In a unique collaboration, iconic international museums Centre Pompidou and Castello di Rivoli are all set to stage Indian artist Nalini Malani’s first retrospective in France and Italy next month.
October will also see artist Jayashree Chakravarty showcasing her work at another Paris-based museum Musée Guimet. The shows of both the artists would be curated by Delhi-based Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA).
“KNMA continues to promote Indian artists on important international cultural platforms. In October 2017, KNMA will support two leading female Indian artists Jayashree Chakravarty and Nalini Malani, in exhibitions opening in the same week in Paris,” says a press note issued by KNMA.
Curated by Roobina Karode, director and chief curator, KNMA, Nalini's project titled The rebellion of the dead retrospective 1969-2018 will offer 50 years of creativity in two parts. First it will be presented in Paris in 2017-2018, then in Rivoli in 2018. Jayshree's project Earth as Haven: Under the Canopy of Love is about nature.
In the Centre Pompidou exhibition, Nalini will present works from 1969-2018, including her latest painting series, All We Imagine as Light and the site responsive wall drawing or erasure performance, Traces.
Apprehending Nalini Malani’s work from both a non-chronological and a thematic angle, the exhibitions tackle the various concepts underlying her oeuvre : utopia, dystopia, her vision of India and of the role of women in the world. The result of the Partition of India in 1947 has had a life long traumatic effect on Malani's family, whose experiences as refugees continue to inform her art practice.
Her explorative investigation of female subjectivity and her profound condemnation of violence — in its insidious and mass forms — is a constant reminder of the vulnerabilities and precariousness of life and human existence. In her art, she places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits temporal and corporeal confrontation of the past, present and future; a dynamic synthesis of memory, fable, truth, myth, trauma and resistance. In this way the artist has constructed a remarkable new language of imagination and form, and of phenomena and meaning.
Jayshree's project at Musée Guimet is one of the most enterprising undertakings by the artist, she will respond to the specificity of the site. She will set and scale in sync with the circular plan of the rotunda.
'Earth as Haven' by Jayashree Chakravarty
In the transformed ambience of the Carte Blanche space, viewers will encounter a large, suspended paper structure, an imaginary form inspired by the tiny wasp-house or cocoon but built in massive proportions, making it possible for viewers to enter into and experience her insect-world.
Bare from the outside, the canopy, quite like cave-forms and natural shelters, will be inviting with its sensual earthiness and dark layered interior that at a closer look, unfolds hidden mysteries. The delicate ribbed armature of this built form echoes the shape of shanties scattered over the city of Kolkata, and also bring to mind the slender ribbed-vaults of Gothic architecture.
Hanging above the ground, it will appears like a slow crawling form, with the partly visible feet of visitors conceived as an inherent part of the insect-form. There wil be seventeen large soaring paper scrolls displayed around as a continuous curtain, transform the space of the rotunda, creating an immersive environment for a deeper engagement.
“Earth as Haven rhymes with and alludes to heaven, and perhaps to a utopian desire, but the artist here is more significantly immersed in retrieving the earth as a place of refuge and shelter for all visible and invisible forms of life that inhabit its soil, air, water and sunlight and enjoy its fecundity,”says Karode.
Referring to the interiority of wombs, cocoons and nests, it will be unadorned from the outside while the inside, unfolds a world inhabited by tiny insect-forms — beetles, flies, ants and glow-worms that sparkle and illuminate the dark core of the earth. A play of camouflage, quite like in nature will offer sudden moments of surprise and discovery, often challenging the naked eye, demanding a microscopic investigation. The aroma of the earth, the palpable sensuousness of the surface, the sense of felt movement in silence, the radiance of the sparkling insect-bodies, all will add to the strange beauty of this make-believe haven.
“Jayashree’s over-riding concern to restore the fragile core of the earth, still beautiful and fertile, but equally frail and vulnerable, continues to stimulate her artistic pursuits. Contemporary and relevant, her concerns go beyond geographical boundaries, cultural differences and political motives. Through poetic evocations, her soaring handmade forms amplify the pressing need for a sustainable ecology of life and living,” adds Karode.
