http://www.aptglobal.org/view/event.asp?ID=1928
9th Shanghai Biennale- Mumbai Pavilion
Shanghai, China
From 10/2/2012 – 12/31/2012
At Power Station of Art, Shanghai
Pablo Bartholomew (APT Mumbai)
Hemali Bhuta (APT Mumbai)
Neha Choksi (APT Los Angeles)
Manish Nai Limbachiya (APT Mumbai)
Kaushik Mukhopadhyay (APT Mumbai)
Gyan Panchal (APT Berlin)
Sharmila Samant (APT Mumbai)
For the first time in the Shanghai Biennaleʼs 16-year history, the exhibition will move beyond exploring national art practices and will begin exploring city art practices with “Inter-City Pavilions.” Mumbai will be representing India, and one of the nearly 30 cities featured in the inaugural show for the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, which is housed in a building that used to be a thermal powerplant.
Working in tandem with the chief themes of the 9th Shanghai Biennale, the Mumbai Pavilion will zero in on what makes this South Asian city completely unique, what forces drive its intense creativity. Curated by Diana Campbell and Susan Hapgood, the pavilion will provide a dynamic evocation of Mumbai's artistic environment, allowing enough space for each of the nine participants' works and cohering as an integrated whole. Gyan Panchal, Hemali Bhuta, Kausik Mukhopadhay, Manish Nai, Mansi Bhatt, Neha Choksi, Pablo Bartholomew, Sharmila Samant, and Shilpa Gupta are the nine artists whose diverse art works will be presented in the pavilion. The exhibition will run from October 2 –December 31, 2012.
"Jugaad" is the Hindi word for an innovative and improvised solution showing human ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of meagre resources. "Jugaad" is a way of life in Mumbai. Built on the remnants of the British empire and teeming with life, this heaving metropolis acts as a kind of renergizing battery for people coming from all over India, seeking jobs, fame and fortune. Confronted with seemingly insurmountable challenges on a daily basis, the city's residents are constantly forced to rely on their own creativity to devise ad-hoc solutions. It is colloquially understood that to survive in Mumbai one must learn to game a nonexistent system. Playing that game invites creative energy; a will to persevere that is palpable and contagious. It is nearly impossible for individuals toaccomplish the simplest tasks on their own on any level of society, and this leads to an openness of spirit and camaraderie in problem solving, even with strangers. 1+1 equals 10 in Mumbai—and the power of this collective force of over 20.5 million people is hard to match.
The Mumbai pavilion will focus on several themes that nine artists have addressed in their work, and that make the city absolutely unique: its improvisational nature, its intricate collective networks, and its pervasive and longstanging reusage and recycling practices. The works to be exhibited will not suggest any particular aesthetic or stylistic methodology--rather, the artistic processes and images and meanings will gradually expand upon and suggest the exhibition themes in themselves. The art community manifests an unusually strong network of mutual support and the "jugaad" can-do attitude. Artists often wear more than one hat, working as curators, critics, and gallerists. The versatility and fluidity of the situation brings an inherent quality of invention and possibility, unfettered by nonexistent rules. The curators have selected works that show the creative ways in which artists working in Mumbai (who have very diverse backgrounds) breathe new life into existing or overlooked ideas, materials, forms and spaces with their energy and "jugaad."
About the artists and their work:
Pablo Bartholomew, an internationally-recognized artist and prizewinning photojournalist who is based in New Delhi, lived as a young man in Mumbai, a city where he was "cradled and mentored professionally." Bartholomew has selected thirty evocative black and white images of Bombay shot between 1976 and 1983, which capture the vitality, energy, and chaos of the city, the pathos and beauty of existing on the margins of society, as well as the intense disparity between wealth and abject poverty that is a simple fact of life in Mumbai.
Mansi Bhatt, a performance artist based in Mumbai, has been commissioned to create a new work, that centers on a hybrid futuristic avatar, part Hindu mythological creature, part warrior, part lover. Costumed and interacting with audience members throughout the exhibition space for five hours a day, the character will invite love notes in this new performance titled KALKInama.
Hemali Bhuta, a Mumbai-based artist who has exhibited throughout Europe and India, is best known for her sculptures. In this exhibition she is represented instead by work in other mediums with which she is equally conversant: video and collaged works on paper. The innovative abstract video, the movement (2007) uses only rubber bands and filament to create mesmerizing visual patterns, while a selection of works on paper from
2009 similarly emanate from these insignificant materials, showing this artist's facility in transforming virtually any material or medium she takes up, including the mundane and wanted, "the hopeless corners and the useless things."
Neha Choksi, a Mumbai based, US educated artist best known for her works exploring absence and the invisible, has been commissioned to create a new work for the Biennale which reuses one rubber mould to cast a series of shrinking concrete cubes. A continuation of her column cube series, the mould shrinks as it is sewn for reuse, and is reused until it is so dense that concrete can no longer fit inside. A series of photographs documenting her meditative process will accompany the new sculpture.
Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai born and educated and widely internationally exhibited artist is revisiting and reconfiguring a sculpture from her acclaimed singing microphone series for the Biennale. The form was born from perusing the grey market in Mumbai, and the microphones are rewired to emit sound in reverse, creating a sense of urgency to listen to a five-minute audio loop about people who have disappeared, becoming mere numbers whose existence is nearly impossible to calculate. Following this desire for calculating the uncalculatable, the pavilion will also include one of Guptaʼs chalkboard works, where the artist collects the chalk dust of seemingly endless markings that acknowledge those who cease to exist.
Kausik Mukhopadhyay lives just outside of Mumbai, where he creates kinetic sculptures from banal household materials and office machinery. His Toofun Mailsculpture made from kitchen pots and pans, plastic wheels, PVC piping, and other bits of repurposed detritus, has been assembled to create a train car that slowly travels its circular path on a makeshift track. Mukhopadhyay is a highly regarded artist who has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Manish Nai, a young Mumbai based artist, is displaying two series of works which crush everyday disposable objects such as jute thread, glue, and newspaper and create sensitive, sculptural art works that are also monuments to the artistʼs personal history. The artist began using jute thread as a medium when his father lost the family business, and Naiʼs success story is a testament to Mumbaiʼs entrepreneurial embrace of new
ideas.
Gyan Panchal, a Paris-based artist with Indian roots, will exhibit works which he created from found objects in Mumbai. Panchal is one of the many non-native Mumbaikars who has become an important part of the cityʼs artistic landscape. In the sculpture Pelom 1 (2012), Panchal examines a piece of discarded green marble, revealing that the jewellike green tone is not the stoneʼs actual color, but rather an ink stain applied with cloth to the natural stone. Panchal rubs away this colorful mask, revealing hints at the stoneʼs original form while also exposing the fingerprints of the workers who first touched it. In the second work on view, Mrmrajo (2012), he plays again with found color, in this case the lucid blue of reused plastic now repurposed for a wall composition.
Sharmila Samant, is an internationally-exhibited artist who is based in Mumbai. Primarily a sculptor, Samant has worked in various media including video and socially engaged community projects as well. For this exhibition, the curators have selected two recent works, The Bump, which draws attention to the need to slow down, to keep alert to everything around us, and ...with the Hardships of Comfort, a piece of trompe l'oeil furniture, which looks like a potential resting spot but is actually a hard unyielding wood surface.
9th Shanghai Biennale- Mumbai Pavilion
Shanghai, China
From 10/2/2012 – 12/31/2012
At Power Station of Art, Shanghai
Pablo Bartholomew (APT Mumbai)
Hemali Bhuta (APT Mumbai)
Neha Choksi (APT Los Angeles)
Manish Nai Limbachiya (APT Mumbai)
Kaushik Mukhopadhyay (APT Mumbai)
Gyan Panchal (APT Berlin)
Sharmila Samant (APT Mumbai)
For the first time in the Shanghai Biennaleʼs 16-year history, the exhibition will move beyond exploring national art practices and will begin exploring city art practices with “Inter-City Pavilions.” Mumbai will be representing India, and one of the nearly 30 cities featured in the inaugural show for the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, which is housed in a building that used to be a thermal powerplant.
Working in tandem with the chief themes of the 9th Shanghai Biennale, the Mumbai Pavilion will zero in on what makes this South Asian city completely unique, what forces drive its intense creativity. Curated by Diana Campbell and Susan Hapgood, the pavilion will provide a dynamic evocation of Mumbai's artistic environment, allowing enough space for each of the nine participants' works and cohering as an integrated whole. Gyan Panchal, Hemali Bhuta, Kausik Mukhopadhay, Manish Nai, Mansi Bhatt, Neha Choksi, Pablo Bartholomew, Sharmila Samant, and Shilpa Gupta are the nine artists whose diverse art works will be presented in the pavilion. The exhibition will run from October 2 –December 31, 2012.
"Jugaad" is the Hindi word for an innovative and improvised solution showing human ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of meagre resources. "Jugaad" is a way of life in Mumbai. Built on the remnants of the British empire and teeming with life, this heaving metropolis acts as a kind of renergizing battery for people coming from all over India, seeking jobs, fame and fortune. Confronted with seemingly insurmountable challenges on a daily basis, the city's residents are constantly forced to rely on their own creativity to devise ad-hoc solutions. It is colloquially understood that to survive in Mumbai one must learn to game a nonexistent system. Playing that game invites creative energy; a will to persevere that is palpable and contagious. It is nearly impossible for individuals toaccomplish the simplest tasks on their own on any level of society, and this leads to an openness of spirit and camaraderie in problem solving, even with strangers. 1+1 equals 10 in Mumbai—and the power of this collective force of over 20.5 million people is hard to match.
