|
‘GenNext' is a revolution in the art world. It is a novel discourse that has opened a fresh chapter in the world art history.
It was a couple of years ago when the idea of a show called 'GenNext' was conceptualized with the sole initiative and commitment to give an exuberant platform to the young contemporary artists where they could showcase their creative expressions and ingenious skill and experience their turn to come in front of the world. It was at that state a vision for Aakriti Art Gallery that transformed into a mission in its second step and now in its third year, it's an ambition for the young generation artists across the globe to be a part of this creative expedition. Artists below forty strive hard to make through in this most-coveted show and get entry only after facing the rigorous process of selection.
GenNext III is ready to onset the panorama of creative carnival by giving it the shape of a global phenomenon. It is inducing a new facet in the discovery of the new generation artists. This year, forty artists have been selected, among whom eleven are foreign artists. Moreover, this time the exhibition is not only showcasing paintings, sculptures, textile and fine prints but also has included photography and video installations, thus expanding the boundary of the conventional faculties of visual arts.
The journey onsets on September 30, 2008 with an interactive session between GenNext participants, Art Experts and Media representatives at Aakriti Art Gallery and then there will be the formal inauguration of the show on October 1, 2008. The show will simultaneously be accompanied by a workshop between the GenNext participants and a few established artists at Emami Chisel Arts, Kolkata on October 2 - 3, 2008.
Thus it's a gamut of events behind the making of the GenNext III show. And let us take our turn to witness the creative ventures of these forty young minds, experience the freshness in their works and also get to know about their ideas, concepts, the way they devise the content and the experiments they bring about through the use of forms and above all how do they interact on this discursive platform with the similarities and differences in their thinking as they come from different corners of the world. How realities and experiences both meet and deviate with contextual changes is quite interesting to confront through a comparative analysis that shapes the heart of GenNext III.
When Sanhita Banerjee from India evokes a pun through the very concept she develops in her sculptures that at the primordial point gets associated with human desires and existential predicament, IV Toshain from Austria goes through a series of experience to decipher the hidden truth behind the very phenomenon, 'existence' and finally discovers it to be camouflaged and represents in her works that range from paintings to photography, drawings and use of objects. Toshain develops a symbiotic and muted species belonging to an environment that mirrors the social codes with stereotypes, consumerism, brain drain, power exertion, frivolity and a material life. But for Sanhita, she punches subtle satirical elements in her work. The collage she develops out of the masterpieces of established artists apparently reflects the desire to be able to touch that zenith that remains in embryonic state in every young artist, but what she lays beneath the layers is a mocking comment that states, simply by copying the old masters without any originality of idea and perception, one cannot climb the ladder under any circumstance. And all such pangs and yearnings actually signify to nothing and the existential crisis that grows out of it is quite vague and leads to nowhere.
Life and death, birth and existence have been quintessential content in the sculptures of Bhabotosh Sutar and Vijay D. Kadam. Vijay has made fibre casting of a 66”x18”x18” male figure with the thread-game symbolizing the game of life. A series of similar puzzle of mind-game has been created in oil by Snehashish Maity who has invoked the existential quest through his photo-realistic works. But Bhabotosh attempts to create a metaphoric space to show the process of procreation through a wooden plough with sharp metallic end penetrating harder within the stone chamber to reach out to the womb.
Tisha Mondal breaks away from conventional mode of sculpturing and makes use of mixed media (dominantly quilt medium) to sew her utopian world of green birds and gives it the shape of installation. Tisha's works resolve that she is a great wanderer with her feminine instincts; Sutanuka Giri transforms this wandering process from mundane to a dream plane where she allows each element from pillow to the parrot, flower vase to the peacock tail, lamp shade to the wavy clouds to float freely on this picture plane and spell magic. Her paintings bear the indigenous quality of pata-paintings maintaining the two dimensional plane yet very original in her very way of execution of thoughts and use of forms. Sanhita Ghosh through her graphic prints mainly serigraphy and woodcut leads to a face-to-face identification with the urban life where through the colourful sunglass, the back glass of a private bus caught in a traffic jam, the reading glass of the conventional meter-reader of a private taxi, we can see the face of a young woman in various moods who actually bears the identity of the 'self' and symbolizes one of us. Interestingly three of these young painters belong to the same school as they come from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan.
