This side of the Forrest…..

This side of the Forrest

A solo exhibition of Vasudevan Akkitham

was on view from the 5th to the 19th December 2014

as part of 

SITE art space &  The Collective Studio Baroda Collaboration

in Vadodara

A poet father, whose words wrapped a young boy in their magic, made for a place of belonging never to be forgotten, even when journeys away from this heartland took the boy far away. In the preamble of getting to know himself as a young artist he found a vast fortune in the treasures of art history. He conversed with himself through the conduit of time that was framed on walls in the corridors of these legacies.

This Side of the Forest frames the preoccupations of Vasudevan Akkitham’s concept of home being central to his work.  He refers to this territory as being a migrant’s dream, yet imaginary and elusive, and in no way corresponding to the actual place he comes from. For him it becomes a life source of sustenance, something he falls back on as the touchstone of reaffirmation of his own existence. It is a subconscious space of attachment that nurtures his spirit, and where the act of painting can unlock deeper terrains where the most meaningful communication is possible in the communion with himself.

The artist’s incessant engagement with drawing as a private space of discourse formulates a major component of his art practice. These notational ideas are instantly caught and held like the quickened pulse of desire, to be momentarily stilled in the pages of his sketchbooks. Unnoticed by others and carried casually without ceremony like a portable world of fantasy, he escapes even in the midst of the humdrumness of everyday teaching in the classroom, to this persistent call of his own moorings. In his studio these miniature-formats then bloom into larger more ordered and designed representations of his personal philosophies, where he paints and draws from the folklores of his childhood and the urban narratives of his adult dwelling, shut away from the pressures of the outside world; and where time conforms to his dictates alone.

The making of a work can often be a protracted affair with Vasudevan, where the image surface maybe reworked exhaustively; sometimes even over many years. His acrylic paintings, layered like overwritten manuscripts, have the final images finding their completion through his painstaking negotiations with the act of finality. This process, unlike the sketchbook drawings, alludes to an infinity that suggests a never-ending span of time in which the artist is unhurried about the final outcome, and where the act of creating becomes the mission in itself. On the other hand the large paper works which are inscribed with imagery that are mutations from the plethora of myths and legends that populate his mental landscape, are fleshed from agitated gestural marks; and the watercolours with their beguiling tranquillity underplay the hidden violence that they contain. Working almost everyday, he has amassed a huge body of work that traces his linguistic journey from his early influences derived from the Trivandrum school of art and his engagement with the figurative narrative movement when he came to study at the faculty of Fine arts in Baroda; and then later his exposure to the New Spirit of Figuration prevalent in London, when he was at the Royal College of art in the late 80’s.

This artist’s studio is a treasure trove, where his work is piled high and deep against the walls. As you look around this intimate space you are encased with an energy that speaks of personal myths; and like reinvented Jataka tales his drawings and paintings open up his world for rediscovery, afresh. The ultimate Sutradhaar, Vasudevan provides you a world of fascination within which to explore and find yourself. The poet’s son now conjures his own magical world of imagery that takes you to his heartland of belonging.

Rekha Rodwittiya

Subtextual Documentalists

Subtextual Documentalists
Jyoti Bhatt & Manisha Gera Baswani
Presented 7th Nov to 20th Nov 2014
A SITE art space &
The Collective Studio Baroda
Collaboration

The process of archiving is the preservation of things considered to be of significance. The need to keep anecdotal memories alive for posterity, so that they remain palpable and assertive long after their occurrence, allows for personal histories to contribute to larger episodes of historical narratives. Such undertakings hold socio-cultural value as they call attention to subjects that lie outside of prescriptive academic interests, and which would otherwise be lost or forgotten without this insistence to memorialising them through independent endeavours of historicity.

Jyoti Bhatt and Manisha Gera Baswani are self-designated documentalists. The camera became an interjectory tool quite by accident for both these artists. However, they very quickly adapted to observing life through a camera lens, and began to use it in diaristic ways. Their common interest in documenting their respective contemporary surroundings by photographing them persistently and exhaustively, offers us revelations that would otherwise be obscured and off limits from any recorded scrutiny.

These photographs record events and occurrences of the life and times of an art community, and by virtue of their proximity to the professions of their subjects, Jyoti Bhatt and Manisha Gera Baswani become participants unwittingly within this chronicled history; lending these images a subtext of autobiographic interpretation.  Being privy to these private worlds disallows them from ever becoming voyeurs. Instead you recognise the ambient connection they forge with these photographic narratives that also reflect the prevailing cultural climate they both belong to.

