Indian representation at the Signature Art Prize

The APB Foundation Signature Art Prize in conjunction with the the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) acts as a prominent platform for both established artists as well as emerging talents. It reflects developments in the contemporary art landscape of this region. Out of the 130 nominated works of art, 15 have been chosen by the elite jury panel as Finalists.

Indeed path breaking in their artistic insight and core concept, expression and technique, these works will be vying for the coveted prize, the People's Choice Award and three Jurors' Choice Awards. People can vote now for one of the Finalist’s artworks to win the special People's Choice Award by selecting their favorite work. Sheba Chhachhi's ‘Water Diviner’ is among the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize finalists this year.

Providing a backgrounder to it, an essay by Alexander Keefe mentions: “The work evokes a complex way of thinking about the (Yamuna) river - not just as a hydrological problem to be managed, a pollution issue to be dealt with–and also not just as a goddess to be worshiped by devotees oblivious to the way that industrial and commercial development together conspire to destroy her body—but crucially both: somehow bringing these twinned notions into taboo wedlock.

The images she uses in the work, the dreamlike fragments from paintings painfully juxtaposed with the nightmare filth that the river is forced to carry, pull us into a consideration of the bulldozers waiting to enact the riverfront's latest re-enchantment, its newest triumphalism - transformation into a level ‘village’ for the Commonwealth Games - and the biggest temple in the world cum IMAX theater that presaged its arrival, that bathed the whole endeavor in a preemptive sacred glow. How fitting that the artist conjures such visions in this dark forgotten room, itself the object of so many damp, half-complete re-inscriptions.

A short walk to the south of the library takes you to Chandni Chowk, its erstwhile central canal lying entombed in stone, its waters blocked, diverted and shit in, forced underground. And yet. Fugitive streams still spill dirty in the black Yamuna and together they take flight to the Ganga and the ocean, carrying with them all the filth of man's endeavor, and the bodies the whole enterprise dumps so casually into its flow…”