AD DESIGN FAIR: MUMBAI
The Architectural Digest Design Show in Mumbai will highlight the latest collections of established global design brands with an edge, including the work of award-winning designers who have swept aside trends to benchmark new ones, and iconic designs that challenge our notions of what's cutting-edge and trend-forward. It's the best of both worlds, under one expansive roof. The inaugural AD Design Show—Mumbai's luxury art and design fair, will unfold at Dome@NSCI, SVP Stadium in Worli, Mumbai from October 26-28.
Amongst a wide spectrum of artworks – from contemporary and modern, to mixed-media and sculpture – courtesy premier art galleries from the country there are some that are stand-alone studies in brilliance and ingenuity sculptural identities.
Sumedh Rajendran
Roshini Vadehra presents Sumedh Rajendran's wooden sculpture Reverse Land. Sumedh's work hints at the wider context of human experience while engaging with the possibilities of sculptural experimentation. His work examines the predicament of migrations, displacements, angst, discrimination, and arguments between different layers and structures of society. He juxtaposes the contradictions, contrary values and widespread social apathy prevalent with a skillful usage of materials like ceramic tiles and leather that have distinct connotations in both sacred and profane contexts.
The constant negotiations with circumstances and the situational contrasts keep recurring in his works and it makes him work with images that people can relate to. He uses multiple facets to explore hidden ideologies." My work is about conversations of land inwardly, inwardly, a reflection of land on a tabletop," says Sumedh.
Shakuntala Kulkarni
Shireen Gandhy of Chemould unveils 3 quaint cane sculptures by the brilliant Shakuntala Kulkarni. Ever since she turned heads with her installations at Art Basel 2012 she has moved into another realm of sorts. Kulkarni explored the idea of women in public spaces and created sculptural armors out of cane that not only protected the female protagonist but also elevated her to a goddess-like stature. However, there is a tension between the notion of being protected and the notion of being trapped. In a series of performances documented in photographs, the protagonist stands in different historically important locations in Bombay that are in danger of being destroyed, using her armor and will to protect her city from cultural invasion.
Chemould also has the brilliant sculptural grids of Madhvi Subramanian's which are an evocation of her love for the forests and their rhythms. The colours and the glazes give us a feeling of a transcultural idiom that, that at once hints at the primordial, as well as archetypal impulses. The structural grace lies in the inclusion of humble everyday materials and processes geared to melding the aesthetic and the functional.
Asim Waqif
At Aparajita Jain's Nature Morte Booth it looks like crushed sheets of aluminum that have a cutting-edge dynamic in shades of Prussian blue and silver. Look closer and you know that Asim Waqif creates his own corollaries on the walls that his sculptural creations hinge on. Over the years concerns of ecology and anthropology weave through his work his research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste, and architecture give him an insight into a netherworld. By employing manual processes that are deliberately painstaking and laborious while the products themselves are often temporary and sometimes even designed to decay his site-specific installations are talking points in the scale of creating work that speaks in new tones.
