Motivations and aspirations of the Devi Art Foundation

Keen to facilitate the aware viewership of creative expression and dynamic artistic practice in India, the Devi Art Foundation has emerged as a meaningful not-for-profit space that provides for innovation totally unconstrained by any commercial limitations. Its purpose is to offer talented artists from the region an art centre so that they can continue with engagement in cutting edge, experimental work.

The foundation hopes to interact closely with, as well as encourage emerging curators and critics, thus helping to give voice to their valid concerns, along with its aim to provide a proper platform for contemporary artists. By undermining geo-political divides, if any the foundation’s the objective is to foster an active dialogue amongst various art practitioners from within the whole Indian Sub-continent.

The core aim is to enhance the understanding of our region’s shared history. A series of lectures and talks are designed to be held along with a series of exhibitions in order to bridge the gap existing between production of art and a wider audience. Supplementing this activity is an education & outreach program to encourage a culture wherein art becomes a theme of active discussion and debate.

The New Delhi based foundation is spread over an area of 7500 sq ft, covering two floors. It focuses on two exhibits each year, curated largely out of the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection. These are on view for a substantial period of time to make way for engagement with the exhibits that look to explore relationship of contemporary Indian art with the global art-world and also the world ‘beyond the art-world’.

Throwing light on this underlying though, an essay by Kavita Singh had noted how in the past decade contemporary Indian art has gone global. By opening out itself to the world outside, it has brought in new opportunities, audiences, influences, means of production and forms of circulation. The exhibitions try to fathom how the shift in its place in the art-world has affected the art practice itself.