and Senegal and the latter, in India with fluid identities and port cities. Involved in the pioneering Emirati art scene that grew around Hassan Sharif, Vivek Vilasini looks back at the openness of that period, while UAE newcomer Augustine Paredes contemplates the material culture and ritual of ‘expat’ journeys.
Read more: VOICES-Nikhil Chopra
SFMOMA ANNOUNCES SOFT POWER—INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITION FEATURING NEW COMMISSIONS AND RECENT WORK BY 20 ARTISTS Opening in October 2019—the First Major Exhibition for SFMOMA Organized by Curator of Contemporary Art Eungie Joo
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (April 10, 2019)—Timely and provocative, SOFT POWER is an exhibition about the ways in which artists deploy art to explore their roles as citizens and social actors. Appropriated from the Reagan-era term used to describe how a country’s “soft” assets such as culture, political values and foreign policies can be more influential than violence or coercion, the title SOFT POWER suggests a contemplation on the potential of art and offers a provocation to the public to exert their own influence on the world. The exhibition opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on October 26, 2019 and remains on view through February 17, 2020
“SOFT POWER reflects SFMOMA’s commitment to living artists and the world we share, as outlined in our new Strategic Plan,” said Neal Benezra, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “The diverse practices and perspectives represented in this exhibition embody the goals of this museum: to embrace new ideas, push boundaries and share new ways of looking at our world through the lens of contemporary art.”
Read More: SFMOMA-SOFT-POWER-Press-Release-4.15.19
With his new work, Nityan Unnikrishnan takes the viewer on a wild ride into his world The artist’s Mumbai exhibition ‘The Way Out’ forces us to ask: is it this world we inhabit or are we trapped in someone’s nightmare?
Lonely Crowd
‘Down here, next to me, in this lonely crowd…’ – Bob Dylan
‘Intolerably, I dreamt of an exiguous and nitid labyrinth: in the centre was a water jar; my hands almost touched it, my eyes could see it, but so intricate and perplexed were the curves that I knew I would die before reaching it.’
— from The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges
Nityan Unnikrishnan’s work sits in the same open train compartment as the work of Indian painters such as Bhupen Khakhar and Sudhir Patwardhan. Unnikrishnan has a valid ticket for the compartment but he sits at an angle from his elders, his knees sticking into the corridor, looking out through a different window and telling very different stories.
Monsters are Crawling Out of Mazes: Sahej Rahal’s hybrid beasts look real in a world marked by distortion and false propaganda, suggests Shweta Upadhyay..
Sahej Rahal’s absurd monsters seem to have escaped from a labyrinth. Descendants of the Minotaur, these part human, part animal hybrids are impossible and fantastic: they are militant and ludicrous at the same time. These larger-than-life figures that have crawled from the cracked bed of the underworld fill the entire surface of the canvas. Rahal uses mostly two colours – variations of saffron and black in this series of paintings – which give the effect of the beasts emerging from the landscape or as being embodiments or mascots of the landscape. Confronted with their bizarre bodies and totems, with whirlpools and moons in their glares, you forget that landscapes were once idealized as part of the celestial feminine!
Read more : Sahej Rahal_Art India
Nikhil Chopra in Arts Illustrated
Published in Arts Illustrated | Volume 6 Issue 4
It isn’t just through the drawings of oceans and mountains, valleys and lakes that he achieves this ethereal quality. A video installation at the gallery captures the artist capturing his subject in situ, presumably high up in the Liddar Valley that looks onto Pahalgam in Kashmir, where Chopra spent summers in his formative years. A lot of his pieces reflect his now home, Goa, and its tropical, languid quality. Stark rock faces and glassy water bodies, green fields and grazing animals, spectacular sunsets and groves of trees – the collection’s subject matter is timeless and the mood is reflective and meditative, with the occasional epiphany bursting out of a frame.
Impact: design thinking and the visual arts in young India in Hindustan Times
Published in Hindustan Times | November 1, 2018
The 1950s were a heady time for Indian art and aesthetics. India was newly independent, and exploring its unique design idiom. It was during this period that both the National Institute of Design (NID) as well as the Weavers’ Service Centre were inaugurated — a celebration of both Nehruvian socialism and institution building.
“Design became a central feature of state planning. As a result, there were many artists who were able to take advantage of the new opportunities this period gave them,” says Mortimer Chatterjee, director of Chatterjee & Lal.
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Impact: design thinking and the visual arts in young India in The Hindu
Published in The Hindu | October 05, 2018
In the first of a series, this art show highlights the cross cultural influences between design and the visual arts in a newly independent India
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Mort Chatterjee for ART India
Published in ART India | Volume 22 Issue 2
Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal have been working for the last two years on the Upme archives. These documents comprise a hand written manuscript running to almost five thousand pages along with a large group of silver gelatin prints, each annotated on the verso. This horde represents the basis of Sir Ram Ram Upme’s famed 1898 tome, Discourses on the Lotus People of Early Hind. There are no known printed versions in existence today. For this issue of Art India, Chatterjee and Lal have used a sampling of text and image to imagine the layout of the final publication. This, of course, is an entirely speculative enterprise, and one that seeks to enable debate rather than suggest any kind of finality on the question.
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Minam Apang in Art Dose
Published online | 04 Sepember, 2018
Minam Apang used to describe herself primarily as a painter; it was much later that she even thought of the word ‘artist’. However, from automatic drawings to installations, she seems to have gone through the whole gamut. While her fluid renderings on paper/cloth are a metamorphosis of her imagination into the visual language of a painting, she believes that stories can be told through any medium, be it writing, music or visual representation.
Her interest in art began at a young age, with the understanding of perspective and the realization that with drawings, she could make things up as easily as they could be broken down. With a keen eye, a desire to play with reality as it exists and perceived had planted the seeds for further exploration.
And thus, began the journey of years of experimentation with processes and mediums, forms and structures. Apart from several platforms in India, she has been part of international platforms like the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane and ‘The Ungovernables’ Triennial in New York. But she does not believe that she is quite there yet- “I feel like I still have a lot of groundwork to do…some people are faster; some people are slower”.
Her visual vocabulary is no more dependent on myths and legends. Her paintings now evoke the viewer to seek new stories in them, creating their own phantasmagoria. About using myths and legends as her subject, she explains that this is a subject that everyone can connect with at any point. They are archetypal and open-ended.
However, Minam does not want to pigeonhole herself as an artist who works exclusively with myths and legends. She has now started looking at other topics, themes and mediums to tell her stories. Of late, her creative search has found a new hook- Goan music. For the past two years, she has been going back to her foundation in music. “There is storytelling in that too”- her curiosity, however, has just scratched the surface and she realizes that it might take longer than she had expected to do something with it.
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