A look at Delhi through artists’ persepectives

Interfaces of being, going on at Korean Cultural Centre, is about exploring the lived reality of Delhi as a city, through the perception of an artist. It is looking at bringing forth the lived experiences of the day to day, imaginations, aspirations, thoughts and communication. The works in the exhibition build dialogues between the actual experience, its memory and its representation. It is about what the city probes, and stimulates in each artist showing in the exhibition, where the city stands for a large web of interfaces—both digital and analog through which one interacts. The exhibition is an attempt to bring together portraits of various versions of Delhi from the personal experiences of each artist.  

Krupa Desai and Anuj Tyagi have collaborated to create a multi-player board-game which walks you through Delhi as in the narratives of the refugees who settled in Delhi post 1947. The game focuses on chance, luck and other random factors that make life a set of absurd events.

Gagan Singh has been engaging with city for many years as a resident. In this set of works he revisits spots and paths from his memories of Delhi, but with the tools of his sharpened quirkiness as an artist. The drawings in the gallery are marks of the impressions he has collected while walking through the city with his sketchbook and phone camera. 

Arjun Singh Sara is an architect whose interest lies in reimagining spaces interspersed with personal narratives in his signature visual style. For this exhibition, his work looks at spaces and structures in Delhi and situates them in the textual context of his experience of the city.

“hum hue, tum hue ke mir hue” is an interactive art project by GSJ and Geetika Arora. The artists have engaged with the text of Mir Taqi Mir, in a pursuit to find references to the idea of being or existence in his poetry. The work consists of a set of sketch books with couplets of Mir cut out from books and artist’s responses to the same with words and doodles. The project invites the viewer to sit and engage by reading, writing and drawing, thus layering it with their own experiences. The work both reflects and documents the artist’s sometimes failed, sometimes successful attempts at conversing with the much-revered poet. Ayaaz Yasin and Shaiqa Tabasum have been associated in research capacity for this work.

Geetika Arora through a series of photographs and videos has tried to capture the mundane and the banal in the day-to-day. This work in progress piece is primarily an attempt to pause and look at/ acknowledge the ‘other’ in the city. 

GSJ walked through Delhi for this work looking for poems which after being written on a piece of paper, were cut into two halves. Leaving one half behind with a twitter address he has displayed the other half in the gallery space along with a live twitter stream, hopefully waiting for the other half to arrive. This work explores the themes of incompleteness, fragility and await that a poem demands from the poet.