The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is showcasing four exhibitions from 30th January to 30th June with Scripting Time | Memory | Ecology curated by Roobina Karode.
There are 160 artworks belonging from different stages and artistic careers of seven women artists on view in these exhibitions.
The exhibitions, Zarina: A Life in Nine Lines, Across Decades – Borders – Geographies; Line, Beats and Shadows: Ayesha Sultana, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Lala Rukh and Sumakshi Singh and Abstracting Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Jayashree Chakravarty revisits and engages with a gamut of languages of abstraction.
In all three exhibitions, configurations are built out of drawings, prints in woodcut, etchings, lithographs, aquatints, collages, paper casts, metal casts, installations, gesso work, and sculptures in a range of mediums as varied as bronze and lace embroidery. These artworks from the KNMA collection, loans from artists, artist’s estates, galleries and private collectors are exhibited in a pattern that interconnects and strikes a conversational relation amongst the diverse practices of the artists.
Curator Roobina Karode says “The exhibitions showcase works of seven women artists, whose personal experiences and generational differences spanning numerous decades mark the key moments in the long and troubled durée of South Asian history. Providing a spectrum of artistic languages varying from the abstract and allusive to the quasi-representational, these works gracefully move between the spiritual and political, the frugal and exuberant”
With a mélange of ideas ‘Right to Laziness… no, strike that! Side walking with the man saying sorry’ is apart of Young Artists of Our Times, which is an evolving form articulating itself in exhibitions, books, panelling conversations, as a nomenclature and a trace, devised by Akansha Rastogi.
The curatorial position of Scripting Time | Memory | Ecology puts into perspective an alternative narrative, removed from a parochial art historical mapping of abstraction as a forte circumscribed to practices of male artists. Paths of creative representation of memory and ecology assumed in relation to time weaves a common thread among the artists.
‘Zarina: A Life in Nine Lines | Decades – Borders and Geographies’ is a solo show dedicated to the artistic career of Zarina Hashmi. Primarily exploring the medium of paper and her fascination towards it, the exhibition displays woodcut prints, lithographs, etchings, paper and metal cast works along with sculptural objects.
The show ‘Line, Beats and Shadows’ presents artists Ayesha Sultana, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Lala Rukh and Sumakshi Singh and their eclectic interpretation of abstraction.
Lastly, the show ‘Abstracting Nature’ with Mrinalini Mukherjee and Jayashree Chakravety shows a complimenting approach where they amalgamate the myriad objects, images and ideas extracted from nature into their own oeuvre, both as an abstract and in a cryptic visual language.