When art meets artificial intelligence

Pradeep Puthoor's art is a confluence of artificial intelligence and biological engineering represented on canvas with vibrant colours and intricate detailing. Adorning the walls of Nature Morte gallery this month is a series of large canvases, executed in the last two years. As I view each, I am transported into a giant chemical reactor comprising metal vessels with the attendant paraphernalia, ranging from tubing and pipes, oozing and bubbling fluid, organic tissue combined with skeletal parts, often against a backdrop of digital codes, metamorphosing into hybrid alien forms of a fantastical dimension. It is an onslaught on the senses, but I suspect that to be the desired reaction from the viewer. Wedged precariously between the real and imagined, Puthoor's works appear to comment on the decadence of urban lifestyle and the human need for mutative technologies. At the same time, the paintings explore emotional underpinnings of fear and anxiety related to man's desire for immortality. With a touch of both surrealistic and futuristic elements, Puthoor's paintings wryly prompt to question our faith in a projected realm of fantasy and science fiction by distorting reality as we know it. 



The exhibition is simply yet aptly titled 'Pradeep Puthoor: New Paintings' and is the Trivandrum-based artist's first major solo show in Delhi, as well as a first showing at Nature Morte. Puthoor's skill as graphic artist and fine draughtsman is evident in each work. Upon close observation I notice an array of tribal motifs, fused and entwined in a modern madness of informatics. There is also a discernable sarcasm in these large and vulgarly bright paintings, which when displayed together create an immersive atmosphere, enveloping the walls and blanketing the onlooker's sight from all else. The visual monotony is broken by the few sculptures by Arun Kumar HG that punctuate the different rooms of the gallery space. Their inclusion here ironically speaks of another level of human relationships with nature, evident in the forms of the revered cow Nandi or that of a juicy oversized watermelon. Out of place and rather disturbing amongst this scheme is Palmscape, one of Mrinalini Mukherjee's marvellously moulded bronze sculptures, which sits atop a pedestal at the far end of the exhibition.

As I survey the gallery, a large triptych in the basement titled Night Watch with Dolls strikes me as hauntingly dark, in colour and form, hung next to a much paler painting titled Temple of Yellow bones. The corner conclave of both these works sums up the exhibit for me, as a meeting of yesterday and tomorrow, of anatomical and robotic compositions, of urban and cosmic spaces.

Source: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/whe...

How to process a history of violence

Delhi underwent a series of preparatory constructions and makeovers in the build-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Although insufficient for the games themselves, it did affect civic life extensively. Over a conversation with Delhi-based artist Priyanka Choudhary, I learnt that the scramble to host the event was also symptomatic of a latent anxiety that propelled the city out of its lazy slumber. With a keenness to explore this pronounced overgrowth, she digressed from painting and spent the next year or so working at construction sites, actively participating in the making of "boundaries". As the city builds vertically, encumbering its supporting infrastructure, Choudhary paradoxically notices a similar anxiety in the barren lands of Rajasthan, the home of her maternal family. Here she observes small plots in the desert, marked by barbed wire fencing, appearing quite unnecessary and completely awkward. The landscape is but a reflection of who we are and to Choudhary the degree to which we build around us indicates the extent to which our freedom is limited. The shards of glass, cement or plaster walls, thorny shrubbery and so on, that we raise to secure ourselves ostensibly reflects, our insecurity.

