Thursday, July 11, 2013

India’s noteworthy new media artists

Here are some of India’s noteworthy new media artists. Of course, the list is representative as many of the contemporary art practitioners are opting for experimentation:

Ranbir Kaleka's work has been described as ‘creating a seemingly living tableau on a canvas and screen.’ It revolves around producing art in an intermediate space between a painting and running visual (video), which is not as much a hybrid as a transmutation.On the other hand, Asim Waqif's recent work incorporated elements of activism, performance and Yamuna river’s protests against water pollution. Baiju Parthan's visually terse and extremely concise video addressed the figure of Abbe Faria, considered the father of Hypnotism. Babu Eshwar Prasad played with the painterly image of the landscape, confronting issues of real ‘development’ and ‘progress.

Vivan Sundaram’s 'Flotage: River Yamuma' documentd a project in he hired city trash collectors to construct a raft out of 8000 discarded bottles. Using the bottle-raft, the artist then ferried passengers across the river, whose once clean waters now figure among the world’s most polluted. Similarly, ‘Meltdown 1–Red Raga’, is Nitin Mukul’s take on climate change and environmental degradation. ‘A Short Passage of Fire’ by artist Rajan Krishnan, shows books being consumed by fire for more than 10 minutes, whereas in T.K. Hareendran’s 'River', one sees him first immersing tiny clay models of fish, tortoise and birds in the river Yamuna, then taking them to Uzbekistan to display them there, before re-immersing them, this time around in Syr Darya.

Shilpa Gupta employs digital media in the form of online art projects and video environments fused with sculptural and photographic elements. Her projects over the years have touched upon the theme of border crisis between India and Pakistan, and the resulting tension. For instance, her video installation ‘Hardly bear to Speak’ (at Yvon Lambert, Paris; 2009) comprised four monitors with vibrating portraits of the four judges appointed to decide the division of India and Pakistan.

Navjot Altaf is another prominent artist who incorporates the moving element in her work. Her multimedia work, including interactive sculpture, photo and video based installations, address the themes of gender/memory/ history and loss.Gigi Scaria and KM Madhusudhanan also have had a major impact on India’s budding video art scene. Tejal Shah deals with sensitive issues regarding gender, sexuality, class, and politics. Surekha, a full-time artist for more than 14 years, showed her first video piece abroad in 2001.

No comments:

Post a Comment