'Curtain' Prajakta Potnis

Curtain| Size variable |Wall installation with cloth|2005

This is a work from 2005 titled ‘Curtain’ which was executed at the Khoj artist international workshop at Vasind. Prajakta Potnis translated the pictoriality of ‘Curtain’ into a site-specific installation. The whitewashed walls of the guesthouse where the workshop was held were extended as sensuous, allusive objects by the simple addendum of a frill, creating a delicate frisson between object and surface.

Koumudi Patil

You are getting under My Skin

THE GUILD MUMBAI 6 - 28 November 09

“Personalization of the body is an attempt to declare its ownership or to simply differentiate the ‘other’. The human tendency to guard, reveal, hide and nurture that which we think as ones own is evident in the tendency of marking and unmarking oneself. The visual manifestation of this body is encountered on the surface layer of the skin. The outermost surface is a space for visual and physical encounters. Skin marks the boundaries of bodily spaces. No wonder that the control of this outer layer has become a strategic practice to control the other.

“’Out, damned spot! out, I say!’”

- Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26–40

This attempt to control and own gets under your skin. Thinking through the skin may lead us to a frenzied attempt to wash out all seen and unseen marks of Duncans blood. Or else one may position oneself on more profane versions of the cosmetic industry instead. While thinking of the profane one may not leave the attempts to attain purity at length of both thought and physique. A few drops of the sacred water purifies the skin of the impure gaze of the other.

To mark or not to mark (the skin)

To be pure or not to be pure (skin)

To reveal or not reveal (the skin)” - Koumudi Patil

Koumudi Patil’s first solo exhibition ‘You are getting under My Skin’ will be held at The Guild, Mumbai from November 6 to 28, 2009. Patil received her B.F.A from Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai and M.F.A from Kala Bhawan, Santiniketan. Koumudi is currently working as a Faculty at the Art and Design Programme of IIT Kanpur. Patil has also been involved with several public art projects and group shows over the past few years.

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MUMBAI / NEW YORK

'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.

Reliquary - Conversation with the Artist

Reliquary
Conversation with Artist, Sathyanand Mohan,
Prof. Parul Dave-Mukherji, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
and Santhosh S, Art Historian.

Reliquary by Sathyanand Mohan

SATHYANAND MOHAN

RELIQUARY

April 4 – May 9, 2009

PREVIEW – Saturday, April 4, 7 to 9 pm

Conversation with the artist – 8 to 8.20 pm

The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present ‘Reliquary’, solo show of recent works by Sathyanand Mohan at The Guild previewing on 4^th April 09.

“My education at the two centers of the ‘narrative – figurative’ revival in contemporary Indian art, - Trivandrum, where I did my graduation, and Baroda, where I did my Masters, - can be said to have impacted my work decisively, each bringing with it its own specificities to my conceptions of art and its practice. The influence of the ‘Radical” movement (a far-left artists collective), although on the decline, was still keenly felt during my time at Trivandrum. They foregrounded an interventionist praxis which drew in equal measure from the European avant-garde as well as the various revolutionary political movements happening in Kerala at the time. My relocation to Baroda for my post-graduation tossed me into the midst of a waning cultural ferment that had been (for a decade or more) engaged in the task of articulating, through a narrative language that drew upon a variety of sources, a type of Indian Modernism that had the conceptual and visual apparatus to address both local and global concerns without, at the same time, becoming yet another exotic commodity in the world-market of ideas. From these encounters with different trajectories and approaches to art making, I have tried to evolve a visual language that is marked by the critical dialogue with tradition that constitutes a historically grounded practice. I am interested in the way that history operates through the minutiae of everyday life and of the ways in which it permeates its spaces. I have also been intrigued by Jurgen Habermas’ well-known formulation about the “incomplete project of Modernity”, which seems to me to particularly apt with regard to nations such as ours, - poised to become an economic superpower, yet more often than not unable to provide for the vast majority of its citizenry the social, economic and political stabilities that the passage through Modernity is supposed to guarantee. These contradictions that exist and constitute the fault lines of our society are a further consideration that insinuates itself into my works.

The particular set of works that are featured in my first solo show titled “Reliquary” have been loosely grouped together around the twin (and interrelated) themes of Solitude and Death. It is, at one level, a stock-taking, and a look back at the components of my linguistic and aesthetic choices as an artist, trying to set them out more clearly in order to locate their own limits. Reliquary also refers in part to the presence of Death as a unifying thematic which here doubles as a metaphor for a loss of selfhood, thereby extending further my continuing attempts at exploring (in my work) alienation as one of the central components of the experience of Modernity. Thus the works also have an existential slant in the sense that they engage with and foreground the presence of what has been philosophically described as 'the abyss' or 'the void', in speaking about the moral and spiritual vacuum that is said to lie at the heart of the Modern experience. The paintings are also grouped according to a typology of sorts, featuring a set of figures that resemble characters from a novel/ play (or a tarot stack) which allows me to examine this central thematic from various angles and thereby delineate different aspects of the same, setting it in context to our tangled relationships with knowledge, sexuality, history, nature and so on.” - Sathyanand Mohan

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