But is it not necessary to protect, I ask, for we do not live in an ideal world. She agrees, but informs me of her intention to study more deeply the land we occupy and the ways in which it occupies our lives. We continue talking as we view some of her work; canvases punctured by nails, some ripped, others slashed, and a few more infested with thorny bush, dust or clay. These and others like the bamboo scaffolding installation titled Pubic (2010) or the red-coloured shards of glass sandwiched between two concrete walls titled Don't Make Me Yell (2012) are themselves an outgrowth of her observations and experiences at sites of construction. In 2012 began a rather accidental yet obvious progression into performative pieces with a work titled Shroud Reader. Choudhary had already begun to physically place herself in situations she desired to investigate. Here, she lies on one of the two beds placed under a loosely draped sheet pierced with nails, with an open invitation to anyone from the audience to lie beside her. She claims it was not a premeditated intention but as the piece took shape, composed by the architecture of the small room of the gallery she felt the need to place herself within it, accenting its fragility and emphasising its temporality. She describes her vulnerability in the presence of watchful eyes of strangers while staring up at hundreds of nails restrained by the simple weave of thread. The resilience of being is never so dramatically real and the experience prompted a series of performances in spaces of historical unrest. Through 2013, she participated in a series of residencies and projects that took her from Zokalo in Mexico, Ground Zero in New York, Soweto in Johannesburg, Jallianwala Bagh in Punjab, and Ypres in Belgium. Each of these sites has endured a history of violence and injustice that shows no residual presence today. Disturbed by how easily the past is forgotten and relegated to history, Choudhary decided to explore the latent violence of the space by inhabiting it and engaging with the local people.

Her sole companion is the charkha (spinning wheel). As she sits spinning amidst the bustle of a square or side street, the constant act of spinning thread arrests her attention; admittedly a sort of meditative action. As the thread grows longer, she begins to wind it around her face and body, metaphorically binding herself to the site. As she spins, more people take interest, inquire and some even begin to narrate stories. The theatricality of her work is attractive to say the least, if not borderline shocking. Using the newly woven and wound thread as a clean canvas, she urges people to write, to express their acceptance and their resilience of the past in scribbles of "yes". It is difficult to describe an experience, or a specific underlying desire that drives it, she finally confesses.

Choudhary declines the label of performance artist although she feels strongly about the medium that connects her to places and people through the simple thread of thought and energy. She is also reticent to consider her work in the lineage of Arte Povera artists although she admits aesthetic and theoretical resemblance. She finds her inspiration in everyday observations and draws from those that move her the most. As I wind up to leave, I look around her home where we both have been chatting, sipping on our iced teas and ask her about the many figurative sketches adorning her walls. They are a part of her; of course they are, but not simply in the manner of a thought put on paper. They are a window to knowing her, an expression and materialisation of self in a specific time wherein like all her works, life and art seamlessly flow into one another.



Source: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/how...

A chaotic cityscape kept in line

aving lived in Delhi for most of my life, I have learnt to get around the chaos and get things done. It still is the most frustrating thing. So I was pleasantly surprised to meet Chetnaa Verma, a Delhi-based artist who draws her inspiration from the city's roads. We decided to meet at Café Turtle over lunch on a hot afternoon, and I grumbled all the way there — bypassing metro construction dividers and multiple potholes, painfully slow autorickshaws, whizzing motorcyclists and annoying pedestrians who popped off sidewalks with a hand raised to warn cars to stop. And this only accounts for the human traffic on the roads!

For anyone who lives in or around Delhi, commuting takes up a big chunk of time. What Verma does is manifest the daily monotony of getting from one point to another in line drawings by tracing the movement of a single point. It is a personal journey, perhaps the point represents her moving as she reflects on the city's architecture, mentally deconstructing it into horizontals and verticals. Either way, the result is a clever abstraction of those memories into linear compositions.

Chetnaa sat patiently waiting for me as I arrived, a tad harrowed and apologising for my late entry. We began to chat about her practice as I flipped through a file of samples of her work. Drawn on paper were black lines of varying density, some thick and bold, others fine and fragile, some that ran parallel, others that intersected. I wondered how such simplicity could be derived from the madness I had just witnessed.

Chetnaa manifests the daily monotony of getting from one point to another in her line drawings by tracing the movement of a single point. It is a personal journey, perhaps the point represents her moving as she reflects on the city’s architecture, mentally deconstructing it into horizontals and verticals. 

She spoke of how often she was questioned about the underlying story that people believed would facilitate a reading of her work, and confessed that the works spoke for themselves, without needing any long-winded narration to support them. It was true; each piece revealed a harmonious order in the layering of maps, lines and angles — drawn on and threaded through the paper, resilient and tenuous all at once. There was no explanation to why a line was overlaid over another in the manner that it was. Chetnaa had managed to abstract the cityscape to a form of minimal geometric purity that could be visually consumed in an instant.

