FINDING INDIA

Sakshi Gallery is pleased to announce an Exhibition of Indian Art at the Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Taipei. This is the first time that such an event is taking place in Taipei. It is a major exhibition of Indian art supported by Sakshi Gallery. The show opens on 21st October, 2010 and continues till 12th December, 2010. Having consistently worked to discover and promote the best talents in the field over more than two decades, Sakshi Gallery is honoured to be associated with this seminal event.

We shall be pleased to see you all at the opening and hope that those unable to attend the opening shall visit during the course of the show. Attached herewith is a list of the participating artists and a note about the show.

For more information log on to
http://www.mocataipei.org.tw/
For further details
contact
Geetha Mehra
Sakshi Gallery
art@sakhshigallery.com

Sakshi Gallery
Presents

“PAINTINGS”
By
AMITAVA
From 14th October to 16th November, 2010

After a long gap, Amitava returns to Mumbai with a solo at Sakshi Gallery. Growing up in New Delhi, Amitava emerged in a time most remembered for political turbulence.Alongside his encounters with questions of human existence and the individual challenges of self-discovery, he has built his idiom absorbing diverse aesthetic experiences and experimenting with a multitude of media, observing and responding to surrounding events.

The paintings here are his recent works, with which his language responds to today’s world. At times placing divine and epic characters in a more contemporary, universal context and at times employing other forms, they point to scars of materialism and violence. And while doing so, they simultaneously stand as unique visual experiences.

The artist will be available for interaction on email and phone for the duration of the show and will be present in Mumbai from 13th to 15th October.

For further details
Please Contact:
Rajalakshmi Pandit / Maneksha Monteiro
office@sakshigallery.com
Tel: +91 (0)22 6610 3424                                                                    
 

Sakshi Gallery

presents

Bangladesh Drawings

by  K.G Subramanyan

From 9th to 30th September, 2010.

 
These intimate sketches done on paper soon after his visit to Bangladesh are evocative of a genre that is seldom used these days.
 The black and white 'notes' as it were, are vignettes of pastoral landscapes that Subramanyan is so well known for.  They recall the lush landscape with paddy fields and tall palms which he glimpsed as he drove through the country. Others are sketches of over-crowded cities where rickshaws vie for space alongside plush cars and where people jostle against each other as they move to their destinations. The cacophony is audible.
 

Amongst the portfolio are several portraits of men and women as he has seen them on the streets of Dacca. These quick sketches done with brisk strokes and economy of color are immediately evocative of a people typical of the region.
 

 Despite the small scale of the drawings, we have a powerful image of a country and its people, all in black and white.  

 
For further information please contact:
Usha Gawde
art@sakshigallery.com
022 66103424

SAKSHI GALLERY

presents

Mummified Myths

Recent Works by Prantik Chattopadhyay

Dates: 7-23 August 2010

-----------------------------------------------------------

Sakshi Gallery is pleased to present ‘Mummified Myths’, an exhibition of recent works by Prantik Chattopadhyay from 7th-23rd August.

The exhibition offers a series of thought provoking works that are satirical and subtly critical in nature. Prantik works with the post-modernist language of borrowing, modifying and subverting the existing visual idioms. Advertisements and packaging form the visual sources for his works. Through his works, he creates a new interpretation of popular advertisements which subtly critique the notions of contemporary socio-eco-political conditions of the society and also infusing in them humour and irony. His innovative, witty and subversive works subscribe to a global cultural economy that thrives on clever advertising and branding. The medium for his works are watercolour and duco finished ply sheets, and found objects wrapped up in fabric as is done during mummification process.

About Prantik Chattopadhyay:
Prantik Chattopadhyay was born in 1979, Kolkota. He completed MFA in painting from M.S. University, Baroda in 2006. He has been a recipient of Nasreen Mohammedi Award in 2002. He has recently participated in Artist in Residency Programme for toy making, in collaboration with Chanapatana Toymakers, 1 Shanti Road Studio, Bangalore 2009 and in Artist in Residency Programme for site specific work at Kanakamajalu, a small village, Karnataka 2009. He lives and works in Vadodara.

