THE GUILD’S RESIDENCY EXHIBITION

JULY 24 – AUGUST 4, 2009

10.00 AM – 6.30 PM

We are pleased to present The Guild’s Residency Exhibition featuring the artists from the first batch (17- 23 June 09). The Residency provided a platform to artists and writers to interact with each other and create room for exchange of newer ideas.

The exhibition is an attempt to present the works produced during the week long residency. It shares the views and ideas of the artists/ writers which took place in form of presentations and discussions on various issues pertinent to visual art and the art world.

The exhibition features works of Balaji Ponna, Hemali Bhuta, Himanshu S., Kedar Dhondu, Om Soorya, Remen Chopra, Shreyas Karle and Ved Gupta and Writers - Mohd. Ahmad Sabih and Shubhalakshmi Shukla.

Balaji Ponna’s works are “textual” and it is here that Balaji’s earlier engagement with the popular sign boards and vehicle paintings come to the fore. Balaji’s use of specific visual devices, grids, frames, photography, text, repetitive compositions and attempts at subversion can be read as the post modern tools of visual articulations. Hemali Bhuta’s installations come across as occurrences, seemingly independent of the artist’s presence as they grow, breathe, move, and shed. She does mostly site-specific works and installations. Documenting and archiving seem to become curious nodes of enquiry into Hemali’s works as she is constantly dealing with the dilemma about how to show her work. Himanshu S has no predilection towards any medium. He even doubts his role in being an artist. With activities that range from children’s workshops, teaching, activism, painting other artists’ paintings, and selling little booklets, Himanshu’s main anxiety seems to return again and again to the institution of art. Kedar Dhondu often uses the language of miniatures for expressions in his works but his underlying themes deal with the core of violence. He brilliantly juxtaposes the beautiful watercolour medium in his work. He uses animals and their expected behavior as metaphors for human behavior ranging from aggressiveness and violence to fear, sensitivity and concern. He invites viewers to involve themselves empathetically, identifiying their own personal experiences.

Om Soorya’s works are surreal dream-like landscapes that question what is real and what is perceived. They look like ‘hung’ cities, a site of exploding activities, a crucible of profit production, a field of contesting ideologies, a program of multi tasking capabilities, but ‘hung’ for a while. Remen Chopra works mostly on paper. But she employs various media, and her images are arrived at through mediation, twice, thrice, and many times over, of techniques similar to the process carbon copy. Her aim is to present work as if it’s some kind of theatre where one can maybe see all the props, characters, and the mise-en-scene, to not so much see what all is visible, but in how they are barely visible.Shreyas Karle plays various roles in his every work. Working on community-based art, collaborative projects, and a range of new media, the one common aspect in all his works is his insistence on conducting ‘research’.Little dwarves of corporate giants and ministers, caricatures, metaphors and proverbs distorted, this is what Ved Gupta’s fiberglass painted sculptures come across as at first glance. His work principally concentrates on social hierarchies, class in particular, and the common man. - Excerpts from Mohd. Ahmad Sabih’s Essay.

Balaji Ponna received his B.F.A in Graphics from Andhra University with Gold medal and M.F.A in Graphics from Visva - Bharati University, Santiniketan. Balaji Ponna has participated in various group shows over the last couple of years including’ The July Show’ at The Guild and Art Basel 09. Recently the artist had a solo show at Bose Pacia, Kolkata in collaboration with The Guild, Mumbai.

Hemali Bhuta, completed her M.V.A. (Post Diploma, Painting) at M.S.U., Baroda. She is a recipient of the Senior Scholarship from Lalit Kala Akademi for the year 2004-05.

She has participated in various group shows like a photography exhibition titled “Visuals of a post-visual world” curated by Gitanjali Dang in 2008 “.

Himanshu S. has been involved in teaching, and has participated in a number of group shows. He has had two solo shows at The Guild namely ‘An Interval between Two Non-occurrences’ and ‘this is himanshu s. maybe’.

Kedar Dhondu has been in participating in various group shows and camps. In 2008: The July Show at The Guild, Mumbai .He is the recipient of "Kava4”, Kashi Award For Visual Art. Kedar D has also partcipated in a print-making at a workshop in Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal,

Om Soorya obtained a BFA in painting from College of Fine Arts, Kerela University, Thiruvananthapuram and a MFA in painting from the University of Hyderabad. Om Soorya’s solo shows include 2007: Random Mirrors in the City of Villagers at THE GUILD ART USA INC, New York, 2007. He received the Emerging Artist Award in 2007 given by Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA).Om was a part of the Prohelvetia Residency program at Zurich in 2009.

Remen Chopra completed her B.F.A and M.F.A in Fine Art from the College of Art, New Delhi. She has participated in various group shows and residency programs including a residency program at School of Visual Art New York.

Shreyas Karle obtained his M.V.A in visual arts at the M.S.University, Baroda in the discipline of painting in 2008. He is the recipient of the Bodhi art award 2008. Shreyas has participated in various shows, site specific workshops.

Ved Gupta graduated from Faculty of Fine Arts 2004, Baroda (B.F.A, M.F.A Sculptures). He has earned many awards and participated in various shows and also in the Al Bastika Art Fair Dubai, U.A.E. He is the recipient of the Kashi Award for Visual Art, Kochi, Kerala .

