India’s first art museum Devi employs student curators for its second show – review Livemint

Shilpa Gupta Blame

 

INDIAN ART MUSEUM SHOW

Where in The World to 3 May 2009 Devi Art Foundation

Renowned Indian art collector Anupam Poddar opened India’s first art museum, the Devi Art Foundation in 2008. ‘Where in the World’ is its second exhibition and contains works from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar collection of contemporary Indian art. According to Devi’s website

This collection will be the future’s memory of this phase in Indian art. In the absence of other such collections, it may be our only memory of these years.

”Where in the World’ was curated by the students from the first class on art curating at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the result is  ‘adolescent’ says Livemint which at the same time lauds collector Anupam Poddar’s ‘noble’ efforts to promote art education.

while the curating of the show may be weak, it speaks volumes for the foundation that it chose to work with students rather than experienced curators for its second show. It shows that the foundation’s mission is to encourage education just as much as it is to display and promote art.

Happily the  ‘shaky’ execution of the display in which artworks overlap and descriptions are taped to the wall, is more than compensated for by the quality of the works

the artwork is without question some of the best contemporary art in the country.

Poddars before Jaguar in love

In particular Livemint likes

Atul Dodiya’s mixed media painting B for Bapu, which traps Gandhi behind a rolling grill shutter and Sudarshan Shetty’s giant T-Rex fornicating with a Jaguar (the car) in Love (both of which) have rarely been displayed in the public sphere before.

And overall the show can be enjoyed for its

  sense of playfulness: Rooms hum with the clattering of typewriters and odd machines blow bubbles. Viewers must walk into Shilpa Gupta’s strange apothecary shop, Blame, where the word “Blame” pulsates off flourescent-lit glass bottles.

Newer work, such as the installation Untitled by Susanta Mandal that plays with bubbles; and the video installation piece Pan(i) City by Gigi Scaria, are also given space alongside more monumental pieces from the recent past.

In sum

While there are still some kinks to work out, the exhibit proves Poddar’s genius. The foundation is a force to be reckoned with: It is not about consumerism or the marketability of Indian art, but the simple pursuit of celebrating contemporary art in India.

Livemint

The exhibition includes works by A Balasubramaniam, Atul Bhalla, C. Nannaiah, Sheba Chhachhi, Krishnaraj Chonat, Nikhil Chopra, Atul Dodiya, Anita Dube, Nicola Durvasula, Sheela Gowda, Probir Gupta, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Sonia Jabbar, Bharti Kher, Sonia Khurana, Susanta Mandal, N. Pushpamala, Jeetander Ojha, Jagannath Panda, Srinivasa Prasad, Ashim Purkayastha, Gigi Scaria, Mithu Sen, Tejal Shah, Sudarshan Shetty, T.V.Santhosh, and Navin Thomas.

Related:

• New non-profit museum Devi ground-breaking first for India September 2008
• Contemporary Indian art group show at Mori in Japan November 2008
• show Indian contemporary art Highway at Serpentine December 2008
• Indian contemporary art reaches a new stage of development December 2008

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Which artists from Asia are in the Pompidou Centre’s collection?

Cai Guoqiang

 

 

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

Helpful sources of objective and rigorous judgement, museums  provide an independent voice in an art world populated by more unscrupulous personalities and poor research than is ideal.  But how can we find out what the top museums are acquiring and what they are holding in their storage rooms?

Public institutions are often happy to share this information if you give them a call though of course this is not necessarily the case with private museums. Some institutions are now giving the public digital access to their entire collections and the Pompidou Centre is one of these. Its collection comprises over 61,000 works by more than 5,500 artist around the world making it the largest collection in Europe of modern and contemporary art.

The collection is dominated by French works (24,000) and there is a substantial group of US works (9,000) with the bulk of the remainder coming from Europe. It seems that the Pompidou has been active in acquiring Chinese, Indian and Iranian works recently. We have made a list of links to some Asian artists’s works in its holdings:

Chinese modern: Zou Wou-ki, Walasse Ting, Xu Beihong and a number of other 1930s born artists

Chinese contemporary: Cai Guo-qiang, Kai Cui, Georgette Chen, Chen Zhen, Cui Xiuwen, Fang Lijun, Huang Yong Ping, Li Yongbin, Liu Wei, Wang Du, Wang Jian Wei, Wang Jin, Weng Fen, Yan Lei, Yan Peiming, Yang Fudong, Yang Jun, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Huan, Zhang Peili, Ming Zhu.

