Delhi’s contemporary art scene gears up for a week exploring identity, memory, ecology, materiality and diverse artistic practices.
The cultural calendar of the capital city comes to life around certain times of the year. The Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW), which seeks to amplify contemporary artistic voices and create a space for dialogue across practices, perspectives and geographies, is one such important annual event. Currently in its 9th edition, it will take place at Bikaner House, New Delhi, from August 31 to September 5. This year’s edition brings together six womenled galleries of Delhi. Alongside the presentations by the main galleries, two curatorial exhibitions by Adwait Singh and Annalisa Mansukhani will also be on display. The first of these is Bye-Bye Monsoon, which looks at extreme weather conditions, shifting monsoonal patterns and the historical, material and environmental forces behind the globe’s changing climate.
The latter titled This Animate Earth, looks at the botanical world as a site of memory, knowledge, care and interdependence, tracing its connections to land, caste, empire and extraction. Speaking about Bye-Bye Monsoon, Adwait Singh says, “The show draws on Amitav Ghosh’s account in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, of the tornado that struck north Delhi on 17th March 1978. Its title alludes to both the seasonal retreat of the monsoon as well as the deeper retreat it is beating on account of the breakdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, causing the monsoon belt to shift southwards. Extreme weather is increasingly becoming part of our everyday experience, yet we continue to struggle with how to understand and represent it. Bye-Bye Monsoon began with an interest in this gap between what we are witnessing and our ability to make sense of it. The monsoon, with its deep cultural and ecological significance, offers a particularly immediate way of thinking about these changes.
The exhibition looks at the storms around us but also at the historical, material and environmental conditions that have brought us to this moment.” This Animate Earth, says Annalisa Mansukhani, “Considers the botanical world as a site of memory, knowledge, care and interdependence. Bringing together ways of looking at plants that move between material histories and political lives, the exhibition considers how plants complicate distinctions between the cultivated and the wild, and how botanical knowledge has been shaped by forms of labour and observation that have often remained outside institutional histories. What interests me is how much of our understanding of the natural world has been shaped by forms of knowledge we have not always recognised as knowledge. Women’s knowledge of plants is one part of that history, but it also opens onto larger questions of land – who has access to it, who is able to work it, and whose relationship to it is valued. In India, those questions are inseparable from caste and from the longer histories of empire and extraction. For me, This Animate Earth is about sitting with these entanglements and asking what they reveal about the ways we understand the world we share.” The gallery presentations are also very interesting. Blueprint12’s Ways of Being Seen, explores the human figure through identity, memory, intimacy and belonging. Exhibit320 focusses on emerging and established artists around material, memory and lived experience. Gallery Espace’s Presenting Abundance, is rooted in miniature traditions which extend into abstraction. Latitude 28’s MERIDIAN brings fourteen distinct practices into the limelight. Shrine Empire’s presentation is rooted in research, process and material enquiry, and Vadehra Art Gallery’s A Geography of Tender Things, approaches place as a situated experience shaped by social, cultural, emotional and geographical conditions.
Dhanda. Mandira Lamba and Riddhi Bhalla of the gallery, state: “Across these ten practices, the figure becomes a vessel for memory, vulnerability, resistance, humour and selfhood.” Exhibit 320 helmed by Rasika Kajaria, introduces five young practitioners alongside established voices like that of Deepak Kumar, Priyantha Udagedara, Richa Arya, Deena Pindoria, B. Pradhan, Wahida Ahmed, Kumaresan Selvaraj and Yasmin Jahan Nupur, whose works engage with urban landscapes, ecological memory, gendered labour, migration, craft and displacement. Gallery Espace brings together varied approaches from Waswo X. Waswo’s series and Viswanath Kuttum’s diptych to Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s green and black series and Kishor Shinde’s abstractions. Renu Modi, the director of the gallery says, “For Gallery Espace, DCAW has always represented much more than an exhibition platform. It is an opportunity to contribute to the larger discourse of contemporary art, foster new conversations, and engage with a wider public.” Latitude 28’s MERIDIAN takes its title from an instrument of orientation, and considers how practices that are not necessarily alike can nevertheless be placed in relation to each being engaged, in its own way, with the act of locating the self against a shifting ground. The exhibiting artists are Hasseena Suresh, Sudipta Das, Farhat Ali, Yogesh Ramkrishna, Raj Jariwala, Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo, Viraj Khanna, Pradeep Thalawatta, Sai Karnekota, Suhani Jain, Devu Nenmara, Waswo X. Waswo, Tanya Johnson and Kishwar Kiani. “Our presentation at this year’s Delhi Contemporary Art Week brings together artists working across painting, textile, photography, sculpture, and assemblage, each engaging with questions of memory, land, and inheritance in their own way,” explains Bhavna Kakar, founder of Latitude 28.
Shrine Empire’s presentation brings together varied artistic positions shaped by different geographies, experiences and modes of enquiry and reflects the gallery’s longstanding commitment to developing contemporary art discourse in South Asia while creating space for practices that sit at the intersection of aesthetic enquiry and wider social and political concerns. The exhibiting artists are Amitava, Arun Dev, Awdhesh Tamrakar, Chris Basumatary, Divya Singh, Hema Shironi, Jagath Weerasinghe, Moonis Ijlal, Paribartana Mohanty, Sajan Mani, Samanta Batra Mehta, Sangita Maity, Shanthamani Muddaiah, and Minal Damani. “What excites us about this presentation is the way these distinct practices begin to speak to one another across very different mediums and sensibilities, revealing unexpected connections around material, memory, landscape, displacement and histories,” share co-founders of Shrine Empire, Shefali Somani and Anahita Taneja. Vadehra Art Gallery’s presentation, A Geography of Tender Things, approaches place as a situated experience that is shaped by social, cultural, emotional and geographical conditions and extending into psychic landscapes and terrains. The exhibiting artists are Anju Dodiya, Ashfika Rahman, Astha Butail, Atul Dodiya, Hylozoic/Desires, Shilpa Gupta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Zaam Arif, and others.
“For Vadehra Art Gallery, the week is an extension of the conversations that have always shaped our programme. We are delighted to be part of a platform that continues to strengthen Delhi’s position as an important centre for contemporary art in India,” say the directors of the gallery, Roshini Vadehra and Parul Vadehra.
*Noor Anand Chawla pens lifestyle articles for various publications and her blog www. nooranandchawla.com.