Mohd.Ahmad Sabih did Bachelors in Visual Arts, specializing in Art History from the M.S. University of Baroda, following which he completed the interdisciplinary M.A. programme at the School of Arts & Aesthetics (SAA), JNU in 2009. Sabih has been involved in doing research and archiving with art-critics, artists, and auction-houses, and his area of interest is in investigating the infrastructure and institution of Art in the country.

Shubhalakshmi Shukla completed her Masters in Visual Arts specialising in Art History from M.S. University in 1997. She has curated shows and also has a teaching experience at various schools of Art. Shubhalakshmi has a number of publications accredited to her including ‘Body and Transcendence : Two Women Artists, An essay on the paintings of Nasreen Mohamedi and Anita Dube’ in the book Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art and ‘Indexing Spaces and Images’, in the art journal Lalit Kala Contemporary.

POOJA IRANNA

Of Human Endeavor:

The Super Exposed City and the New Possibilities of Space

6 – 22 August, 2009

PREVIEW – Friday, 6 August, 7 to 9 pm

Conversation between Pooja Iranna and Deeksha Nath– 7 to 7.30 pm

The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present ‘Of Human Endeavor: The Super Exposed City and the New Possibilities of Space’, solo show of recent works by Pooja Iranna at The Guild previewing on 6th August 09.

Born in 1969 in New Delhi, Pooja Iranna received her BFA and MFA in Painting from the College of Art in New Delhi. Some of her prominent shows include ‘Metamorphic Mathematics’ at The Guild, Mumbai; Trends & Trivia at The Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong; Walk the Line at Avanthay Contemporary, Zurich; ‘India Revealed’, curated by Antonio Manfred at Cam Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Naples, Italy; Korea-India Contemporary Art Exchange Exhibition, Seoul, Korea and Emerging India’, by art Alive at the Henry Moore Gallery, London. Her works are in private collections in India, New York, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.

“Pooja’s art has made slight visual shifts every few years since she began working after graduating from the College of Art, New Delhi in 1995 but she has remained true to her inspirational precedents – built urban structures, how they order and articulate space and the response of the human body and the human psyche to these spaces. The particular brand of her visual language has existed in the blurred boundaries between painting, photography, mixed media collages and sculptures and between architecture, urban spatiality and abstraction.

When looking at the photographic works we are aware firstly of the soaring access, of spatiality articulated as a spectacle. This free movement is aided but also ordered by the architectural elements, creating frames which are patterned by grids, reducing the magnificence to the manageable. What they are present day high-rises, headquarters of Multinational Corporations, Banks or World Agencies, shiny glass clad buildings that belong to no-place and can be seen in every-place. But what they have become in Pooja’s works are radical architecture, emptying space of time and event thus creating a shock of absolute fragmentation and dislocation.

These spatial imaginations can not be dissociated from the material corpus of the city. The artist takes pleasure in multiplying architectural perspectives in order to mislead the spectator. This architecture may cause anxiety due to its potentially limitless character, yet it is the limitlessness of the constructed that also frees it, and us, from the shackles of confinement and thus urban imprisonment. The ever-expanding boundaries of the built space become our new frontiers, our anxious landscapes.”

(Excerpt from Catalogue Essay by Deeksha Nath)

The Guild
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'With a Pinch of Salt' by K.P. Reji

The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present With a Pinch of Salt, by K P Reji from July 3rd, 2009 to July 18^th, 2009 at The Guild.

“It’s a delight to find paintings in the common and everyday...”

K.P. Reji

The present body of works by Baroda based artist K. P. Reji are a continuation of his explorations into the organization of community life in India and the manner in which this has become a political issue in contemporary India. However, what makes the present set of works distinct from some of his more recent works on community is the way he has pushed the conceptual thresholds of his visual language in order to probe further into the areas of community life in India, particularly the ways in which the Indian nation state has arranged the lives of its people. He focuses on the way the nation state has set up a seemingly coherent bio political order for its own legitimacy as a sovereign power. The sites where Reji has chosen to work for the mapping of the ‘national’ and ‘modern’ in India are of course the paradigmatic sites of the family and the state, the domains of the private and the public. What one sees across these set of works is a collapsing of these seemingly separate spheres of life with their distinctions becoming historically irrelevant in the face of an emerging biopolitical order in India. Reji’s works map this order of life and the ways in which the lives of various communities are imagined in it.

Reji’s representations of this new order are structured around an incisive examination of the category family. The family, as it emerges in this body of work, is caught in the interstices of nation and capital. Rendered at moments of the intensely personal—during sleep, at play, setting up a house or making love—the family nevertheless is shown relentlessly tied to governmental forces that shape its very contours. There is a sustained hint in these dramatic, even melodramatic depictions, that these figures are hardly individuated, in fact, they call to mind populations and demographics, the subjects of a national order.

Born in Kerala, K.P. Reji has done his graduation and post-graduation in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda. He has had three solo exhibitions with ‘Just Above My Head’ being the latest, held in The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai in 2006. He has widely participated in many significant group exhibitions, camps and workshops in India and abroad, including the Shanghai Art Fair (2008), Miami Art Fair (2008), Miart 2008 in Milano, ‘OK Horn Please’ curated by Suman Gopinath at Bern Museum, Switzerland (2007), ‘Beyond Credos’ curated by Shivaji K. Panikkar at Birla Academy, Kolkata (2007), ‘Double Enders’ a travelling exhibition curated by Bose Krishnamachari (2005-6), ‘Are We Like This Only’ curated by Vidya Shivadas at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2005) among many others. He has recently been the recipient of the Sanskriti Award for the Young Artist by the Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi in 2007. He lives and works in Baroda.