Visions in the Making Opens at New Delhi

Visions in the Making

A two site exhibition project by Arthub & Engendered, Transnational Arts and Human Rights, promoted and produced in collaboration with the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, and curated by Myna Mukherjee and Davide Quadrio.

Site 1: Visions in the Making
Duration: 2020 January 30 – February 28
Venue: The Italian Culture Centre, Nyaya Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi -21

Site 2: Visions in the Making 2.0 – Open platform
Duration: 2020 January 30 – February 2
Venue: The India Art Fair, NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla Industrial Estate, New Delhi – 110020

‘Visions in the Making’ is an altermodern art project that seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry, transformation and translation between cultures. The formal month long exhibition features six women artists from Italy and South Asia whose works provide a framework for a new modernity that is emerging and is reconfigured to an age of hybridization. The project was initiated in the curatorial interest of bringing three Italian women artists to New Delhi to research signs, forms and materials that have sustained over time in South Asian art practices, and that constitute fertile ground for furthering an expansion of their own individual practices through collaborations with local and regional artisans and designers. During the process, the project was further developed to include three South Asian women artists whose work is a telescoping of the aesthetics, politics and pedagogic lineages and times in India and its contemporary global fora. How does the ‘aestheticizing of the political’ look in India? How does the post-modern lens reconcile with the post-colonial gaze where the foregrounding of the political is seen as ‘inevitably contaminating its aesthetics’?

All six artists Amina Ahmed, Natascia Fenoglio, Stefania Galegati Shines, Marta Roberti, Shilo Suleiman & Gopa Trivedi come together in the contact space of the exhibition to create works that defy standardisation and commercialisation, transpose information from one format to another, play with time and temporality, and wander in geography as well as history.

About artworks

Natascia Fenoglio’s works with performative gestures and objects of functional use like food, paper, ceramics etc. that elevate these to poetic works and ironic commentaries on the world of design and art. Natascia will present three works especially produced for this occasion. The wall paper called Selfie and Bones are transposing images of our daily routine into patterns and surfaces mimic interior design patterns but intrinsically subverting meanings and visual appearances. Same principal is at the back of the Camel project, where the traditional technique (and ritually based) of shaving the camels with magic patterns. Here the camels are shaved in a way that the pattern revealed are the bones of the camel, subverting again systems, values and ritual meanings not without a certain irony. Finally Natascia is creating together with local chefs a banquets offered to our guests on bread-hands and colored with edible natural pigments which are a delicacy to the eyes and the senses.

Marta Roberti tries to elude us with her transparencies and ephemeral installations but, by doing this, she actually reveals herself through the pictorial gesture with her transparencies between body and nature. A liminal space, a poetic and strong gesture, the body that expands holistically. The works will be creating a forest, a parallel universe in which to be lost and magically enter a personal, meditative dimension of fullness. Marta has been preparing this work after residing in Asia for several years.

Stefania Galegati Shines presents an articulated project entitled “Let’s buy the island of the females”. An island to be purchased by women, for women. An island symbol of resistance possible and true. A project to be shared literally and metaphorically. For this exhibition several of the “portraits” of the islands, painting the artist has being produced for several years have been enlarged and expanded using textile techniques and digital printing. The results are several big format carpets to be displayed both in the gallery space and at the art fair. A special promotional video will be also shown on the sculptural representation of the island made with a specific red soil coming (and physically dig out) from the village called Nrityagyan which literally means “’Dance Education”. The village is completely managed and lived by women. Through this combination of the two distant places, Stefania is connecting with the locality, making the project she is bringing to India universal and participatory at the same time.

Gopa Trivedi, a neo-miniaturist, creates subversive new idioms to grapple with the complex and often deep-rooted socio-political stances that pervade South Asia. She re-infuses and re-contextualizes miniature court styles but in radically different style by fusing traditional painting with minimalist abstraction, architecture, technology and new media. She works on temporality and corporality of time by using diverse materials, often creating her own dyes or sculpting with edible products like bee wax.

Shilo Suleiman, a contemporary artist, uses wood and sculpturally painted cut-outs to create layered composites. These are illustrated and embellished ornamentations that depict flora, fauna, body parts and mythic beings. She also works with photo performance.

Amina Ahmed’s work in contrast borrows from folk and spiritual traditions, geometry and metaphors. As a Muslim woman artist in a Diaspora that is increasingly stereotyped, polarised and put under surveillance, her work questions to what degree she can shape her own representations.

All six artists will create new works, site installations or performance for this show.

As a special feature the opening of the exhibition, 30th January at the Cultural Center, will have artist Natascia Fenoglio working with the local chef at the restaurant Diva to develop a series of dishes that would then be presented as an installation, a part of the artwork that will be on display in the gallery space.

Visions in the Making 2.0
the open platform

The project also comprises an alternate satellite site at the India Art Fair, a heterotopic exhibition pavilion that expands the discourse of new genre public, performance & site-specific art with a distinct emphasis on gender, equality and choice. The space provides an intersection between artistic disciplines and ideas, straddles theory and praxis, and, in a world struggling with new ways to connect it allows a visual mechanism for understanding ‘the other’ be it cultures or perspectives or different locations. Blurring polarities between contemporary and classical, local and global, normative and queer; the pavilion will be a space of continuous flux, displaying a hybrid and temporal assembly of art, installations, performance, sculpture, theatre, works-in-progress, poetry slams & open mikes. The space will amplify both ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ voices thus seeking to strike a balance between various conflicts, variegation, and fragmentation that manifests itself in public spaces and the potential role of art in transforming collective struggles.

Artists include Iranian photographer Aamir Rabbani, Actor/Factor, Adil Kalim, Amina Ahmad, Amritah Sen, Babak Haghi, Balbir Krishan, Chandan Bez Baruah, Gargi Chandola, Gogi Saroj Pal, Gopa Trivedi, Kavita Nayar, Malik Sajad, Manmeet Devgun, Moutushi Chakravorty, Mujtaba Syed Rizvi, Pratap Morey, Priyanka D, Puneet Kaushik, Ritu Kamath, Saba Hasan, Satadru Sovan, Satyakam Saha, Sawan Taank, Sumiran Kabir Sharma, Valay Gada, and others.