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Articles
on Indian contemporary art
by Swapna Vora
| Swapna Vora has written on Indian art for years. She was VP at Asia TV Network, GM at UTV, and editor at the Taj magazine and the Indian Express. She has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Kenya, Lebanon, Britain, etc. and misses them. She now works in America and in India. |
| Once we were one: Erasing Borders 2008: Passport to Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora |
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Laughter, irony, mockery and anguish are there, especially after 9/11, after Iraq, after racial profiling. Youngsters who had basked in the suburban wealth created by their adventurous parents, now knew they were not simply American but brown and Asian. Race, color, religion had again become major parameters to measure humankind. How did they see their world and how would they depict it? 'Erasing Borders' provides some doorways, some glimpses. |
| Published: May 02, 2008 |
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| Jayashree Chakravarty: Herstory: Palimpsests of the maps of memory |
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Jayashree Chakravarty's work is very detailed, unbelievably painstaking and full of stories, memories, and images from childhood, from her many travels, and her schooling in India and France. Her work has layered images, uneven sheets of colors, and even black and white pats. |
| Published: August 31, 2007 |
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Hemant and Shishir are short fleeting periods in tropical India, when the seasons shift into winter. They have to be observed, perhaps, only as they pass on. The pale pinks and rich autumn colors of Amitava’s Hemant are a visual delight and he charmingly explains his involvement with the seasons. |
| Published: July 10, 2007 |
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| Chiru offers limbs, muscles, bones cloned with animals, shards of existence, of disaster. There is anger, suffering and chaos, with no well remembered limits, no recognizable boundaries. We momentarily halt and watch the anguish in his works. Are these responses to catastrophes, humanity's disasters, bloodshed, generated violence, mindless mobs? |
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| Published: May 01, 2007 |
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For a few brief weeks last September and October, Anish Kapoor’s new ‘Sky Mirror’, an enormous stainless shimmer, a giant’s salad plate, sat at Rockefeller Center. It stretched New York and reflected it upside down. It was a time for delight as New Yorkers smirked at themselves, jumped up and down, grimaced at their images and ‘do si doed’ around the Sky Mirror, possibly the most instantly interactive art installation in the world. |
| Published: March 09, 2007 |
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| Splashed, split, sometimes gently lacerated colors, infringed, annulled prisms, interrupted regularly, ruptured opportunities, breaking news. So I see Padmanabh Bendre’s current work. Art in Bombay now has glittering doors, gala openings and glamorous boys as everyone strains and stares across the room to see the next winner of a million. And so the whirligig of contemporary art continues with sly appreciation for nothing but the price. |
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| Published: March 05, 2007 |
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Kausik Mukhopadhyay, a part of India’s post Midnight Children, wryly comments on those complex cyborgs called cities. We live in spaces with no space and in times when time has, without giving notice, slyly slipped away. Kausik creates models of cities that are Mumbai but could easily be New York. |
| Published: February 08, 2007 |
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| Bose Krishnamachari, bold and bald, sits surrounded by his explosive, multihued art: a perspective on the ghosts of his own practice. He observes bodies in a time warp, twisted and stretched out in the universe’s black holes, he is interested in ghosts, ‘misunderstood, misconceived’, the chaotic order and vibrancy of Mumbai and, astonishingly, attempts to understand and portray other artists. |
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| Published: December 04, 2006 |
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