Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies - Karishma D'souza

Balancing Act

‘Sometimes when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can cause one to feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly unravelling. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes more and more difficult to keep a balanced grip on one’s own being.’

Haruki Murakami ‘The Wind-up bird Chronicle’

In certain circumstances or situations, one can travel beyond oneself to look at the familiar clinically, which finally allows one to be closer to the self. My art practice is often such a space for me, allowing me to revisit feelings that linger from a memory, while grappling with the elements that make up a painting- and how one creates a visual; being a space where I can pay homage to something; communicate with someone who has repeatedly given unconditionally; hold the dialogue.

The most precious thing in life is the sharing of the spirit, and that no one lives in isolation.

In my work I try to reach out with a tweezer and pick out these wispy, seemingly ephemeral and easily dissolvable, points of connection, sentences of conversation, that hover and float, morph and regroup to their original shape continuously in the stratosphere of memories of my lived experiences; and the experiences of others that leave imprints on one through a retelling; experiences that are relived as often as they are retold. I would see these paintings as a response for me being reached out to, for the light that is often shone for one while groping in the dark.

The quote regarding the possibility that through forgetting one is doomed to repeat the same mistakes, rings often for me. The imagery in these paintings are also reminders for myself – warnings of the follies of life, carried in Sufi poetry, in biblical quotes, in the poems of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Yehuda Amichai, Edgar Allen Poe and T.S.Eliot, in the writings of Ben Okri and Haruki Murakami.

In some of these paintings the landscape or the ‘setting’ is the primary subject or focus, where the figure or details, assist the exact atmosphere one wants to communicate. In others the painting is built up to act as a ‘setting’ for the intention, which lies in the details. The paintings are pictorial diaristic notes, or documents, which speak about what I have been most impacted by in life’s encounters.

Karishma D’souza

2011

Exhibition at Lemongrasshopper, Ahmedabad

Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies, an exhibition of six artists curated by Rekha Rodwittiya for Lemongrasshopper, Ahmedabad opened on the 27th February 2011.

Theen Tamasha and Friends- Kim Kyoungae, Malavika Rajnarayan, Sonatina Mendes, Karishma D'souza, Kim Seola and Lee Hayan are the six artists in this exhibition. The paintings by all these artists that are presented in this show can be viewed at Lemongrasshopper's website. You can also view photographs from the exhibition on www.rekharodwittiya.blogspot.com

Save the Date

Opportunity for Students and Young Artists

There is a wonderful opening for young artists to proliferate and sell their work through this online portal called Best College Art. It is applicable to all students and graduates of art who are either studying or finished college within the last ten years. Please visit their website for more details.

Of One Generation

I spent one month in Mumbai this October, assisting Sakshi Gallery coordinate an exhibition called SCRATCH curated by Swapan Seth that was presented at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. During the experience, I discovered a common connection between the artist Nnenna Okore and the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both of whose works I admire immensely. Both these individuals studied at the University of  Nigeria in Nsukka and at Universities in the USA. Having only a difference of two years in age, they are the voices of our generation who are contributing significantly to the creative world with their preoccupations being rooted to their immediate history and reality of the countries they reside in. It is wonderful to see threads of commonality in their sensibilities which  are evidently nurtured by the involvement with their own contemporaries. On similar lines, I've begun to read A New Anthem, which is an anthology of English writing by mainly second-generation South Asian writers, edited by Ahmede Hussain.

Malavika Rajnarayan

Letter to another city

What is distance? The space between any two points, on a paper... between two minds. Therefore a letter; 

A line The alphabet The sound and from then on, Bridges of thought Ideas. A journey travelled A world traversed A by-lane with a hanging lantern Colour, light! The smoke from a tea stall A waft of aroma a slight nudge- a cow grazes past with a single tinkle A stream of water, picking up plastic bags, cigarette butts, dried leaves, grains of rice, It flows down to the main street. Where have I come? Where is the distance?

Malavika Rajnarayan

Mumbai

Online Resources for Art Students

I have often pondered about what we understand by the word "resource" within our experiences of learning. As students, we were situated in institutes, where libraries and teaching faculty became our resources of learning. But to what extent have we used these resources to their maximum potential? For instance, my mother used to set a vacation routine for me while I was in school, where I had to spend an hour every day reading from a ten-volume Britannica encyclopedia. I read the story-section again and again, day after day, year after year and ignored the sections on history, art, society, mythology, science and many others. I missed the opportunity to take all that the encyclopedia could have offered me.

India's art institutions have been taking the flak for failing to generate critical discourses and dialogue amongst the students, owing to the dearth of scholarly presence in the teaching faculty. While it is surely justified in pointing the finger towards the people responsible for imparting instruction, I would also ask what the students are doing with all the resources that are available to them at hand's reach? How much time or effort does it take to walk to the library, read the titles on the spines of books, pick one up and read the essays/ look at the visuals? Why doesn't curiosity drive one to the library to browse?

Even if we accept that today's world depends much more on the internet for information, why is it not being used to its potential? I would go even further to say to all the facebook junkies amongst the students that there too, they can find art resources as most Contemporary Art Galleries have facebook pages with frequent updates on all their events and exhibitions. Galleries and museums now host amazing websites that are interactive, informative and serve as superb resources. Art documentaries on television channels are also easily accessible.  

Sudhir Patwardhan and Bhupen Khakhar are two examples of some of our finest artists and neither of them underwent academic art training. It is through the dialogue with their own peers, through their passion to seek information and through many hours of hard work in the studio that they created for themselves a niche in the history of contemporary Indian art.  At a time when there was no internet and the world relied on 'snail mail' for communication, artists were compelled to make the best use of the limited resources and every opportunity that would enrich their art practice was treated with the utmost fervour of sincerity. 

