6 Generations:Notional worlds

6 Generations: Notional worlds

K.G Subramanyan

Nagji Patel

Surendran Nair

Manisha Parekh

Sonatina Mendes

N.Divya

Presented 7th to 28th February 2015

A SITE art space & The Collective Studio 

Collaboration 

Baroda holds a context of individual significance for each of these artists. Spread over six generations, their art creates a timeline that illuminates some of the key preoccupations within contemporary Indian art as it has evolved within the changing ethos of India’s economic, political, social, and cultural developments. Art history compiles the lineage of multiple ancestries - recording for us how visual language is determined by outer frameworks of influence and personal spaces of resistance.

Baroda has given birth to friendships within each generation, producing through these synergies an intellectual sharing amongst peers. These interactions have shaped art movements, and informed theoretical studies through ideation and discourse, which were centred on collective concerns, thereby contributing in a major way towards defining the visual cultural history of an independent nation that has had a prolonged period of colonial interjection within its political history to address.

Myth and reality converge to make up the narratives of their notional worlds. These works, sometimes playful or ironic, bustling or stilled, or laced with a spiritual alertness that elevates the mundane into a sacred moment, always possess the undertone of urgency to articulate life as it is lived and experienced.

This culminating exhibition that concludes SITE art space & The Collective Studio Baroda’s collaboration is a tribute to the city of Vadodara. This old Gaekwad city has, over the decades, brought together students and art practitioners from different parts of India, who have received much from this city, and who have equally given back to it, by excelling as visual artists. This show holds a spectrum that umbrellas the legendary teacher to the emerging young artist on the cusp of a future.