Sunil Gawde

Sakshi Gallery is proud to present Sunil Gawde’s magnificent installation,
‘Alliteration’ in a special exhibition from March 17 to 21, 2010. The work is
just back after being shown at the 53rd edition of the prestigious Venice
Biennale between June 7 and Nov 22 last year.
‘Alliteration’ is a 4.5 meters large dead-matte black metal kinetic piece. Its
front side presents a screen-like surface to viewers, a wall on which discs
representing 28 moons turn at variable speeds, dipping in and out of
view. The reverse side is open, naked to the eye, without hood or baffle: a
candid disclosure of the mechanism composed by seven belt-driven
wheels, which are choreographing with their movements an elaborate
dance of the moons.
‘Alliteration’ is a complex meditation on the passage of time: a
contemplation of the rhythmic flow of waxing and waning, fullness and
eclipse, which characterizes the life cycle of individuals, empires and
universes. It alludes directly to a cosmos calibrated by the interlocking
trajectories of suns, moons and planets. It hints, also, at the enigma of
personality, whether of the individual or the planet. And perhaps most
subtly, with understated eloquence, it reflects on a society that has made
the transition from an industrial past to a future in which the machine is a
splendid ruin rather than engine of profit, quiescent memorial to fortune
rather than turbulent generator of change.

About Sunil Gawde:
Sunil Gawde was born in Mumbai
in 1960. He graduated in fine art
from the Sir JJ School of Art,
Mumbai in 1980. In 1995, he
received the British Council’s
Charles Wallace Award for 1995-
1996, and spent a year as visiting
artist at the Glasgow School of
Art, Scotland. His work has been
exhibited in numerous
international exhibitions,
including ‘Radium Grass’
(Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow,
1997), Bombay Maximum City’
(Lille, 2006), ‘Made by Indians’
(St Tropez, 2006) and ‘Art on the
Corniche’ (Abu Dhabi, 2007),
organised by Galerie Enrico
Navarra. In 2009 he was invited
by Pompidou Centre, Paris for a
residency program where his work
is slated for exhibition in 2011.
His work will also be shown at the
Museum of Naples later this year
and the Museum of Athens
next year.

