Collaborate to create

This is the season of unique collaborations. A few weeks ago, young artists Amitabh Kumar, Prayas Abhinav and Siddhartha Kararwal put together a collaborative show of works in mixed media in a quirkily titled show Glitch Frame Lollipop at Latitude 28. To walk into the gallery, you have to step over dozens of rubber prints with etchings that get ‘glitched’ or erased the moment you step on them.

‘By adding their own footprints, viewers are directly participating in the artistic process, and it is this collaboration with the viewer that we wanted to achieve through this show,’ says Kumar. His other work titled

Revenge of The Non is a triptych of three ultraviolet prints on raw aluminium sheet which is about systemic glitches. ‘The work is based on the concept that the meek shall one day inherit the earth,’ he says. Kumar in that sense is questioning democratic systems where all are deemed equal and yet some are more equal than the others.

Abhinav, on the other hand — while having put together digital media works made up of bluetooth, keyboard, projector and paper — had created a ‘glitch forum’ on Facebook which resulted in unknown people brainstorming on how to create glitches  in art. One of the seven selected entries was Hemant Sareen’s photography installation which is a series of polaroid shots. 

These images are more a product of an accident or a glitch, and not something he had clicked with a purpose. Kararwal’s installations made of stuffed garments — one suspended like a spinal cord and the other displayed in the gallery window like a meat shop — reiterates the show’s theme of glitching the visual baggage which a viewer brings along every time he sees a work of art.

Right opposite Latitude 28 is a show which showcases another collaboration between artists, far more traditional but similarly engaging. This is a novel idea as it is a rarity for an established contemporary artist to work with a traditional or folk artist on the same canvas. Silent Dialogues, a group show hosted by Art Perspective, is an attempt at opening up the pictorial dialogue between these two spheres of creativity, between high art and traditional crafts, between the celebrated and the unknown masters of Indian art.

For instance, in the canvas created jointly by Anupam Sud and tribal artist Nankushiya Shyam, a bluish figure appears to be swimming in a crystal-clear lake where several marine forms swim alongside the floating body. While the main figurative form, rendered by Sud, has been made in her realistic manner, the animals and marine life by Shyam have been made in the signature style of Gond art.  Achuthan Kudallur and Neela Akbari’s colourful rendition of a city life looks like a patchwork quilt.