Jyoti Bhatt’s black and white photographs presented in this exhibition evoke an era where the climate of cultural change within India was charged with passionate discourse, and where the implementation of newly formed governing modules for national platforms of art activities were being strategized. Art education and independent art practices began to flourish in post-colonial India. Stalwarts like N.S.Bendre, Shankho Chowdhury and K.G Subramanyan, along with cultural theorists, re-phrased aesthetic canons that were instrumental in shaping those early years of Indian contemporary art. Many of the people photographed in these images were engaged in articulating ideas of modernity, and its newly phrased implications. Jyoti Bhatt places these moments of personal struggle and collective enquiry before us, without any desire to underline its historical importance, but instead offers it as a personal journey he has been part of. In his usual self-effacing way, he underplays his role as a visual orator who immortalised an era of seminal change within Indian contemporary art.  What we receive therefore is the gift of a genealogy through this documentation, to which we can trace our own belonging.

Manisha Gera Baswani’s coloured photographs on the other hand, take you into a more assured stance of contemporary Indian art history, where the artist and their practice has acquired a more autonomous space of existence. In this time zone the discourse of Indian art has shifted to encompass the global as a context of belonging. The lens holds focus on her subjects, often in isolation, making them occupy centre stage, thereby emphasizing the role of the artist as an individual - confident and firmly entrenched within a social space of urban acceptance. Her photo documentation is culled from the terrain of an establishment that already holds its rightful place within today’s contemporary cultural history. As a viewer you are led into each photo image to confer with a space of private thought, where you recognise the prevailing intimacy of the moment as fleeting, and therefore supremely special. Manisha Gera Baswani holds you captive to the celebration of artistic musings. She draws your attention to the details that illuminate the character of her subjects and their relationship with their work. Whether in a gallery space, in their studios or homes, or in quiet solitude of reverie, the world of the artist becomes the sequestered prism through which all else is viewed. Contemporaneity recorded will now lend itself to posterity. 

Rekha Rodwittiya - 2014

Residual Remnants

Residual Remnants
a group show
presented from 10th to 18th October 2014
as a SITE art space & The Collective Studio Baroda collaboration
in Vadodara

  

Residual Remnants  was the first exhibition of a the one-year collaborative venture between SITE art space & The Collective Studio Baroda, which opened on the 10th of October 2014 and concluded on the 18th of the same month. Sharing a vision for art that focuses upon community and interaction as seminal features that we wished to engage with, our desire was to also highlight alternative spaces of exhibiting and discourse as valuable and critical to sustaining an energized and ever-evolving art context for the city of Baroda.

The curatorial premise for this show was based upon viewing the perceptions of five artists in relation to how they negotiate specific observations of an outer world, and how these works then configured a discourse within this presentation. Each of these artists’ possess personal pictorial languages that are borne from information and experience, which then phrase the conceptual territories that they examine, with the particular pertinence that underlies their personal politics and addresses concerns of humanism that is central to all five. These filtered perceptions are processed to create a space of distance for themselves, thereby transposing the work to hold wider meaning, and to allow collective concerns and empathy to be recognized and shared.

Abir Karmakar concerns himself with a corporality of flesh and body that examines matter and substance through the erotic of transmuted experiences. Every space contains an imprint that validates the human presence being recognized. His sensual feel for paint is almost devotional, as he beckons you to enter into a place that feels familiar - sometimes dislocated and at other moments a place of intimate belonging. He is the quintessential easel painter, whose work reflects the history of art without burden, holding relevant the practice of his painting as one would the obsession with a lover denied. His world, like a labyrinth, keeps you in its maze, entranced.

Kim Kyoungae takes you into a sensual space of pulsating life that is steeped in the blood red of purgation. Derived from the experiences of caring for her mother during her battle with cancer, these works are like votive offerings that hold the evocations of life-giving prayers, at an altar of mortality.  Pristine, these burgeoning forms are like ritual flowers of regenerative power. Tactile, you feel their magic powers in the sacrificial red that seeps through these forms - ever pervasive and real.