 


I notice a recurring square grid in many of her drawings; she explains that it exists as a window to escape the disorder, the mundane journeying, and the seemingly endless distances that need to be traversed.

The works I'd seen thus far were all black-and-white, with the occasional (and more recent) use of thread and gold leaf. As we spoke, I discovered that her early works reflected the emotive use of vibrant colour bars that created vibrations of excitement and energy in the viewer. Chetnaa's work is, however, not limited to paper and canvas. She also experiments with video animation and laser light installations, both accommodating her abstractionist sensibilities as well as allowing her to exploit spatial dimensions more penetrably.

It is no coincidence that she was recently voted Emerging Artist of the Year by Glenfiddich and Bestcollegeart.com. Consequently, she begins a three-month residency in Scotland this July with other young artists from around the world. As her practice evolves, I discern a more astute conceptual minimalism in the lines and angles of her making. For the moment, however, I am curious to see what she makes of the Scottish landscape, and look forward to meeting again on her return.

Source: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/a-c...

An 'open source' history through art

Astha Butail began her career in fashion, but her recent interest and pursuit of the study of Indian scriptures, especially the Rig Veda, inspired a deeper yearning. I stumbled upon her work while researching book projects for an editorial I was writing and was immediately drawn to the poetics of her art. This specific project was titled A Story Within A Story, an open book series she began in 2012. Butail draws from the manner in which oral traditions are passed on through generations, interwoven and overlapped, interpreted anew each time. The first themed collection is an archive of a hundred catalogued books based on the Black Sun, drawn from the mythological tale of Martand.

Her studio is also her home, where life and work merge, multi-layered and fascinating, much like her art. As I walk in, I immediately recognise the books mounted on the wall. She walks me through some early works; delicate paper collages and wooden macquettes of a havankund, while filling me in on her motivations behind them all. We shortly return to the books and she explains how she conceived and executed the project. She is thorough in her application of symbolic references to Martand, the eighth son of the goddess Aditi. She crafts each book by hand, with seven leaves. These are then filled by contributions from the audience who are invited to write, draw, engage, reacting to a note on a prompt card that becomes the title of the book marked systematically as 1/100, 2/100 and so on. The outcome is a beautiful collection of people's experiences, stories, poems and sketches that interact with each other. She deftly controls the overall aesthetic of the books, each encased in a sleek retro-looking wooden cover, with pages of paper selected in white, black, red or grey, bound by thread and mountable at random on the wall as an installation. 

Butail’s fascination with memory and the varied libraries of its keeping is complemented by her eye for symmetry that guides the construction of her works. No two books are made the same; the pages cut as eyelets, squares and other geometric shapes, with a black page peeping from under the white that is overlaid.  

Butail's fascination with memory and the varied libraries of its keeping is complemented by her eye for symmetry that guides the construction of her works. No two books are made the same; the pages cut as eyelets, squares and other geometric shapes, with a black page peeping from under the white that is overlaid. Similarly, no two stories are the same, although they may draw from the same reference or source text.

A set of stools placed in ascending or descending order, depending on the way you view them, is currently part of a group exhibition at Galleryske, Delhi. As intended in most of her works, this piece too, invites viewers to participate, choosing to sit however they please, similar to a play of musical chairs. Although originally built more as furniture than a work of art, the creative instinct remains the same. This is the first time she has displayed her work at a gallery space, the open book series remaining within the safe environs of art establishments like the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi and Masquelibros (Artist's Book Fair), Madrid. These are, for the most part, visited by an exclusive art fraternity of enthusiasts and museum-goers, whose inputs are in tune with the project's overall purpose and design. She wants Black Sun (2012), the 10-part Stretch Out To The Light (2013) and others that follow, to be archived as repositories; relics of the current age and its prevalent thoughts. This, however ambitious, does ensure collective authorship whereby individual contributions document multiple personal identities, memories and thoughts minus the politics of history writing. In a place and time where we find ourselves surrounded by competitive branding of ideas, it is inspiring to view her working process, from the inception of a thought to its ultimate manifestation. Astha Butail thus takes up an important role as artist-activist, successfully performing and activating a derived reference with new connotations.

(A Story Within A Story blog can be found at http://astorywithinastory.tumblr.com/about)