Hong Kong: Man Ip

Yuki Onodera

Shadi Ghadirian

Indian: Subodh Gupta, Ansih Kapoor, Sonia Khurana, Satyendra Pakhale, N Pushpmala, Raghu Rai, Amar Sehgal, Tejal Shah, Bethea Shore, Velu Viswanadhan

Indonesia, Cambodia catogories contain works by Europeans rather than by native artists

Iraq: Jananne Al-Ani, Abraham Habbah, Jamil Hamoudi

Iran: Jalai Abbas, Nasser Assar, Shadi Ghadirian, Ghazel, Abbas Kiarostami, Nathalie Melikian, Shirin Neshat, Serge Rezvani

Shirin Neshat

Israel: Most works Ron Arad furniture design

Japan: 16 pages of works including 1960s photography and architectural works and furniture from 1960s to 1980s, Yayoi Kusama, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rika Noguchi, Yoko Ono, Yuki Onodero, Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

Thailand: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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New nonprofit museum of Indian art groundbreaking first for India – Christies, New York Times

Anupam Poddar and his mother Lekha

MUSEUM INDIAN ART NEW MEDIA EXHIBITION to 30 September 2008

Spread over two floors and 7,500 square feet in an office tower in the Gurgaon suburb of New Delhi , the Devi Art Foundation, as it is called opened in August 2008 with an inaugural show of photography and video called “Still Moving Image.” It features the work of 25 artists, a fraction of the roughly 2,000 contemporary pieces that make up the collection of 34 year old hotel magnate and leading art collector Anupam Poddar, along with an estimated 5,000 folk and tribal pieces, which are his mother’s passion.Devi is India’s first noncommercial, nonprofit exhibition space for contemporary art from India and the subcontinent. Yamini Mehta, director of modern and contemporary Indian art at Christie’s auction house in London, described it as “a truly groundbreaking first for India.”

The New York Times says “the birth of the Devi Art Foundation signals a sort of turning point in the Indian art scene, in that it opens up a private family trove to the public and is devoted entirely to contemporary art.””The Poddars are known in the art world here for their daring eye, for seeking out artists before they start fetching high prices or become recognizable names at fashionable Delhi dinner parties. Mr. Poddar scouts art college graduations for new talent, though it must be said that many of the artists he sought out years ago, like Subodh Gupta and Sudarshan Shetty, are now among the most recognizable names at those fashionable parties.”

The post-Indian-independence generation of artists known as the Progressives collected by his mother did not resonate with the son. He gravitated toward artists of his own generation. “Their vision of India was similar to mine,” he said. “It was being part of this – I hate this word – global world. It wasn’t just India. It wasn’t so isolated. They were working with sculpture, installation, with new media.”His first acquisition, in 1999, was a life-size pink fiberglass cow by Mr. Gupta. “It was quintessentially Indian but modern in its essence,” he said. “That’s what spoke to me.”

The inaugural exhibition of contemporary photography and video brings together the works of Aastha Chauhan, Baptist Coelho, Atul Bhalla, Avinash Veeraghavan, Bharti Kher, Kiran Subbaiah, Mithu Sen, Nalini Malani, Navin Thomas, Pushpamala N., Ram Rahman, Rameshwar Broota, Ranbir Kaleka, Ravi Agarwal, Sheba Chhachhi, Shilpa Gupta, Sonia Khurana, Sudarshan Shetty, Surekha, Susanta Mandal, Tejal Shah, Tushar Joag, Valay Shende, Varsha Nair and Vivan Sundaram.