Looking the minute and the microscopic in an expanded form and lifting the trivial to the level of importance is precisely the idea of Jayanta Bhattacharya's sculptures with materials like fibre glass, paint, painted gloves. Nantu Behari Das also gives shape and significance to the petty through his experiments with the waste material. His works are very conceptual that relate to specific psychological associations and moves away from conventional mechanism of executing sculptures. While Nantu and Jayanta are from India, Ashraful Hasan from Bangladesh also works on the same track but makes it more emotive and essentialized. He attempts to depict the modern capitalist society through newspaper which he gives shape of the modern man who's in fact a bulk of information but suffering from severe fragility of existence as newspapers are. They are basically manhandled while being read and dumped after their purpose is over. At the same time, Prandeep Kalita, another Indian painter invokes a similar pattern of existential turmoil where man is actually entrapped in the rat-race of what apparently seems to be the progress of civilization. He too depicts leading newspapers in his paintings instead of making direct use and introduces a mock element in his presentation called 'Sublime object of imagined reality'. The title itself indicates towards the making of a critical statement.
Justin Tyler Tate, a young sculptor from Canada is obsessed with skeletal structures, be it a paw or a nail of an animal or a bird that he specifies as specimen or be it a full skeleton of a dinosaur or any other extinct species. Justin revives the lost world but Prithwiraj Mali, an Indian sculptor interrogates with the process of evolution and creates a confrontation with the dichotomy of life and death that he signifies as basic realizations through the human head made of fibre and the aluminium tiny figures dancing on it.
Maciej Gador from Poland invites the viewer with some charismatic feel. The realistic image floats on a surreal plane thereby elevating the space from the mundane setup though each and every element on the picture plane are very much a part of our common life. Korou KH, the youngest in the crew of GenNext III from India pricks the essence of realization through the disintegration and distortion he creates in the male figure swinging upside down carrying the note of pangs both with agony and the fervor of ecstasy. Korou is also to an extent surreal in his approach. Where as Rajen Mondal, an Indian printmaker uses the mundane elements like a sofa-set, a chair, a glass bottle etc as signifier where the final connotation creates a psychological warfare in the form of signified in his recently worked out etchings. In the interplay of signifier and signified, he subtly makes the statement on the complex nature of modern urban living. But Muktinath Mondal, another Indian painter explores the romanticism in the mundane structure and somewhere hints with skepticism that how long will the purity of nature going to remain. The broken mud pots and the distorted scarecrow are indicating to such insecurity in his current oil paintings.
Santosh D. Andrade on the other hand rediscovers the Indian miniature and scroll painting style in mixed media dividing the space on canvas with as much contemporary content as he makes use of the decorative patterns quite similar to the medieval indigenous forms. In the blend of these unique patterns he too reconciles the lost time. But does his central protagonist in modern attire on the canvas somewhere lament on the present situation or is it left open to be addressed by you and me?
K Prasun Roy is much interested in working on huge canvases of 8"x5" and so on dominantly in acrylic medium. He has picked up the visual language of bill-boards and intriguingly devised it in his own way. He dwells with self-reflection from various perspectives and creates puns with the self images. He too somewhere identifies with the crisis of the present day man. Imagination through non-representational art form reaches an ethereal state in Amit Kalla's oil paintings where the sun and the tree, the bird and the bee, the boat and the hut - all modulate the rhythm of life. Fantasy is triggered in the core of the abstract forms. Where Amit creates a soothing pulse in his paintings with the use of matt colours, Hem Raj who too mystifies abstraction makes it more loud and bold through the use of crimson red, yellow ochre and prussian blue in their direct tones without dilution. Impressive abstract forms also hold central instinct of Joarez Filho's works and he is from Brazil. It really will give pleasure to the vibrant viewers when the intermingling of Latin American art and Indian art will strike the walls of Aakriti Art Gallery.
