Just a touch away
8 Nov 2012 9:39 PM GMT
As you enter Latitude 28 in Lado Sarai, a shroud like dress hangs on a tailor’s dummy. It’s a faceless shape and the eyes are naturally drawn to the work made entirely of safety pins hinged together with wires.
This is the handiwork of Sri Lankan artist Anoli Perera who has been invited by gallerist and curator Bhavna Kakar to be part of a show titled Tactile. Featuring artists from the south Asian region, the show resonates with tactility — a quality linked to the sense of touch.
As one moves around the gallery, taking in art made from seeds, thread, cloth, feathers and even a woman’s undergarment, one realises that in contemporary art, boundaries of media and material have now fallen apart to create a space where anything goes. It’s the feeling the works evoke, almost as palpable as a touch, which becomes all pervading.
Perera, through her work in safety pins titled The Shroud for a Lost Mother, creates a close affinity with dress-making which is a tool for holding, tightening, loosening and fastening. The white garment underneath the shroud of safety pins plays out a sense of purity and veneration and yet oscillates between violence, loss and guilt – leaving behind an unresolved anxiety that is impregnated in the work.
Bangladeshi artist Mohammad Wahiduzzaman, twice winner of the Berger award, Bangladesh’s highest honour for a young artist, uses icons like Mahatma Gandhi and Lata Mangeshkar on his acrylic and steel installations titled Image + Experience = You to depict the degradation in society through symbols, colours and textures.
He says about his work: 'In this era, every child grows up with an image of his or her hero from the world of fantasy. Gradually these perceptions mingle with the real time experiences gathered from society and the final product is what becomes of us or 'you'.'
Pakistani artist Masoom Sayed sculptural works made with human hair, feathers and women’s undergarments titled All the King’s Men and Jacob’s Creek is a celebration, on the one hand, of the hidden and the forbidden. On the other, they represent a pun and play on our social snobbery and our self-imposed taboos on the human body.
Shivani Aggarwal’s Half Knit is surrounded with thin, red threads and explore the relationship between tension and release, attachment and separation, bondage and freedom while Manisha Gera Baswani’s paintings in tea-water and gouache, titled How Green Was My Valley and Melting Moments, have been inspired from her visits to Mandu. Baswani says: 'Nature has been the primal force for my works. It had been confined into tight parameters and insets in my earlier works but in the current tea water series in the show, I have let nature flow to regally become all-pervading.'
This is the handiwork of Sri Lankan artist Anoli Perera who has been invited by gallerist and curator Bhavna Kakar to be part of a show titled Tactile. Featuring artists from the south Asian region, the show resonates with tactility — a quality linked to the sense of touch.
As one moves around the gallery, taking in art made from seeds, thread, cloth, feathers and even a woman’s undergarment, one realises that in contemporary art, boundaries of media and material have now fallen apart to create a space where anything goes. It’s the feeling the works evoke, almost as palpable as a touch, which becomes all pervading.
Perera, through her work in safety pins titled The Shroud for a Lost Mother, creates a close affinity with dress-making which is a tool for holding, tightening, loosening and fastening. The white garment underneath the shroud of safety pins plays out a sense of purity and veneration and yet oscillates between violence, loss and guilt – leaving behind an unresolved anxiety that is impregnated in the work.
Bangladeshi artist Mohammad Wahiduzzaman, twice winner of the Berger award, Bangladesh’s highest honour for a young artist, uses icons like Mahatma Gandhi and Lata Mangeshkar on his acrylic and steel installations titled Image + Experience = You to depict the degradation in society through symbols, colours and textures.
He says about his work: 'In this era, every child grows up with an image of his or her hero from the world of fantasy. Gradually these perceptions mingle with the real time experiences gathered from society and the final product is what becomes of us or 'you'.'
Pakistani artist Masoom Sayed sculptural works made with human hair, feathers and women’s undergarments titled All the King’s Men and Jacob’s Creek is a celebration, on the one hand, of the hidden and the forbidden. On the other, they represent a pun and play on our social snobbery and our self-imposed taboos on the human body.
Shivani Aggarwal’s Half Knit is surrounded with thin, red threads and explore the relationship between tension and release, attachment and separation, bondage and freedom while Manisha Gera Baswani’s paintings in tea-water and gouache, titled How Green Was My Valley and Melting Moments, have been inspired from her visits to Mandu. Baswani says: 'Nature has been the primal force for my works. It had been confined into tight parameters and insets in my earlier works but in the current tea water series in the show, I have let nature flow to regally become all-pervading.'
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