Friday, December 7, 2012

‘Cynical Love: Life in the Everyday’

Conceptualized by guest curator Gayatri Sinha, an interesting group show at New Delhi-based KNMA strives to signal the place of technology in a massive global change in the flow and reception of information.

A curatorial note elaborates: “It is technology that serves democratic art forms, from social messaging to YouTube to serving micro banking in women’s cooperatives in India and Bangladesh. As an instrument of democracy, technology effects twitter revolutions and Facebook fame. At the same time, technology challenges the museum as it constructs an archive, leading the past into the future. Technology as the driver of invention challenges the aura that art confers on an object.

“Responding to the space based in a technology hub, artists have revisited industrialization from the 19th century to the present day with wit, irony and critique. The many stages of invention that signal modernity here intersect with contemporary views of design, architecture and film. The art works invoke a sensory response to the environment, a return to tactility and natural materials. Cynicism is tempered with nostalgia and the poetics of a vanishing beauty.”

The exhibit is in sync with the growing permanent Collection of KNMA largely focused on significant trajectories of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art. Its core Collection highlights a magnificent generation of 20th century Indian painters from the post-Independent decades and equally engages the disparate art practice of the younger contemporaries. To put it in Kiran Nadar’s words, ‘though the idea of opening a private art museum occurred with the intention of sharing my art collection with the larger public, I was also acutely aware of the existing dearth of institutional spaces that could bring visibility to modern and contemporary art from India and the subcontinent”.

Sponsored by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, KNMA is plugging the social need of promoting art and instilling its deep appreciation amongst individuals, through the museum and its other educational initiatives. It is focused on bridging the current disconnect between art and the public and enhancing museum-going culture in India. 

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