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Over the past few years the ART senario has experienced a positive change, an overview published on 28th Oct 2010, have a look(CELEBRATION times by Times of India)
Our motto is Odisha contemporary art visible on the global perspective.The effort of the teachers and students in the inadequate space dreamt of a new world, which deals with innovation and realisation. The integrated conviction has brought the BKCAC through these twenty five years. In these years there have been ups and downs but the nuance and vibe of the associates has remained intact.
Opening : 29 October 2010, 6:30 to 8:00 pm
Exhibition opens to the public November 01 - December 04, 2010.
Sponsored by Tamarind Art Council
The latest video by Pratul Dash, "The Story of a Landscape" (2010), in the gallery's main hall is an experimental fusion of live action and animation with digitally stitched landscape depicting two of the artist's oil paintings named, "Conch Blower" and "Man with a Camera". The work will extend and amplify the conscientious nature of Dash's recent work, demonstrating an evolution in Dash's practice, with elements not often seen in his past work such as the use of CG animation. The film opens with picturesque landscape, alluding crisscross sections of time and space. When idyllic representations are subverted by the artist's perception, the landscape becomes a site of haunted desolation.
As an artist who was born in a small town in India and migrated to bustling metropolis in his adult life, Dash's art is very sensitive to his environment, reflecting the socio-cultural ethos he inhabits and works from. "Life of a Double", a disturbing dual projection is a product of artist's endless quest to locate the urban and the existence of the human beings in the urban locale.
In "Reflection", the viewer can sense the pain caused by displacement of the self and the physical body, and the struggle of trying to exist in as familiar land as a rightful citizen rather than a refugee.
Pratul Dash is an artist on the rise both at home and internationally. Dash, (b. 1974, Orissa, India) has exhibited extensively in major international institutions and has received numerous awards including, the prestigious Industrial literature society, Biella, Italy in 2005 and a scholarship from the Inlaks Foundation in 2004; the M.F. Husain award from the College of Art, New Delhi, in 1998; and three annual awards from the B.K. College of Arts and Crafts, Bhubaneswar, in 1991, '92 and '93.
Select solo exhibitions by Dash include 'Human Spaces', Sarah Khan Contemporary Art, Schaan, Switzerland, 2010, 'Proxy Origin', Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2008, showcased at both the Indian Art Fair: India Art Summit:2008 and Art Expo India: 2008, 2009 by Ashok Art Gallery, 'Neo-Istoria' at Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2007; 'UNIDEE in Residency' at Cittadelarte, Italy, in 2004; and those at Krishna Collections Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2003; Triveni Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2001; and Rashtriya Lalit Kala Academy, Bhubaneswar, in 1995. Dash currently lives and works in New Delhi, India.
About Tamarind Art Gallery
Established in 2003, Tamarind Art is an innovative forum for Indian contemporary art that inspires and challenges global audiences to embrace an understanding and dialogue about art in today's day and age. Tamarind Art encourages broad-based practices, encompassing a myriad of realms such as painting, sculpture, photography, installations, and video art projects. In addition to showcasing high caliber art, our mission is to become the premiere resource center for gaining an understanding of Indian art and artists who engage themselves into a challenging spectrum of work. In dealing with global issues that reflect contemporary society's concerns while documenting today's reality, rendered in a veritable and expressive light, these artists yield artistic versatility to Tamarind Art.
For more information about Tamarind Art Gallery, please visit our website at www.tamarindart.com
Tamarind Art Gallery is located at 142 E. 39th Street, New York, NY, 10016. Contact us by calling (212) 990-9000 or emailing info@tamarindart.com
Gallery Espace’s Going Going Gone, had two sculptures that zoomed into the value and volatile nature of headlines in newspapers. And Times Of India as a brand became the subject of an artistic composition. Bhubaneswar-based Kanta Kishor Moharana has been creating newspaper sculptures in marble for the last 10 years and he uses a gun and the imaging expression of a smoky map to give us the metaphor of global terrorism as an urban testimony.In many ways this sculpture also talks to us about the idea of visionary morphism and the re-examination of atrocity in the urban milieu.
