Prajakta Potnis in Indian Highway MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome 22 September 2011 - 29 January 2012

Prajakta Potnis in Indian Highway

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome
22 September 2011 - 29 January 2012

curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar B. Kvaran together with Giulia Ferracci, Assistant Curator MAXXI Arte, and organised in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway

The exhibition is an itinerant collective show that, through a vast selection of works, presents the multiform panorama of the Contemporary Indian artistic scene. Indian Highway offers an exciting opportunity to learn about Indian artistic research and constitutes the first investigation by an Italian museum of the art of this fascinating country.

With 30 artists, 60 works including 4 site-specific installations conceived for MAXXI Art and a series of works exhibited here for the first time in all their monumentality, the exhibition offers a vast representation of the creative panorama of one of Asia’s largest regions and reflects the economic, social and cultural developments of the past twenty years. Beginning with the definition of the highway as an element of connection between the migratory flows moving from the periphery towards the city, Indian Highway speaks about technological development, the economic boom and the growing global centrality of this subcontinent in the world of the arts since the 1990s.


Still Life

My work dwells between the intimate world of an individual and the world outside which is separated sometimes only by a wall. I would like to look at the wall as a veil and also as an organic separation between the inside and the outside through which imperceptible elements pass and affect the psyche of individuals, after reading about certain crops being genetically engineered, it made me wonder how it would affect, the individual consuming it. How resolutions passed, transgress and enter an individual’s private space. The inside of a refrigerator has always intrigued me, its controlled enclosed environment creates a stage like setting, I wanted to weave a narrative within this setting. Where the viewer becomes a voyeur, witnessing an event happening in the inside of this enclosed space. With the aid of those vegetables that would be genetically modified, I tried to recreate a moment of explosion, a sudden outburst in the inside of the refrigerator. – Prajakta Potnis


For more information visit http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/schede/indian-highway-en

Art 4 Sunday

Dear Friends,

We invite you to visit us on Art 4 Sunday, September 25, 2011 from 11 am to 5 pm.
Do catch Looking is not Seeing - solo by Balaji Ponna The Guild

We look forward to welcoming you this Sunday with your family and friends.

Rakhi Peswani in Residence at The Hague at the invitation of Kosmopolis Hague

Rakhi Peswani in Residence

at The Hague at the invitation of Kosmopolis Hague

September 16 – December 14

During her stay in the Netherlands Rakhi will study Dutch Art from Indian perspective. Rakhi will be participating in the Hague India Month. She also has some teaching assignments with art academies, a collaboration project with a Dutch theatre Director and an exhibition of her works at Denneweg Today

Rakhi Peswani is a recipient of Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s Emerging Artist Award and obtained her Bachelor’s degree in painting and Master’s degree in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. U, Vadodara. Peswani’s solos include Matters Under the Skin with The Guild, Mumbai at Art HK - Asia One 2011; Intertwinings, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2009;Sonnet for Silent Machines, at Jehangir Nicholson Gallery & The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2007. Selected group shows include Generation in Transition New Art from India Exhibition Curated by Magda Kardasz,Warsaw, Bring Me A Lion: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art, The Hunt Gallery, St.Louis, Missouri(2010).

For more information visit http://www.kosmopolisdenhaag.nl/

Prajakta Potnis at West Heavens Artist Dispatch - Residency in Shanghai

Prajakta Potnis

at West Heavens Artist Dispatch - Residency in Shanghai

Artist Dispatch

September 2011 Onwards, Delhi - Shanghai

Indian artists Dhrupadi Ghosh and Prajakta Potnis will be dispatched to Shanghai in September 2011, while Chinese artists Zheng Bo and Liu Wei, together with Taiwanese curator Amy Cheng will be dispatched to Delhi at the same period. Thoughts, discussions, and notes will gradually develop themselves into art works in the months to come.

West Heavens is a cross-disciplinary cultural exchange project, aiming to foster closer understanding of India through contemporary art and scholarship, and develop cross-cultural dialogue based on visual culture and notions of Asian modernity. Past and current programs cover a vast scope of social thoughts, contemporary arts, urban studies, film studies and music, and the form of events extend from lectures, discussions, exhibitions, screenings, workshops, performances and related translation and publications.

Prajakta Potnis (1980--) received her BFA and MFA from the Sir J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai, India (1995/2002). Her multidisciplinary work spans painting, installation, sculpture and photography and investigates the porousness and interpenetrability of boundaries and binaries such as inside/outside, public/private, natural/engineered, etc, and has been shown to critical acclaim in India and internationally in venues including Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Paris, France (2011); Heart Herning Museum Of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2010); Lakeern Gallery, Mumbai (2010); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art Oslo, Norway(2009); The Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Austria (2010); Khoj International Artist Workshop, Delhi (2009); and others, as well as solo exhibitions, “Membranes and Margins”, Em Gallery, Seoul (2008); “Porous walls” The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai (2008); “Walls- In- Between,” Kitab Mahal, The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai (2006).