‘Chance Encounters: Seven Contemporary Artists from Africa’ Curated by Bisi Silva Sakshi Gallery in collaboration with The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA, Lagos) is pleased to present its special projects initiative, “Chance Encounters, Seven Contemporary Artists from Africa” starting April 17 till May 14. Curated by Bisi Silva, the exhibition consists of works by acclaimed artists El Anatsui (Ghana), J.D. Okhai Ojeikere (Nigeria), Berry Bickle (Zimbabwe), Safaa Erruas (Morocco), Myriam Mihindou (Gabon), Nnenna Okore (Nigeria), and Uche Iroha (Nigeria). Whilst exhibitions of contemporary art from Africa have proliferated in Europe and America, few, if any have been presented in India. In keeping with Sakshi’s endeavour to introduce international art to Indian audience, we present this fantastic show and hope that it will engender a continuous journey of interaction and collaboration. “Chance Encounters” plays on the idea of discovering, meeting, interacting and exchanging within a loosely prescribed curatorial framework. It highlights the way in which individual concerns, mediums and interests coalesce into a fluid but coherent articulation of some of the important issues that affect and reflect our contemporary societies. Through different media including sculpture, painting, photography and mixed media, the artists touch on subjects of the body, memory, culture, history, colonialism, mobility, consumerism and the environment in diverse and captivating ways. El Anatsui presents three sculptural works specially created for “Chance Encounters”. Internationally acclaimed for his luxuriant, monumental sculptural installations, the works reference on the one hand a rich tradition of weaving, whilst also dovetailing into a contemporaneous consciousness about our relentless consumer society and the way in which it impacts on our environment. His works, embodied by remnants of thousands of bottle tops of local liquor drinks and are powerful symbolic reminders not only of the historical effects of global commerce and conquest, but also of the indelible characteristic of the 21st consumer society. Anatsui was born in 1944 in Ghana. He is professor of Sculpture at the Fine/Applied Arts Department, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. J.D. Okhai Ojeikere can be likened to a griot, a harbinger of history, culture and tradition. A self-taught photographer who began his career in the 1950s, the broad spectrum of Ojeikere’s work represents the richness and diversity of Nigerian and African cultural life. With a career spanning over fifty years he has documented the changing realities of a young nation from pre-independence period throughout the early euphoric post-independence period until the present. Ojeikere is, however, known internationally for his extensive photographic repository of collective hairstyle memory shown at Documenta XII in 2007. His central premise is in documenting this eroding inherited tradition and transmitting them into the present. Ojeikere’s works orchestrate the cultural signification of the African hairstyle which is marked by its outstanding sculptural form. Ojeikere was born in Ovbiomu-Emai, South-Western Nigeria in 1933. He started his career in 1953 as a darkroom assistant with the British Colonial Goverment. In the early 1970s, he opened his own studio foto ojeikere in Lagos. Safaa Erruas reduces space to its simplest form of expression through her monochromatic wall drawings, paintings, installations. Her beautiful, silent presentations are powerful artistic vehicles that use seemingly everyday objects such as needles, pins, razor, thread and silk. However, their deceptive simplicity invokes complex emotions such as pain and pleasure, injury and healing and reference issues of history, tradition and gender. As Erruas states, ‘White is not as neutral as it appears. Every colour conceals a message.’ For example the use of gauze in her work is a deeply symbolic material in her work – this thin, light almost transparent material is an important tool used in healing and in protecting from wounds and infection which Erruas uses it effectively as a metaphor for the positive, the pure against the blood red of a wound. The methodological use of white combines the emotions of purity, pain and seduction. What the artist calls ‘Le faux doux’ (false softness), in the perennial search for an equilibrium between good and bad, right and wrong which sometimes results in missing or avoiding the possibilities in-between. Erruas was born in 1976 in Tetouan, Morrocco. She studied at the National Institute of Fine Arts, Tetouan. She reduces space to its simplest form of expression through her monochromatic wall drawings, paintings, installations. Uche Iroha fuses the documentation of everyday reality as witnessed in his critically acclaimed work ‘Fire, Blood and Flesh’, producing images that reflect the dynamic forces of urban Nigerian verve in all its diversity. The series capture the reality of an abattoir the ‘hidden’ aspect of the city whilst also symbolically, posing a mental inquiry on our society today. Iroha was born in 1972 in Enugu, Nigeria. He graduated with a B.A, Sculpture from the University of Port Harcourt. He is a founding member of the collective Depth of Field (DoF). Nnenna Okore twists, weaves, flattens, ropes and braids newspapers, jute material, burlap and clay to create intricate sculptural installations which reference everyday Nigerian practices and cultural objects. She attempts to change the function, meaning, and historical or social context of the materials. By transforming ordinary materials from their original state through repetitive processes and varying textures, by employing deconstructive and reconstructive techniques, the materials inevitably assume new purposes and cultural significance. Okore was born in 1975 in Australia. She graduated with a B.A (1st Class) from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and an MFA from the University of Iowa, USA. Berry Bickle belongs to a generation of African artists who emerged in the early 1990s when theoretical discourses about post-colonialism, cross-cultural identities and globalizations began to question the western artistic monopoly. In her work, Bickle dissects the memory of mobility to study how it impacts societies. Her work often incorporates script of different kinds, recollected fragments from the colonizers written documentations. She is most fascinated by the insignificant remains that she finds among old official documents as well as personal everyday notes such as scrapbooks, cookbooks, almanacs and diary's from life under colonial rule. The question implicit in Bickle's work is whether human beings are a community of nomadic aliens who gather personal stories to build history. Bickle was born in 1959 in Zimbabwe. She studied at the Durban Institute of Technology and Rhodes University, South Africa. Myriam Mihindou places the body, mobility and history at the centre of her diverse artistic practice in photography, video, sculpture and performance. Her photographic series Dechoucaj explores the link between the social and political situation in Haiti and the African continent, what the artists calls, ‘the transfer of a reality between history spectre and the index’. By presenting her images in negative black and white Mihindou wants to establish a connection between the African continent’s ties with contemporary history and the future of this chaotic territory which is Haiti. Mihindou was born in 1964 in Libreville, Gabon. She graduated in Fine Art from the School of Fine Art in Bordeaux, France. Bisi Silva is the director/founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos and an independent curator. Among her projects includes co-curator, Dak’Art Biennale (2006), “Democrazy: Three solo exhibitions and a publication”,(2008). Like a Virgin… Lucy Azubuike & Zanele Muholi (2009). She is a curator of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece in May 2009. Details: Date: April 17 – May 14 Venue: Sakshi Gallery, Tanna House, 11-A, Nathalal Parekh Marg, Colaba, Mumbai-400001 T: (022) 66103424 W: www.sakshigallery.com For further information, contact: Sanyogita Deo E: sanyogita@sakshigallery.com T: (022) 6610 3424