Through this immense display of talent, we kept our eye out for young and emerging artists who were pushing the boundaries with their work.
The fifteenth edition of the annual India Art Fair (IAF) opened to much fanfare on February 1, 2024 at the NSIC Exhibition Grounds in New Delhi, and is on till Sunday February 4. The grand show features 109 exhibitors with an entire section dedicated to the category of design, in line with the fair’s commitment to celebrating the best of South Asian art and culture. On display are a plethora of works – masterpieces of Indian modernists as well as the works of emerging artists and contemporary masters of traditional arts. Artists from the South Asian diaspora are also part of the milieu.
Through this immense display of talent, we kept our eye out for young and emerging artists who were pushing the boundaries with their work. Here is our pick of the best young artists to watch for at the India Art Fair 2024:
Merci Thamshangpha Maku
One of the IAF three Artists-in-Residence, each of whom come from different under-represented parts of India, Maku is a performance and mixed-media artist from a village in Manipur. He works on themes of identity and borders. His work at the IAF consists of a large bamboo installation on the theme of preservation of memory, inspired by traditional Naga food smoking implements and using Naga motifs. The after-effects of war loom large in his work, as he remembers stories of trees full of the ghosts of army men and his father’s hobby of collecting war helmets, shells and other war paraphernalia — remnants of the Japanese invasion of the state during World War II and harbingers of the violence to come in the region.
Mayuri Chari:
The second artist-in-residence is textile and installation artist Mayuri Chari, from rural Maharashtra. She works with the form and concept of the feminine body. Her film and drawings are dedicated to the sugarcane and brick kiln workers from rural Maharashtra. Currently practicing in Kolhapur, among sugarcane fields and many kilometres away from any town or city, she straddles her life as an artist with the domestic expectations of being a daughter-in-law. She outlines a typical day in her life: “I make tea for my father-in-law at 6 a.m., who goes on a walk in the morning and then clean the house, before preparing for lunch at 11. Half of my day goes in doing the housework.” Only after this does Chari get a chance to begin her studio work. However, for her, this is a normal way of life – something she shares with many women in India — “My work celebrates women, and my narration always focuses on the real — real society, real people, real stories,” she says.
Siddharth Gohil aka Khatra
The third artist-in-residence is graffiti and street artist Siddharth Gohil aka Khatra, who originally hails from a small town in coastal Gujarat. He creates striking murals across India’s major cities. For the IAF, he created a large carpet at the entryway to the fair showcasing his flair for colour and geometry. Going by the alias ‘Khatra’, which is a tongue-in-cheek way to caution us of his ‘danger’ to established societal norms. His mission in life is to bring art to the streets, and through it, to engage with social and political issues, directly, in the public eye. His work consists of geometric abstraction and typography at large scales and can be seen in public spaces throughout the country, including at venues such a cycling track in New Delhi’s Lodhi Colony, the facade of Chennai’s Indira Nagar Railway Station and the historic Sassoon Dock in Mumbai, among others.
Dhruv Jani
Co-Founder of Studio Oleomingus, an independent and experimental video game studio, Jani explores colonial and postcolonial narratives through video games. For his digital presentation at the IAF this year, he created a video game in the form of an adventure quest in which players seek to find the ‘seed of a mountain’ and be challenged to reconsider ideas of what it means to be a ‘good steward of the planet’. The game and its rocky environs are set in his home-region, which is the north end of the Western Ghats. A huge collector of books, table-top role-play board games, and computer hardware, he relies on these to create his work as a writer and artist.
Sadhna Prasad
This illustrator and muralist spent six years as the Artistic Director of the Aravani Art Project, a trans-women and cis-women led public art project. For her presentation at the IAF this year, she created a vibrant alternate world ruled by natural cycles and another ruled by current human interference into the ecosystem, to show two possible futures. She shares, “I have always created my most impactful work when I have been uncomfortable.” Her series of self-portraits at the IAF use a holographic fabric found in a textile market. “The material would completely change depending on how the light fell on it,” she describes, “and that’s how I came to see myself too.”
Aaron Myles Pereira and Ameya Shinde
A music synthesist and graphic designer have collaborated to create a soundscape and visual world inspired by the diverse bird songs and textures from around India. Pereira works in a sound equipment studio on the ground floor of an industrial building in Sewri, Mumbai. That’s where he met Shinde who works on the mezzanine floor of the same building, as a designer at Studio BigFat. Together, they focus on the “sometimes grating and sometimes harmonised sights and sounds of the city”, from those of their industrial building to the galleries of South Mumbai and the animals and bird-songs at the Mumbai Zoo. Through this aural and visual representation, they aim to celebrate the diversity of their city and country.
Janhavi Khemka
A solo digital presentation of interdisciplinary artist Janhavi Khemka’s is presented by Emami Art. This hearing-impaired artist found it difficult to verbally share her innermost feelings, impressions, and reactions, so she leant on art as a transformative force in her life, as she felt it enabled her to connect with the world through her hands and other senses. For Khemka, this disability is not as a disadvantage but a lens through which one can see, understand and negotiate with the world in different ways. Each work expresses her unique ways of interacting with the world without acoustic sensation. As sound is locked out of her world, she has a particular fascination for rooms. They often appear in her prints and installations. At the IAF, her darkened booth displays a vibrating mat to mimic the one which her mother had once taught her to read lips on. As she creatively explores tactile memory through woodcut prints and animated mouths, a bittersweet sentiment emerges. In her works, amorphous fear takes the form of muted storms or colossal waves that can crash into her world without notice.
Noor Anand Chawla pens lifestyle articles for various publications and her blog www.nooranandchawla.com.