Featuring Sooni Taraporevala's photography, Girish Shahane lecture, Chandan Gomes and more..

NEWS

Elegy for the Unsung Cubicle

( Work by Chandan Gomes)

The Convention Centre of the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi presents a solo show of photography by young and upcoming photography artist Chandan Gomes.

Chandan Gomes captures more than the lens can see and his work is more a representation or an anticipatory metaphor of the event. The show titled ‘Elegy for the Unsung Cubicle’, displays images of the situations Chandan has been through in an almost biographical essence. 

Chandan Gomes has also been the awardee of the Fellowship for Photography 2010, with his illuminating work.

The show is on view from the 26th of September 2013 till the 6th of October 2013.

Free Expression -  a lecture

(Girish Shahane)

Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai presents a lecture on ‘Free Expression: The Indian Context’ by eminent writer, Girish Shahane. The lecture focuses on the actual and assumed position of libertarianism  and free expression in a country like India, where history is replete with cases such as M F Hussain and more, especially in the art world. Shahane attempts to locate the discussion within a specifically Indian context, foregrounding the gap between the responses of India’s law-making apparatus to obscenity on the one hand, and political or religious offence on the other. In building his argument, Shahane refers to texts like Bharata’s Natya Shastra, the Williams Report on Obscenity and Film Censorship, and the Delhi High Court judgement in the M.F. Husain case.

Girish Shahane is an independent writer based in Mumbai. His articles on art, film and cultural politics have been published in leading newspapers and journals in India and abroad.
The lecture will be held on Saturday, 21^st September 2013, at 6: 30 pm, in the Origins of Mumbai Gallery at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum.  

Portraits of Emperors

(Rajkumar Sthabathy with his work)

Shrishti Art Gallery Hyderabad presents a solo show of art works by artist Rajkumar Sthabathy. Rajkumar’s works on display feature his intense portraiture of people. Working extensively in water colours and with a strong sense of control over the medium Rajkumar presents his new series titled, ‘Portraits of Emperors’. 

There are 53 portraits in the show and though not all of the subjects are royalty, he believes each one is an emperor in their own right. He loves the fluidity water colour offers as a medium and sees human faces resonate a similar fluidity in their lives. 

The show is on view till the 19th of September 2013.

Small is Beautiful

(Works at Tao Art Gallery)

Tao Art gallery, Mumbai presents a group show titled, ‘Small is Beautiful’. The show displays works by a mix of eminent and upcoming artists of the country along with some legendary artists. The works are a healthy mix of contemporary styles and the common feature of all the displayed works is in the small size. 

The show as the titled suggests has been specifically focused on smaller sized works. The participating artists are Akbar Padamsee, Ali Akbar Mehta, Anjolie Ela Menon, Arunanshu Chowdhury, Arzan Khambhatta, Badri Narayan, Baiju Parthan, Brinda Miller, Chinthala Jagadish, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Charan Sharma, Debashish Dutta, Debraj Goswami, Devdatta Padekar, Gourishankar Soni, Gurcharan Singh, Heeral Trivedi, Indrajit Prasad, Ingrid Pitzer, Jagdish Chander, Jaideep Mehrotra, Jayashree Patankar, Jayasri Burman, Jenny Bhatt, Jogen Chowdhury, K G Subramanyan, K S Radhakrishnan, Kalpana Shah, Kavita Jaiswal, Krishen Khanna, Nanda Das, Nayanaa Kanodia, Nimisha Sharma, Nisreen Moochhala, Paresh Maity, Prashant Salvi, Rameshwar Broota, Ravi Mandlik, Rini Dhumal, Sachin Deo, Sahil Shah, Sakti Burman, Samir Mondal, Sanjay Kumar, Seema Kohli, Shipra Bhattacharya, Shuvaprasanna, Smita Mandlik, Somenath Maity, Sudhir Patwardhan, Suhas Bahulkar, Sukhada Das, Sunil Padwal, V Ramesh, Venkatesh Pate, Vijay Shinde, Vinod Sharma and Yashwant Deshmukh.

The show is on view till the 29th of September 2013.

(News reports  by Sushma Sabnis)

FEATURE

Memoirs of a photographer

Sooni Taraporevala’s photography project ‘Parsis’, which captures facets of the Parsi community, opens in Delhi today

(Miss you Mr Spencer series, Bombay, 2013. Photo courtesy: Sooni Taraporevala)

Growing up in Mumbai in a Parsi household, Sooni Taraporevala saw her father click many pictures of their family members and would capture them in black and white images using a twin lens Rolleicord camera. Soon enough, she picked up the camera and started photography on her own.

At first she clicked all that she pleased, including members of her family, and continued to work as a professional photographer. Having spent the better part of her initial photography years in capturing images of her family, she had in her hands, a project, which just needed to be taken up formally. After her encounter with the famous photographer, late Raghubir Singh, who after seeing her work advised her to take up photographing her community, started the 36- year-old and still on-going photography project -- of capturing members of the Parsi community, named “Parsis”.

(Documenting the family: My grandfather, Bombay 1985. Photo: Sooni Taraporevala)

“(Raghubir Singh) saw amongst my eclectic collection of photographs the subject that had been staring me in the face but that I had failed to see, a photographic study of my community. What had begun nostalgically and personally, grew into a more objective project that encompassed a world larger than my immediate family”, said Sooni.

Despite popular Parsi business tycoons and Bollywood culture, knowledge of the community’s existence remains largely hidden in and around India. It was only when Sooni went away to college and started travelling around the world did she realise the dwindling numbers of her community. The statistical truth about the community’s footprint on earth spurred Sooni to capture members of the Parsi community in their true flavour, with men wearing the traditional sola topi and women in short cropped hair. This was not to portray stereotypical images but to capture them in their characteristic facets; and not to be lost in the faceless metropolitan. “Numerically we are a dying community. In the future will we still be around? I don’t know the answer to that question. Perhaps that is the reason why, despite several detours, the project I began 36 years ago is still on-going,” said Sooni.

(Report by Hansika Chopra for The Hindu)