Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies - Kim Seola

When an image becomes a remembrance......

For me the desire to paint is what anchors me to art at all times, and which creates a connection to my existence and the world around me as I live today. Perhaps the act of painting (for me) suggests the potential ability to reclaim that essential factor of life where experience, perception and sensibility can converge to create a work in which the human spirit of life becomes the pivotal focus, and which records time by the interpretations we give to it.

In the contemporary context of an art practice today diversity is what I believe allows individuality and difference to exist. What engages me as an Asian artist are those elements that retain the primeval force and influence art within societies, and which in later times becomes a collective legacy to all. Awareness of the self and one’s surroundings filter such influences of impact for me, and are what holds my own desire to locate myself in India currently.

That the most trifling of occurrences or the most mundane of objects like dry leaves, or the discarded and forgotten, all become worthy as emblems that can hold memory and which reveal. It is this that feeds the imagery in my paintings, where the form gets transposed and meanings get altered through the designation of purpose that they become invested with.

Kim Seola

2011

Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies - Kim Kyoungae

Threading Waves

“The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.

A pain when beyond human range becomes something else.”

When the sky clears, Ghalib (Translated by Robert Bly and Sunil Dutta)

Sound is a volume; trickling, dripping, wavering, piercing (or the many ways of defining sounds attached to tracing its origin). How do I trace a distant sound, its movement, intensity and definitiveness, to evolve the same as a space within me? Here I disclose a practice that I love to undertake – of choosing, extracting, and refining a sound that creates a sequential space within my mind. What follows may not explain my paintings as visual constructs, but unveil layers that define depth in my works.

I begin as an initial step, from the depth of darkness towards light- evolving intervening surfaces; from ignorance towards acknowledgement, or simply from a question of the pigment, as to what it can explain.

I like the practice of viewing; the ritual of opening books, maybe even upside down, to challenge what has become the set notion of “correctness”; like with the delicate drawings and prints of Ernst Heckle or with Barnett Newman’s paintings, as the existential need to question meaning through process-based works.

I often begin a day with looking out of the window of my sixth floor studio. What gets chosen to be viewed and what gets ignored by accident; what I return to view again, and what I eliminate, is all a part of the process of making a work of art for me. Colour tones ripen to allow a subtle exit or an entry into my paintings; paying heed that the edges conform to their own needs. Colours define architectural spaces; sunk in solitude. I knew the person who lived there, now there is no one; yet there is a tree bursting with life and energy under the blazing sun.

I could not ignore the empty window, sullen, yet traversing the monsoon like an insisting island, and as the monsoon passed it eloped from the mind. I come across what I had seen three years ago in the same town; its eroding quality encapsulating time and becoming one with the surroundings. I enter into nature, a cyclical experience of piercing time and healing itself, and again erupting from nothingness. I appreciate this very rhythm, this harmony that one lives with, within mundane surroundings.

An interpretation of Kim Kyoungae’s writings by Shubhalakshmi Shukla

2011

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