AFfair

What’s a fair? It is a periodic gathering of buyers and sellers in an appointed place. What do they do there? They look at objects, judge them and buy them if necessary. The purpose is to either buy or sell. And it is often done in a fair manner.

What’s affair? It is anything but the above. In fact, it s a lot more than what a fair aspires to achieve. It is just one of the ways to explore different worlds that has always been a human drive. One that uses the recent phenomenon of art fairs as an immediate and direct reference point. Which explains the timing of this unique show. It coincides with the Art Dubai 2008.

And like all such events affair too is the meeting place of lovers of the arts – artists, critics, curators, buyers, sellers, historians and passers by. An affair to remember

The many artistic styles on display here reflect the entire continuum of possible artistic positions. The spectrum allows visitors to obtain a clearer insight into their own interior world of images, i.e. into what touches, moves, stirs or fascinates them. After all, the search for art always has something of a private search for oneself about it. We cannot really confront and contemplate anything in art unless we have already established our own set of artistic values. And affair, be that may in the form of installations, new media or canvas paintings or drawings, endeavours to incite this passion in new ways, new spaces, new times.

Part of a twin show being held at different venues in the city, affair is where the bleeding edge meets the present. It is the place where the lover meets the loving. Matters of heart. Precisely matters of art. An affair to remember.

About the curator…

BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI

Bose Krishnamachari is an artist with many talents. He works on different mediums with the same artistic verve. Studied in Sir.J.J.School of Art, Mumbai and Goldsmiths College, London, Bose started off his career with abstract paintings. Though he used to paint in a hyper-real style during his formative years, the language of abstraction attracted him considerably after his studies in Mumbai. Working between two diametrically opposite art languages, namely figurative and abstraction, Bose gives accent on concepts rather than the actual images or surfaces that he paints. His works are the physical manifestation of certain concepts on art and its engagement with the society.

Besides being an artist of worth, Bose finds time for curating the works of other artists. He has done several path breaking shows that include, Bombay Boys, Double-Enders, Maarkers, KaaM, Soft Spoken and so on. He has been instrumental in forming several artists’ collectives.

About the artists…

ANANT JOSHI

A painter and installation artist, Joshi’s simultaneously sinister and comical creations reflect a sensitivity to urban alienation and cultural displacement. In his installations, Joshi uses beamed light to project a juxtaposition of strange, sculpted ceramic objects and dissected, dismembered toys onto the wall of an imagined space. In this way, the artist’s fictive hybrid man-toy-animals are transformed back into two silhouetted dimensions that simulate a traditional picture plane. With studio practices and mediated imagery often the initial trigger for concepts and forms, Joshi’s painting and drawing practices are symbiotic with his installation projects.

HEMA UPADHYAY

"I like to tell any stories, whether real or imaginative. These are even reflections of one's phobias, shortcomings. The recurring theme in my work is autobiographical. In addition, it is the cathartic factor that becomes the reason to take these objects and convert their ability. Yes…my work is cathartic in process."

JUSTIN PONMANY

Justin Ponmany was born in Kerala in 1974, but has always lived and worked in Bombay. In fashioning himself as citizen and artist in a demanding, even inflammable metropolitan context, he seeks out implements that are robustly industrial-grade or pungently artisanal. His relatively unorthodox materials include resin, epoxy, hologram foil and printing ink; the photographs that he takes of people and sites as he walks or drives around Bombay serve him as working drawings. His aesthetic combines the grittiness of everyday technologies of communication and protocols of iteration with the lyricism of a meditation on self, place, time, decay and survival.

VN JYOTHI BASU

"If Jyothi Basu’s iconography of redemption moves us deeply, even in this profane age of split-second gratifications and instant cures, it is precisely because he allows for the warm, human tonalities of the sensuous and the ironic, without confining himself to the austerity of transcendence." - Ranjit Hoskote, 2002

MINAL DAMANI

My works become autobiographical because of the use of 'self-image' as the protagonist.
Each painting has a new pattern for the story which reveals the inner life of the 'self' having - hope, optimism, dreams, opportunities, fear, pulls and pressures.
So images like stars, flowers, flying birds recur in my paintings which form a pattern for such personal experiences and beliefs.

AJI VN

Aji VN’s works brings back a lot of sepia toned and black and white memories. Here is an artist who has shifted his original location and found a home in foreign lands.

However, it does not seem that the change in the locale has shifted the context of his art production. Aji places his works in the context of a rigorous journey, a journey undertaken for the pleasure of it.

PARVATHI NAYAR

Her art practices centre around painting and drawing; conceptually they are rooted in ideas of narrative, at ways of looking and the privileging of sight.
She explores ideas of the daily narrative of our lives in this world through fragmentary, familiar and unfamiliar perspectives – with an obsessive attention to technique in the eventual resolution of the work, so that the subject of a work is both its content and manner in which the content is portrayed.

VIVEK VILASINI

In the case of Vivek Vilasini, it is an effort to excavate life through bringing back   to ‘life’ alphabets that are getting fast extinct from public usage and also personal vision. Rounded and poetic, these figures, boldly drawn and starkly foregrounded by colour contrasts, stare back at us like dinosaurs that could not survive the changed atmosphere that we inhabit. Use of alphabets and archaic symbols is a much tired one, yet Vivek through his vibrant composition and vision, give them a new life to force our attention and also concern.