Tushar Waghela's works are very reflexive and automated with strong statements. How the 'self' of a peasant is brutally raped and killed is symbolically devised in his paintings as a fifty rupee stamp paper against land that has been actually seized from the farmer. The voice of protest on industrialization by ruining agriculture - a common plight of rural India gets a vivid portrayal in Tushar's works.
Moutushi Chakraborty has made a creative journey in projecting her ideas and thoughts without restricting herself to a single medium. It has been human experiences that she lays bare sometimes through the notion of body and sometimes through some camouflaged creatures and sometimes through the self images. But each time she has something very innate to share yet with a new discourse be it in screen print, digital, acrylic, pencil drawing or in the form of installation. Exploring abstract forms with meaningful deliberation through the textile medium is Banatanwi Das Mahapatra's area of creative venture. Her works though in textile medium carry an invariable painting quality and reflects freedom of expression. Serena Scapagnini from Italy initiates a journey within in her work 'On Olive tree's branches' where in monochromatic shade of grey, black and white invariable forms are put together that peep through when opened by two robust palms. The symbolic depiction of the subconscious mind that is always gathered with endless desires can be read as an impression in Serena's works. And such interesting interplay of various human desires also forms the nucleus of Priyanka Lahiri's paintings. Dionne Simpson, a young Jamaican painter juxtaposes human existence with his/her immediate presence and deconstructs each and every element to instigate a sense of frivolity at apparent vision. Yet deep within Dionne confronts and counters the paradigm of this social and man-made construction that is present in the form of tall buildings all around in her work. Is she trying to reflect the threat to the entire ecology in the whirlpool she creates? This is of course something Dionne leaves open for us to think.
Chandan Bhandari has an incredible style to play with size and redefined dimensions of objects that he sculpts with complete liberty of imagination. The playfulness in his works which is attained through the dimensional virtue attracts one to move around the sculptures more than once. And Ketan N. Amin makes this dimension multi-layered with more than one representation. Ketan basically works with the form 'hand'; more precisely it is the human palm with five fingers that the sculptor poses as human anatomy of a stout male figure holding the globe which is in the form of a rotating top. The irony of human existence is intensely shaken from within when one comes face-to-face with Ketan's works.
Video art is being introduced for the first time in the GenNext show this year. As the medium offers dynamic possibilities breaking conventional norms and modes of execution, both Suman Kabiraj from Kolkata and Sian Amoy from USA have explored exclusive ideas and expressed with pulsating tones through this genre. And Anirban Mahapatra, a photographer associated with an Indian daily has made an aesthetical journey clicking around issues on art and culture, customs and rituals, ethnicity and tradition in a documentary style. His works are a must-watch in the GenNext III show.
Art has always been an individual expression but day-by-day it has attained the crux of individualistic idiosyncrasy. Through the creation of unusual symbols and their depiction to arouse certain meanings are being practiced by artists working with different mediums all around the globe. GenNext III is becoming a unanimous and an unparallel platform to bring together these individualistic perceptions, discernments and sensitivity of the young minds from different continents with diverse contextual realities. Asim Amjad from Pakistan, Mathew Tom from USA, Gregory Chenu Vidal from France, P Bardhan from Baroda, Sanjoy Kumar Das from Kolkata and Saptarshi Naskar from Noida - all painters have something in common yet distinct and unique to initiate an innovative discourse through their art.
This was in a nutshell the most precise way to give an overview of the ideas, experiences and experimentations that the forty young participating artists from different corners of the world are coming together to ignite the most popular and promising show for the rising talents, GenNext III.
An art movement evolves without understanding the barrier of boundaries. Though inferences are drawn on the basis of cultural contouring yet these differences can suggest to a unifying whole where Brazil can come close to Bangladesh, Pakistan can unite with India, Austria can rub shoulder with America and Poland can become quite alike Canada, France or Italy. So it's time to enunciate another art movement purely voicing the mindscapes of the generation to lead next and give direction to the art world. A big round of applause for all the participants who have made through this final journey with spectacular creative venture to be a part of this gala event – GenNext III.
--Sarmistha Maiti
Kolkata, 2008
|
|
