Speak Space

An international conference titled “Archiving Art histories: Exigencies and Challenges in Pedagogy and Research” was held in Baroda from the 5th to the 7th of February.   The conference provided a platform for intellectual discourse, with art historians and artists presenting  lectures that provoked interesting responses from the participating audience.

Kim Kyoungae is currently working on small works, both on paper and canvas. On her last trip to Korea she found many things had changed. In these works she is attempting to connect  the present context of her homeland with her memories of the past, both real and imagined. The history of the sex slaves during the Japanese war  with Korea for thirty-six years till independence in 1945, is a period of  time she is also looking at through reading the stories of these women.  

Mark Cazalet, a British artist was on a residency program in Baroda at Rekha Rodwittiya & Surendran Nair’s personal studio in Sama. Kim Kyoungae, Malavika Rajnarayan and Sonatina Mendes all interacted extensively with him. 

On a recent trip to Ahmedabad along with Mark Cazalet, Karl Antao and Rekha Rodwittiya, Malavika Rajnarayan took some photographs on her cell phone at  different heritage sites that she visited. The photographs of intricate carvings in stone along with the patterns of light that the jalis formed in the interiors of the mosques, fascinated her because of her own interest in pattern. She found an echo of these architectural patterns on the following day, in the textile prints and embroidery at the Calico textile museum.

  

After a successful solo show in Mumbai with Hacienda Gallery that was curated by Jasmine Shah Varma, Sonatina Mendes is back to painting in her studio. She carries in her mind the jottings she had made from a critical self-assessment session and is now focused on the works that she is currently working on.