The Mumbai pavilion will focus on several themes that nine artists have addressed in their work, and that make the city absolutely unique: its improvisational nature, its intricate collective networks, and its pervasive and longstanging reusage and recycling practices. The works to be exhibited will not suggest any particular aesthetic or stylistic methodology--rather, the artistic processes and images and meanings will gradually expand upon and suggest the exhibition themes in themselves. The art community manifests an unusually strong network of mutual support and the "jugaad" can-do attitude. Artists often wear more than one hat, working as curators, critics, and gallerists. The versatility and fluidity of the situation brings an inherent quality of invention and possibility, unfettered by nonexistent rules. The curators have selected works that show the creative ways in which artists working in Mumbai (who have very diverse backgrounds) breathe new life into existing or overlooked ideas, materials, forms and spaces with their energy and "jugaad."
About the artists and their work:
Pablo Bartholomew, an internationally-recognized artist and prizewinning photojournalist who is based in New Delhi, lived as a young man in Mumbai, a city where he was "cradled and mentored professionally." Bartholomew has selected thirty evocative black and white images of Bombay shot between 1976 and 1983, which capture the vitality, energy, and chaos of the city, the pathos and beauty of existing on the margins of society, as well as the intense disparity between wealth and abject poverty that is a simple fact of life in Mumbai.
Mansi Bhatt, a performance artist based in Mumbai, has been commissioned to create a new work, that centers on a hybrid futuristic avatar, part Hindu mythological creature, part warrior, part lover. Costumed and interacting with audience members throughout the exhibition space for five hours a day, the character will invite love notes in this new performance titled KALKInama.
Hemali Bhuta, a Mumbai-based artist who has exhibited throughout Europe and India, is best known for her sculptures. In this exhibition she is represented instead by work in other mediums with which she is equally conversant: video and collaged works on paper. The innovative abstract video, the movement (2007) uses only rubber bands and filament to create mesmerizing visual patterns, while a selection of works on paper from
2009 similarly emanate from these insignificant materials, showing this artist's facility in transforming virtually any material or medium she takes up, including the mundane and wanted, "the hopeless corners and the useless things."
Neha Choksi, a Mumbai based, US educated artist best known for her works exploring absence and the invisible, has been commissioned to create a new work for the Biennale which reuses one rubber mould to cast a series of shrinking concrete cubes. A continuation of her column cube series, the mould shrinks as it is sewn for reuse, and is reused until it is so dense that concrete can no longer fit inside. A series of photographs documenting her meditative process will accompany the new sculpture.
Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai born and educated and widely internationally exhibited artist is revisiting and reconfiguring a sculpture from her acclaimed singing microphone series for the Biennale. The form was born from perusing the grey market in Mumbai, and the microphones are rewired to emit sound in reverse, creating a sense of urgency to listen to a five-minute audio loop about people who have disappeared, becoming mere numbers whose existence is nearly impossible to calculate. Following this desire for calculating the uncalculatable, the pavilion will also include one of Guptaʼs chalkboard works, where the artist collects the chalk dust of seemingly endless markings that acknowledge those who cease to exist.
Kausik Mukhopadhyay lives just outside of Mumbai, where he creates kinetic sculptures from banal household materials and office machinery. His Toofun Mailsculpture made from kitchen pots and pans, plastic wheels, PVC piping, and other bits of repurposed detritus, has been assembled to create a train car that slowly travels its circular path on a makeshift track. Mukhopadhyay is a highly regarded artist who has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Manish Nai, a young Mumbai based artist, is displaying two series of works which crush everyday disposable objects such as jute thread, glue, and newspaper and create sensitive, sculptural art works that are also monuments to the artistʼs personal history. The artist began using jute thread as a medium when his father lost the family business, and Naiʼs success story is a testament to Mumbaiʼs entrepreneurial embrace of new
ideas.
Gyan Panchal, a Paris-based artist with Indian roots, will exhibit works which he created from found objects in Mumbai. Panchal is one of the many non-native Mumbaikars who has become an important part of the cityʼs artistic landscape. In the sculpture Pelom 1 (2012), Panchal examines a piece of discarded green marble, revealing that the jewellike green tone is not the stoneʼs actual color, but rather an ink stain applied with cloth to the natural stone. Panchal rubs away this colorful mask, revealing hints at the stoneʼs original form while also exposing the fingerprints of the workers who first touched it. In the second work on view, Mrmrajo (2012), he plays again with found color, in this case the lucid blue of reused plastic now repurposed for a wall composition.
Sharmila Samant, is an internationally-exhibited artist who is based in Mumbai. Primarily a sculptor, Samant has worked in various media including video and socially engaged community projects as well. For this exhibition, the curators have selected two recent works, The Bump, which draws attention to the need to slow down, to keep alert to everything around us, and ...with the Hardships of Comfort, a piece of trompe l'oeil furniture, which looks like a potential resting spot but is actually a hard unyielding wood surface.