This is clearly my week for India happiness, what with Meena Kadri & Arti Sandhu's exhibition I posted on last and my Rajasthan post. If I had any worries of this blog beginning to not have much to do with India here comes more design news with desi-ghee Indian goodness. I've written about Ghee Happy earlier & Sanjay Patel is back with a bang and a new book - Ramayana: Divine Loophole and a limited edition silk screen print called Burning Lanka. If Sanjay's work was beyond cute earlier, it now has a cutting edge. More than just a modern take on Indian mythology what makes Sanjay's work different is how approachable and humane he makes all of India's Gods & Goddesses.
When I think of contemporary Indian design and a real appreciation of art on the Indian streets in its raw elemental form, I think of Meena Kadri & Arti Sandhu. I've long been a fan of their Indian street photography - see their flickr streams here & here and you will know what I mean. Both these artists are academically strong on design and have taught in India & abroad. Meena Kadri has taught at the NID and lectured across Europe and Arti has taught design in Newzealand and is now in America. I know both of them as seperate entities whose work I admire. So imagine my surprise and excitement on chancing on this exhibition on RandomSpecific Meena Kadri's blog - Overlap: Intersections of Desi and Diasporic. Overlap sees a coming together of both their work done across time and the many continents they've lived in, but rooted firmly in India and celebrating her local language, colour and accentricities."Arti and I have been intersecting across the globe for a decade now – in New Zealand, India, Hong Kong and the US. Sharing a fondness for hand-rendered, vernacular artforms, we conceived the show around our varied perspectives of Indianess – touching on the desi and diasporic, the traditional and typographic alongside language and locality." - Meena Kadri
A typographic collaboration between Meena Kadri and local Ahmedabadi sign writer Yasin Chhipa. Media: oil paint on 2 sided stainless steel plates.
Visitors to India are often surprised at the amount of English one encounters – in the street, peppered through Bollywood films and even sometimes in remote locales. Here the colourful sign-writing tradition of India has been used to capture the flavour of this localisation of the global spread of English.
Hollywood has its Walk of Fame which displays its divas and heralds its heros on the pavements of Sunset Boulevard. This exhibition seeks to playfully create a Bollywood version employing local portraiture and typographic styles.
A collaboration between Meena Kadri and a local rickshaw mud-flap painter and a ‘sticker-wallah’ who cuts coloured adhesive into numbers, letters and decorative motifs to adorn vehicles. This father & son team work on the roadside in the Old City in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Media: oil paint and adhesive on rubber.
Arti Sandhu - The Alphabet Series
"This was also a way of remembering and a way of visually communicating my experiences in India. Combining the everyday (pani, toilet), mundane (clothes, traffic), novel, with some obvious strereotypes (haathi, mahal, buffalo) - I hope to finish the entire alphabet chart one day. The images that make up the prints are all from my collections of pictures taken in India." Arti Sandhu
Arti's Mahila Moments. How I flipped when I saw this. I hope to one day own one of these if Arti sells. In Arti speak, this series is "loosely inspired by Madhubani folk drawings, Ganjifa cards, dilemmas of modern day India, dilemmas of migration, fashion, my love for pattern, line and repetition, my childhood in India and even some kamasutra poses!!!"
You can read about my previous posts on Meena Kadri here & Arti Sandhu here. The show Overlap: Intersections of Desi and Diasporic is hosted by Box Design & Research and will be up at Delhi’s Mocha Arthouse, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj through February, 2010. So all you lucky people in Delhi, you know where to head & for Bombayites, watch this space - I'll definitely tell you if they come here.
You can read about my previous posts on Meena Kadri here & Arti Sandhu here. The show Overlap: Intersections of Desi and Diasporic is hosted by Box Design & Research and will be up at Delhi’s Mocha Arthouse, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj through February, 2010. So all you lucky people in Delhi, you know where to head & for Bombayites, watch this space - I'll definitely tell you if they come here.
We were put up at the Mandir Palace in Jaisalmer and the beauty about Jaisalmer is that you can walk it all up. Just keep strolling up and down towards the fort along the winding streets lined with beautiful and historic sanstone monuments. Even for an Indian, its exotica. With the lonely planet to guide us- we strolled next door into Nachana Haveli which houses the tented, rooftop restaurant called Saffron. And true to its name the place was awash with a warm fiery glow of red. Perfect for a winter dinner. While we went looking for Saffron, we didn't know that the Haveli which housed it was so gorgeous. But then again almost everything in Rajasthan is gorgeous- you kind of get used to it :)
Its all in the details- I love the little brass and metal utensils that go with this antique wrought iron bench
I loved this mirror embedded wall
I loved this mirror embedded wall
I'm so happy :) I've been wanting to do this for SO long now. I hope you've noticed that this blog has a brand new banner- how do you like it? And the pictures are BIG-finally! These photographs I've taken are not new- they were taken on a bright and happy weekend. Each time I would think of posting them & think- naaaah- not now. But today I remembered them, dug them out of my folders & here it is- bright and happy- just the way I feel.
My dining table gets a lot of light in winter & this was from a morning just before breakfast.
I'm still pushing things around on this blog- the pictures might get a little smaller. A new background, some sizing, new icons. I'm not rushing into it. Tell me how you like it. This is my way of saying a heartfelt thank you to all of you who've been reading this blog regularly, some sending me mails of appreciation, some leaving comments & some just coming back here for more. You guys make my day and I feel I don't say that enough.On that happy mushy note- here's leaving you with a lot of warmth, colour and sunlight- Happy weekend people-eat drink and make merry ;)
The Kala Ghoda Arts festival is when Mumbai celebrates its love for art. And the cuturatis crawl out of every nook and crany armed with cameras of all kinds. Its crazy, almost every one on the streets is shooting & just by bring present physically you are in the way of someone else's 'shot'. And because the crowd is well educated and egalitarian, everyone is apologising to everyone else, yours truly included- it was too funny. That apart, like every year, Kala Ghoda was a splash of colour, a medley of artists, sparkling performances and streets chockfull of interesting people having a good time.
The colourful Khyber restaurant signage behind even more colourful wind-toys
Godrej Cupboards painted in technicolour & stacked on top of each other made for interesting gateway to the action packed streets of Kalaghoda
I really liked this beautiful larger than life Ganesha from Rare Thought who have almost become permanent feature at the KalaGhoda Arts Festival.
People please appreciate this photograph- I had to wait for 10 whole minutes before I started repeating "excuse me!" loudly so I could shoot this picture.
And now for my personal favourite stall/installation at the festival. GiantWalls is the new initiative by the super talented duo Rahul Gaikwad and Yadnyee Shingre, the same guys behind Giant Robot
And now for the installation which is being referred to as the 'most popular' in all of KalaGhoda- the Sunlight Eiffel Tower by Vikram Arora. Its a brilliant concept & in a nutshell- instead of using up precious electricity to keep the eiffel lit- Vikram proposes Solar panels & lights his eiffel with solar power- cool eh? What I love about Vikrams work is that he is SO strong on concept and how he sees it through to the end.
And powered by Solar energy at night. You can read a post I made of Vikram's art here. Or see a video of his interview by the Kalaghoda guys here.