Her work has been featured in significant publications including ‘I’m Not There: New Art from Asia,’ Ed. Cecilia Alemani (The Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2010); ‘Younger than Jesus: The Artist Directory’ (New Museum and Phaidon, 2009), as well as numerous catalogues and art magazines such as Art ETC, and others. Potnis is also the recipient of the major awards including the Sanskriti Award for ART (2010), the Inlaks Fine Arts award (2003-2004), and the Young Artist fellowship, from the Indian National Department of Culture (2001- 2003).

For more information visit http://westheavens.net/en

T. V. Santhosh at Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art 'Rewriting Worlds'

http://www.4th.moscowbiennale.ru/en

On September 22, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens its fourth edition. Titled "Rewriting Worlds", it will run until October 30 and features 64 artists and 14 groups of artists from more than 33 countries. The Moscow Biennale is being curated by Peter Weibel, Director of the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The Guild is proud to announce the participation of T. V. Santhosh, in the Fourth Moscow Biennale, who will exhibit 'Houndingdown' sculptural installation in the Biennale. The other Indian artist to be participating in this biennale is Shilpa Gupta.

The work titled, ‘Houndingdown’ is a key installation that broadly reflects Santhosh's conceptual and linguistic concerns of his ongoing engagements. It consists of thirty dogs and LED panels, is a combination of few historical references of ruthless and unforgivable deeds men committed in the past and relentless angst about the thoughts of future. One of the references is a testimony, a text that runs across on three LED panels placed on the floor, of a schoolgirl who witnessed the Hiroshima nuclear explosion. This re-edited first hand description of such a dreadful vision of terror and screams is almost like a hounding dream yet more real than real that sends a chill down through the spine. It is a story of burned and mutilated dead bodies, how a familiar neighborhood suddenly turns in to a ruined war zone and how the radiation turns a young girl into looking like old aged. The redness of the LED text plays the role of the image by reflecting it on to the images of dogs thus playing a crucial role in building up the totality of the installation.

If you are at the Biennale, we look forward to meeting you for the opening.

www.guildindia.com

Balaji Ponna 'Looking is not Seeing' at The Guild

Balaji Ponna

Looking is not Seeing

THE GUILD MUMBAI

September 8 – October 3, 2011

Preview: Thursday, September 8, 7 pm – 9:30 pm

The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present Looking is not Seeing a solo exhibition of recent works of Balaji Ponna, previewing on Thursday, the September 8, 2011.

“Responding to the socio-political and cultural realities of the time is one of the modes in which artists engage thematically through work. Within this engagement there are several trajectories of expressions that had emerged corroborating the subjective experiences of the artist in relation to the objective existence in society….

Balaji’s works comprise a crucial relation between the painted text-phrases and the images. In fact this text, composed in two phrases, frames the meanings and the subtext of the visual images. Written in a simple typography, this text does not intervene in the picture format but stays on the surface, by virtue of its flat, two-dimensional nature. In one sense this text is equal to the status of parergon, as theorised by Derrida – Parergon is “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work, neither inside or outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work” (Truth in Painting, 1978). The textual phrase belongs to the work (painting) as well as stays unrelated pictorially to the painting. When a viewer approaches these paintings, the sight is drawn towards deftly manoeuvred images, but quickly, the verbal text catches the eye, as if intervening between the pictorial image and the sight of the onlooker. This moment of rupture is also the moment of introduction of specific meanings to the work. The phenomenological and aesthetic experience of the viewer, in this context, is guided by the text-phrase, written in English. And in this moment of quick shifts between the textual phrase and the image, signification gets complicated and acquires a double signification which correlates each other – the text and the image. At one level the text-phrase puts forward a literal or direct meaning of it. When the signified or the meaning interacts with the image, this signified becomes empty and acquires a second level signification, whose signified belongs to the social and political realms.” (Excerpt from an essay by Santosh Kumar Sakhinala)

Born in 1980, 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. He has been recipient of H.R.D. National Scholarship for young Artists (2004–05). His recent solo exhibitions include Monuments at India Art Summit 2011 with The Guild, Mumbai; The Things I Say, at Studio La Citta, Verona and Black Smoke, at Bose Pacia, Kolkata, in collaboration with The Guild. Ponna has participated in various group shows over the last couple of years including Art Celebrates 2010: Sports and the City, an Exhibition of Indian Contemporary Art curated by Rupika Chawla; Contemporary Exoticism curated by Marco Meneguzzo at Studio La Citta, Verona; Art Basel by Studio la Citta, 2009; A New Vanguard: Trends in Contemporary Indian Art, Saffronart, New York and The Guild, New York; The July Show at The Guild and Are We Like This Only? Curated by Vidya Shivadas at Vadehra Art Gallery , Delhi . His works were also exhibited at the France Print Biennial in 2009.