Over the past ten years, I have at different points of time searched on the internet for video art and the resources have consistently expanded and last year, I discovered http://www.vdb.org/ 

Is it because I have found myself in certain circumstances (like having to teach a class) to look for resources? May be. But most of the time, my own art practice has created circumstances for questioning, seeking and discovery.

I was recently introduced to www.theotherspaces.com. It is a wonderful intervention in the course of sharing art- history outside academic structures and I do believe that the some of the texts that are being archived on this website carry historical significance without which the comprehension of contemporary art today would be incomplete. 

Theen Tamasha and friends created the following list of resources that may merely serve as a starting point to further one's information on art.

Malavika Rajnarayan

LIST OF CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERIES IN INDIA

Mumbai

Sakshi Gallery- www.sakshigallery.com

Gallery Chemould- www.gallerychemould.com

Pundole Art gallery- www.pundoleartgallery.in

Lakeeren gallery- www.lakeerengallery.com

Guild gallery- www.guildindia.com

Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke- www.galeriems.com

Gallery Maskara- www.gallerymaskara.com

Gallery BMB- www.gallerybmb.com

Delhi

Vadhera Art Gallery- www.vadheraart.com

Gallery Threshold- www.gallerythreshold.com

Nature Morte - www.naturemorte.com

Palette Art Gallery- www.paletteartgallery.com

Delhi Art Gallery- www.delhiartgallery.com

Gallery Espace - www.galleryespace.com 

Khoj- www.khoj.in 

Auction Houses

Saffron Art- www.saffronart.com

OSIAN’s- www.osians.com 

Sotheby’s- www.sothebys.com

Christie’s- www.christies.com

Museum websites

National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, INDIA- www.ngmaindia.gov.in 

National Museum, Delhi- www.nationalmuseumindia.gov.in/collection.html 

Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York- www.moma.org

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art- www.sfmoma.org

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York- www.metmuseum.org 

Smithsonian museums, Washington D.C.- www.si.edu/museums 

The National Gallery, London- www.nationalgallery.org.uk

TATE Modern, London- www.tate.org.uk/modern 

The Victoria and Albert museum, London- www.vam.ac.uk 

The British Museum- www.britishmuseum.org

The Louvre, Paris- France- www.louvre.fr

The Pompidou Centre- www.centrepompidou.fr 

Museo Del Prado, Madrid- Spain- www.museodelprado.es 

READING LIST 

The following list is ONLY A SELECTION that is meant to lead one to more writings by the authors.

Geeta Kapur

Five Contemporary Indian Artists

When was Modernism

An Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990)

The Evolution of Content in Amrita Shergil’s Paintings

K.G.Subramanyan (Monograph)

Quest for Identity (Vrischik Publication)

Gender Mobility: Through the lens of five women artists (Art and Visual Culture in India: 1987-2007 Marg Publication)

Inside Out: Women Artists of India

Partha Mitter 

Indian Art

Triumph of Modernism- Indian Artists and the Avant Garde, 1922-1947

Indian artists in the colonial period: The case of Bombay (Art and Visual Culture in India: 1987-2007 Marg Publication)

K.G.Subramanyan

Moving Focus

Living Tradition

Creative Circuit

The Magic of Making- Essays on Art and Culture

R.Sivakumar

Benodebehari Mukherjee: Life, Context, Work

Culture specificity, Art language and Practice of Modernism: An Indian perspective (Contemporary Indian Art and Other Realities- Marg Publication)

Gulammohammed Sheikh

Ruminating on ‘Life of the Medieval Saints’  by Benodebehari Mukherjee

Ranjit Hoskote

The Enigma of Presence: Reflections on the Human Figure in Modern Indian Art (From ‘Celebration of the Human Image- The human figure in Indian contemporary painting)

The Complicit Observer (Sudhir Patwardhan’s monograph)

The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and conversation in the art of Surendran Nair

Now that the trees have spoken- Catalogue essay of exhibition of Non-urban art at Pundole Art gallery

Chaitanya Sambrani

Edge of Desire- Recent Art in India

Shadows, Reflections and Nightmare: the Art of Nalini Malani

Navjot: Of response and responsibility (From Expressions and Evocations- Marg publication)

Rustom Bharucha

Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin

Nilima Sheikh

Post-independence Initiative in Art

On Amrita Shergil: Claiming a radiant legacy (From the book Expressions and Evocations)

Nancy Adajania

Soloists in Shifting Ensembles: Bombay (text from (Chalo! India  - A New Era of Indian Art)

New Media overtures before New Media practice in India(Art and Visual Culture in India: 1987-2007 Marg Publication)

India’s New Progressives- (from ART ASIA PACIFIC- 50TH ISSUE)

The Mutable Aesthetic of New Mediatic Realism- (From Art India Quarter IV- 2005)

Images of Conflict, Icons of Power (From Art India- Quarter 2, 2003)

Kamala Kapoor

Art of Vivan Sundaram

Nalini Malani: Memory Stress and Recall (From Expressions and Evocations- Marg publication)

All publications of SAHMAT- www.sahmat.org

www.theotherspaces.com has the following texts: 

“Place for People”- Geeta Kapur

“Questions and Dialogue”- Anita Dube

“The Group 1890”- J. Swaminathan

“Cholamandal” - K.C.S. Panicker

“Progressive Artists Group”- F. N. Souza