This sculpture also comments on modern day society, it is like a global anthology of peace talks that have fallen apart of places and people in jeopardy and the resulting aftermath of ensuing disasters. The gun translates the numberless death tropes in the angst ridden time of terrorism. This sculpture tells us that as a society we have become a wounded generation. And in this climate of wounds our trust has been replaced by a series of politically driven controls.The artist’s position is that of an observer who stands helplessly and watches.
He articulates a raw space in which the newspaper becomes his medium and message-in a world that has been suppressed in its quest for mass consumption. A newspaper as a subject can be the instrument for soul searching dynamics.This sculpture affronts us and asks us to understand the basis of events and the sadness of death .The gun created out of bronze and stuck to the marble becomes the epitome of cultic symbolism. It talks to us about the futility of philosophic predicaments and the dark science of global terrorism that has become the definition of humanity’s angst.
Not all that many artists concern themselves much with the urban pedestrian, except to call his attention to the few architectural beauties and multiple horrors that surround him on his 'to-ings and fro-ings'. Thus artists, who protest vehemently against the drab and sordid facade of our hectic times, therefore do a service to society and social living. In Suchismita Sahoo's oils we observe two conjoined faces of the reality, we presently live in. The first and the everlasting one so far is the integrity of nature, of her flora and fauna – bees, birds, beasts, trees, bushes, flowers, the hitherto limpid waters, and the blemishless skies, etc. In all this we sense a calmer, sweeter and more spacious way of life and living. It is this world we constantly turn to after our trying, exhausting labours of sheer survival.
That being so, the artist meaningfully juxtaposes such pure enchantment with its obverse, namely with the distress at and the horror with the plastic that proliferate like weeds in the calmly flowing stream of time. She intends to show the pollution that, through thick and thin abets in the feel of cheapness. The cheapy feel in current living is there for all to see. The revolting can be sensed right in the pit our stomachs. How mindless have we not become, in our search for convenient, time-saving useful objects. However the artist is just and not merely attacking the very existence of synthetic polymers. In her note on her work she finds the plastic enormously enabling for a whole kind of human activity. She is right. However she also realizes that reckless commerce has not taken account of sundry sordid aspects of the material when marketing it. I would say such is its color or hue: Texture matters enormously even as you translate an old time earthen vessel from plain clay into plastic. So that only certain objects from the long past can be meaningfully cast into synthetics – I mean engagingly. The values of
utilitarian service, and those of the contemplative eye better not to be severed, else humanity sooner or later goes berserk. The former value or values are for our material well being, the latter for our emotional or spiritual one. Both better be yoked as a harmonious team.
In the painter's work, we notice an endless number of ingenious plastic products doing the rounds of the city in the hands of humbler seeming folk. By their toil the plastic object gets into the nook and corner of each Indian town and city, giving it a different tone and color than what the natural objects (like wood terracotta or stone) did. Also, even birds and beasts, then begin to take recourse to the cast away plastics to build nests, and beasts to tongue it, if not swallow it. Well, animals or birds in tête-à-tête with plastic objects certainly seem quaint. The flow of civilization changes even the non-human to some extent. These of the painter's works, then, have a bearing upon our future time on earth, and need to be mulled over by all its children. Her work helps give a better sense of proportion to these vital matters. She quickens our sensibilities in order that we hesitate to inflict upon others things that make us wince. It should reveal to us the value of moderation and the beauty of orderliness. By showing a dark aspect, she paradoxically restores our sense of experience that we endeavor to preserve. Only by thus highlighting the two sides of a coin do we become conscious, and then go on to alleviate dire poverty as well ensure our private delight. The artist obliquely instructs us, with the truths she imparts, even as she surprises us with the odd combination: of the mother earth born, along with those objects come of the human brain.
Keshav Malik
Fellow, Lalit Kala Academy
This Show will continue from 27 March to 31st March 2010
At: Open Palm Court Gallery, IHC, Loadhi Road, New Delhi