Mitali Shah pieces together layers of material that mesh a surface that conjectures the pain and fatality of a city- disintegrating and revamped, each day. Like a perpetuating cyclic of inevitability, this life and death ritual plays out. These wounds, punctured and torn open, are poetic verses of quiet anguish; delicate yet incisive truths of disregard and neglectfulness.

Poushali Das borrows from the narrative traditions of manuscript and miniature painting to re-engage with a world of nature that she believes has become a dispossessed space within the cacophony of mega-media techno-indulgent ideas of existence. She believes in a universe of co-existence where a heightened consciousness perhaps offers a journey of discovery to a more ordered and mediated world; thereby placing all energies within the harmonies of an ideal existence. She demands of you to enter into the story-telling and to find your echo within it. Feminine territories are not accidental playgrounds nor fetish spaces of self-indulgence in her work. Poushali presides over her poetic visual missives with a precise understanding of her own empowered space as woman; sensuous, awakened and free.

T.Venkanna carries the beguiling camouflage of being child-man, both within his persona and his work. This tight-rope walk is a balancing act which plays out his explorations of the world of sexuality-part pleasure, part service, sometimes notional and at other times real and subversive – but always omnipresent. He recalls a childhood where sexual information held proximity to his space of innocence, leading him to examine the world from this prism of eroticism. In the seemingly explicit imagery you however chance upon clues to decipher from, which holds a subtext that the artist encrypts. Like a maverick, Venkanna defies the norms of expectancy and delivers his magical world that questions and confronts the stereotypical ways in which sexuality is understood and defined, without apology.

Rekha Rodwittiya-2014

A collaborative endeavour - SITE art space & The Collective Studio Baroda

From left to right- Piyush Maheshwari, myself, Manish Maheshwari & Surendran Nair

at SITE art space Baroda

In June 2014 I conceived of a collaboration with Manish and Piyush Maheshwari, two brothers who run Rachaita Creative Solutions, to curate present five exhibitions to the city of Baroda.

SITE art space and The Collective Studio Baroda both share a vision for art that focuses upon community and interaction as seminal features that we wished to engage with, as well as to also highlight alternative spaces of exhibiting and discourse as valuable and critical to sustaining an energised and ever evolving art context. Our desire was for the programs to generate excitement and participation which would allow for this idea of cultural engagement to be a rewarding experience for the city of Baroda.

SITE art space is situated at GIDC Makarpura within the heart of the industrial production zone. The exhibition space designed by Mumbai based architect Samira Rathod is beautiful, and lends itself to interventional transformations. Having the gallery space along side the fabricating unit, a display space of art products designed and executed by artists, a library, a residency program unit and a pop up café space, all within a primarily industrial location reaffirms the emphasis of reinstating alternative art spaces as a continued tradition that is a valued part of art history. The underlying thrust was for the community of artists and the audience to be more intimately engaged with discourse and interaction.

The Collective Studio Baroda was set up in the traditions of the guru shishya practice where students and young artists live and work together with Surendran and myself who host this initiative. It is a space of learning that does not charge any fee nor accepts any payback via works of art in exchange either. Founded on the principle of trust and belief to the commitment and passion to study art from the comprehension of it being a holistic world of imbibing knowledge and experience and where the rigours of long hours of studio practise are mandatory, the selection is through invitation only. Teaching, residencies, lecture programs, curatorial projects and fund raising are amongst some of the major activities that The Collective Studio focuses on. 

The rigour of this intensive curatorial and art management program has been personally exhilarating. Working pro bono and with a minimum budget that was self generated by the three of us, it has been extremely rewarding when  exhibitions  have  drawn in  audience numbers  touching 500 on an opening day. The artists and the citizens of Baroda have been very hugely participatory and for that , as a team, we feel great gratitude.



We began our season with a talk on conservation by architect Sanjeev Joshi.

In October  2014 we presented Residual Remnants

In November 2014 we presented Subtextual Documentalists

In December 2014 we presented This Side of the Forest 

In January 2015 we presented Measured Metres

Ankush Safaya was our artist in residence from 8th December 2014 to 10th January 2015

Today we present Six Generations: Notional Worlds

We present author Sanjay Kumar in conversation with Sadanand Menon on his new book Virgin Gingerly on the 21st of February 2015.

Watch this space for more visuals that will share each event in more detail regarding the work and displays.

So to all my readers who have been disappointed that I have been inactive on my blog, it has been this venture that has been the reason!