 Related:

• Latest Indian contemporary art news
• Review of Still Moving Image by Asia Art Archive
• Devi Foundation website
• Recent posts on collectors of Asian art, important museum surveys, events on now, events coming

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Asian Art Triennial Manchester UK 5 April – 1 June 2008

INDIA SINGAPORE CHINA KOREA TAIWAN The UK’s first Asian Art Triennial opens 5 April -1 June 2008 and is conceived by Shisha, the UK’s premier international agency for contemporary South Asian crafts and visual arts, in partnership with Castlefield Gallery, Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse, The International 3, Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University.  

 

Asia Triennial Manchester 08 shows fresh and innovative work that represents the best of contemporary visual art from Asia: a festival of visual culture that not only celebrates Manchester’s diverse communities but also explores cultural, artistic and political debates of the 21st century. The international programme features stunning venue-based exhibitions, surprising site-specific new commissions, innovative residencies and extraordinary publicly sited work by artists from Mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. None of the work featured has been seen in the UK before and for some of the artists ATM08 will be their UK debut. 

 

The inaugural Asia Triennial Manchester (ATM08) programme echoes Manchester’s radical political and social history, reflects new artistic practice, and seeks resonances between the city and Asia by exploring the notion of ‘protest’ – in its widest sense.  

 

Castlefield Gallery is working with Channel A (Hongjohn Lin and Ella Raidel) from Taiwan and p-10 (Woon Tien Wei, Jennifer Teo working with collaborators Jeremy Chu and Kai Lam) from Singapore who will reside in Manchester in the lead up to ATM08. The gallery space will become a hive of activity with both groups presenting new site-specific work that has been developed through their time in the city. 

Channel A will reinvent the identity of the 18th century bogus Taiwanese, George Psalmanaazaar, as an estate agent, in order to explore the notion of property and fantasy in Manchester and Taiwan. p-10 will create a symposium platform for an accumulative research based investigation into different notions of ‘localness’ within the context of the international Triennial and Biennial. Chinese Arts Centre has initiated both a residency and exhibition programme. 

There will be two artists’ residencies, March – April with Chinese artist Mao Yan Yang, who will continue his interrogation of the media’s depiction of events focusing on the Triennial’s theme of protest and May – June with Hong Kong comic artist Kong Kee. 

For the exhibition, the Centre is working with two Mainland Chinese artists, Chen Shaoxiong and Qiu Anxiong, who both use Chinese ink painting in an experimental way. Using their daily life story and a modern city portrait, they create new ink paintings and animation, which illustrate a sense of insecurity of the rapid urban development in China.  

Cornerhouse is staging “What do you want?” with artists Tejal Shah, Jasmeen Patheja, Shilpa Gupta, Surekha and Shaina Anand, all living in India and working amongst a new generation of artists with activist concepts. The exhibition and community project challenges traditional cultural opinion, contemporary political issues and controversial social situations, the artists use photography, performance, sculpture, video and new media to analyse problems faced by Indian women and those living within conventional family structures. 

 

The International 3‘s project features Chinese artist Han Bing whose work uses photography, video and performative social interventions to question everyday living and the impact of human progress. Han Bing’s art manifests a kind of amor mundi — love of the world — investing ordinary objects with a subtle sense of the sacred. For ATM08, Bing is planning to involve approximately 100 local people in the European premiere of a surprising outdoor performance in Manchester on Saturday 12 April. 

Manchester Art Gallery presents contemporary work by two Korean artists, Gwon Osang and Choe U- ram. Gwon Osang makes extraordinary life-size sculptures of people. He uses hundreds of photographic images to build up the surface appearance of his models, including the face, their hair and their clothes. The process gives his beautifully crafted figures both photo-realist and surreal qualities.  Following a recent Manchester residency, Gwon is now creating new work including a sculpture of the musician Graham Massey – best known as a member of Manchester’s electronic pioneers 808 State. This will be exhibited from 5 April together with an existing work Control. 

Manchester Art Gallery also presents Gwon’s first major UK solo exhibition from 21 June – 21 September 2008. Choe U-ram uses precision cut and polished metals, machinery and electronics to create stunning kinetic sculptures inspired by sea creatures and plant life. Two of the artist’s enormous robotic works, Urbanus Female and Urbanus Male, will be exhibited for the first time in the UK in the gallery’s atrium 5 April – 21 September 2008.  

Source: press release 

 www.asiatriennialmanchester.com