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“There was a language in the world that everyone understood… It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose and as part of search for something believed in and desired.” Though there is no connection between Paulo Coelho's philosophical discourse of accomplishment in his most popular novel, The Alchemist with Vikram Bachhawat's setting up Aakriti Art Gallery, but Vikram's ardent passion for art that gave him the enthusiasm and impulse to shape this gallery in the cultural capital of India can be directly linked with the basic belief of human dream and desire and its fulfillment that Coelho generously articulated through his novel.
“When you want something, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it”, Paulo Coelho had encapsulated the essential principle of existence that is always motivated through intuitions to drive you to reach your destiny. Well, again for Vikram Bachhawat, setting up Aakriti Art Gallery in Kolkata in 2005 was not something that happened through years of planning. It was simply an instant decision picked up through his intuitive instinct that resulted into the making of this gallery, one of the most glittering names now in the Indian contemporary art world and Vikram Bachhawat has evolved as one of the most promising patrons in the country who believes in the essence of art and is really capable to gear up dynamism in promoting art and artists in all possible ways exploring novel avenues and unique ideas. He has indeed created the alchemy of changing the mindscape of the art circuit by drawing a new inertia through the promotion of young generation artists. And this is how the whole idea of 'GenNext' has been incepted and geared up to the stature of an eventful and promising discourse of the present art scenario at the global level.
'GenNext', the Annual Exhibition of Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata was conceptualized as an initiative to set up a fresh focus on the contemporary art where the pathfinders to enunciate this project would be the young generation. And thus in 2006 in the month of October, 'GenNext' was celebrated as Aakriti's first anniversary show. Since then it has become the icon to revolutionize the concept of bringing up next generation artists and set a benchmark to the role of art galleries in the process of patronizing such art. For Aakriti, the real motivation behind the 'GenNext' show was to promote the creative potential of young talents below forty years. A selection procedure was conceived that is very clear and transparent. Artists are selected by a panel of judges that includes art historian, critic, artist and connoisseur from the entries received within a stipulated time frame of the year for which announcement is done in different media worldwide every year since 2006 and then they are asked to send their current works for being showcased.
In the first GenNext, artists were mainly selected from the eastern fringe of the country with prime focus on Kolkata. Akhil Chandra Das, Barun Chowdhury, Birendra Pani, Biswajit Mukherjee, Debanjan Roy, Debasis Barui, Debraj Goswami, Deepak Kundu, Dipendranath Pal, Farhad Hussain, Jayanta Paul, Jayanta Kumar Paul, Jayanta Roy, Nobina Gupta, Prasun Ghosh, Rajesh Bhowmik, Rajesh Deb, Ritendra Roy, Sandip Daptari, Soumit Gupta, Soumen Das, Sourav Jana, Subrata Biswas, Sujit Kumar Karan, Supam Adhikary, Sutanu Chatterjee and Tapas Biswas were the participants. These twenty seven emerging painters, sculptors and printmakers executed their creative potential to generate an enriching experience for the art lovers of the city. The GenNext dais also became a turning point for many of these participants who now excel in the art world and their art works are exhibited on international platform. Debraj Goswami, Birendra Pani, Farhad Hussain are among the most promising young contemporaries right now exhibiting their works across the globe with accolades with appreciating worth in the art market. Sculptors like Tapas Biswas, Akhil Chandra Das and Subrata Biswas, Debanjan Roy have evolved with a new genre of sculpting and making differences yet through classical touch. Their works too are applauded across the nation as well as in other continents of the globe. Crossing boundaries with liberated thoughts, experimentation with mediums and development of new language has by now become the inherent motto of the GenNext shows.
In 2007 when GenNext II was organized, it took the shape of a national event. In a much panoramic outlook, again a bunch of forty young talents got the opportunity to execute their intellect and creativity on this inspiring platform. The gallery took every bit of initiative to reach out and give right promotional treatment to contemporary flavour. The whole show became a mixed bag of content and style, a confluence of old and new thoughts and techniques, an amalgamation of various trends and also an attempt to way to self-expression that sometimes turned out to be very discreet. This time the participants were Abdul Salam, Akhil Chandra Das, Amlan Dutta, Anasuya Chakraborty, Ankur Khare, Apu Dasgupta, Arya Oraw, Ashish Ghosh, Avijit Dutta, Balaka Bhattacharjee, Chandan Bhandari, Chandan Das, Debasis Barui, Dipak Kundu, Jayanta Kumar Paul, Krishna Sardar, Madhuri Kathe, Mithun Dasgupta, Nobina Gupta, Pallab Das, Pradip Mondal, Rajesh Bhowmik, Rishav Gandhar Narzary, Rupal Dave, S. Gopinath, Sandip Daptari, Shantanu Mitra, Shyamal Roy Chowdhury, Somit Gupta, Somnath Adhikary, Sourav Jana, Subrata Biswas, Sujit Kumar Karan, Sumana Ghosh, Suman Choudhury, Supam Adhikary, Tapas Biswas, Tarun Maity, Vivek Sharma. So there were a few names in common who had also been selected in the first GenNext.
