Indian galleries at Art Basel - I

It was a real celebration time for contemporary Indian art at Art Basel 41 event that featured five leading galleries from the country.

At Art Statements section, Gallery SKE presented ‘Zero Knot’, an installation and publication by Sreshta Premnath, who examined the spectral figure of the monument – a memorial from the past, pointing toward its historic conception of a future – always gesturing towards something which could never have been…Like the mathematical zero knot, the monument was a cipher, simultaneously absent and present.

Chatterjee & Lal presented Nikhil Chopra, known for his performance-based practice. He conceived a project that wove positions associated with museum display around the residues of a performance undertaken in the environs of a Mumbai based museum earlier this year. On the other hand, Nature Morte displayed works by artists Suhasini Kejriwal, Schandra Singh, Thukral & Tagra, Gauri Gill, Atul Dodiya, Aditya Pande, and TV Santhosh.

Among the most impressive sections at Art Basel was Art Unlimited, a platform for projects transcending the classical art-show stand. The lineup of artists read like a cross-section of leading figures from the international art scene. They featured exclusive video projections, large-scale installations, massive sculptures and live performances. The section also presented 26 one-person shows of young artists this year.

On the other hand, projects by international artists on the exhibition square and at Isteinerstrasse engaged directly with the viewers as part of Art Public. If the Art Film program featured a varied program of films by and about artists with different themes, the 2010 special Artist Book show highlighted Artists' fanzines.

Bringing together various 'historical' examples and experiments by the latest publishers, it offered a source for numerous hard-to-find works little concerned with classic distribution. Leading publishers of editioned works exhibited the results of their collaboration with renowned artists at the Art Edition section. Art Salon incorporated talks, panels, book signing and other presentations on the current state of the art world.