At the level of experimentation, these young artists had taken invariable initiatives in their presentation. Particularly in the second GenNext, the sculptors explored with the raw material in the most intriguing way to give a new dimension to the basic content they attempted to develop. Subrata Biswas moulded cold hard metal to spring folk narratives with a naïve quality, Pallab Das interestingly weaved the same quality in Ceramics keeping the round shape in particular with a greater volume. S. Gopinath's fiberglass sculpture 'Redemption Song 2' brought forth a mini version of rock cutting within the gallery premises. Arya Oraw used iron scrap and steel plates to generate a protest against mechanization of material living within the form, so did Ashish Ghosh in 'Battle for Oil' where he used welded iron plate and nickel to depict the imperialist hegemony in the global warfare. Tarun Maity's 'I can remember my Grandmother's Story' in wood in the structure of a hobby horse built up the satire in the thematic articulation that projected the loss of one's own roots was both unique at the level of form and content. Sexual relations, urban lifestyle, conglomeration of traditional myths and social reality, conflicts between conventional and the new-age trends these formed the core metaphors in the works in most of the paintings exhibited in this show.
The GenNext III took the shape of a global phenomenon. In 2008, there were over eight hundred entries received from young artists below forty across the globe. Among them only forty were finally selected. They were Amit Kalla, Anirban Dasmahapatra, Banatanwi Dasmahapatra, Bhabotosh Sutar, Chandan Bhandary, Hemraj, Jayanta Bhattacharya, K Prasun Roy, Ketan N Amin, Korou KH, Moutushi Chakraborty, Tushar Waghela, Muktinath Mondal, Nantu Behari Das, P Bardhan, Prandeep Kalita, Prithwiraj Mali, Priyanka Lahiri, Rajen Mondal, Sanhita Banerjee, Sanhita Ghosh, Sanjoy Das, Santosh D Andrade, Saptarshi Naskar, Snehashish Maity, Suman Kabiraj, Sutanuka Giri, Tisha Mondal from different corners of India, Mathew Tom (U.S.A) and Vijay D Kadam, Ashraful Hasan (Bangladesh), IV Toshain (Austria), Maciej Gador (Poland), Asim Amjad (Pakistan), Dionne Simpson (Jamaica), Serena Scapagnini (Italy), Gregory Chenu Vidal (France), Joarez Filho (Brazil), Sian Amoy and Justin Tyler Tate (USA).
It was not only that artists from around the world participated but it also became a procreative platform where innovative creations conjugated with execution of an array of thoughts, plurality of perspectives and freshness in concepts. This time it was not just confined to the conventional modes of fine arts but extended its domain to video art, installation and textile designing. GenNext III was not delimited to just an exhibition but was shaped in a complete package of events like workshop, interactive sessions and seminars that tried to give a new definition in setting up the theory-practice relationship.
For the viewers of GenNext III, the works exhibited created a sphere of comparative analysis between the fresh discourse of contemporary art through the new generation who belong to different socio-political realities and cultural contexts. When Serena Scapagnini, a young Italian painter's symbolic depiction of the subconscious mind trapped in the whirlpool of desires was being drawn in comparison to the works of a young Indian painter, Priyanka Lahiri who attempted to portray the interplay of various instinctual desires of human existence on the canvas, similarly Sanhita Banerjee's sculpture depicted the hidden aspirations of a creative mind with a mock could be seen together with Sanhita Ghosh's works who etched self-images in the mundane process of human life though elevating the essence to the existential predicament that we thrive in and with the works of I V Toshain from Austria who attempted to discover the nature of human existence to be garbed with camouflaged cravings. The juxtaposition of sculpture and installation art was another brilliant area in the GenNext III show. Breaking away from the conventional mechanisms of executing sculptures, the participating sculptors like Bhabatosh Sutar, Ketan Amin and Nantu Behari Das were more conceptual in relating specific psychological associations through their works. This comparative study became the crux behind the conceptualization of GenNext III, and the show rocked the art world with a revolutionary instinct.
And now in 2009, the fourth GenNext is going to glitter with another new hope where thirty four versatile creative minds are meeting again for the sake of the common cause to boost the new generation art movement. This time artists from USA, South Korea, Hungary and far eastern states of India are coming together to raise a novel hue through their creative discourse. With other events like symposium on global issues related to art and its democratic proliferation, GenNext IV waits to get unveiled with a blast even in this hard time of economical recession.
Keeping fingers crossed we all hope that 'GenNext' perspires through ages to come. And as Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist is regarded as the fable of modern popular literature, Vikram Bachhawat's brainchild the 'GenNext' should take the shape of the modern fable of new generation art.
- Sarmistha Maiti
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