the blog is meant as a platform for notes and thoughts about the show..its concept and also about the works one would display..and how.
its not that curatorially i am necessarily looking for new work from everyone. What i am looking for is for the participating artists to collaborate with the with the curator in terms of display and representation.
thus the blog is ideally a platform for us to upload our work images...for me to upload the gallery view...
beyond that i would like it to be a space for exchanging views on art, galleries curation and writing. (which pratibha and megha have already started) :)
lets see where we can go from here
but will definitely.
dear rahul...meeting up is definitely a good idea..also i wanted to tell u that your curatorial concept comes very close to something i was thinking while i was at JNU...i had taken up a course in the women's studies department called Gender and Visual Culture and all of us were supposed to do presentations. i presented my work in context to the contemporary scenario in art today and it really got me thinking and sweating!!!!it was so difficult to place or answer questions that arose ....so i structured it as a "Presentation of Questions"....i would like to share some of these........Is Art Gendered? Is the Art making process gendered? what does it mean to be a practising artist in India and to be a woman? Can the choices i make be understood as part of female subjectivity or social and cultural construct? how is the art market gendered? what decides the trend of the art market? how am i implicated in the setup?
ReplyDeletehow are hegimonic notions of contemporary art formulated? what are the alternative spaces for discussion and dissemination of art-work that doesnot toe the line of the current mainstream?...........
hi there :) valid valid valid! and sadly questions that people are not that eager to understand right now.
ReplyDeletewe will take this discussion forward, for now am posting an introduction i have written for the art and deal's 30th issue (on women's art)
have a read
When We Talk: Introducing The Issue
When we talk of empowering women, I often wonder which women are we addressing? Women like myself? Empowered to start with? Most of the times we are speaking to converts and wasting our time. No amount of legislation can bring about a change in this archaic mindset that continues to view females as liabilities …or not ,not just the family but society at large. In which case we are all guilty, each one of us. But where are the courts to try us?
Shobha De, The Twin Tragedies, The Week. October 25 2009
It is refreshing to be forced to quote an author who is not among the most stimulating minds our times can engage with. It (maybe) reflects a near complete bankruptcy of intellectual rigor in the manner in which contemporary Indian art engages with politics.
Like the garment, accessories and film industries – the Art industry also goes through fashion cycles. What are the reasons that determine these cycles and what are the various factors that influence these fashion cycles are issues that require a separate volume. In this piece one should rather concentrate on the issue of representing women as a group…the politics of such and possibly touch upon issues of intellectual role play.
A lot of cosmopolitan Indian art behaves as if their cosmopolitia and its vision of the hinterland is what constitute the nation’s contemporarity. Maybe that is why as contemporary Indian art and its market got integrated into the global art production and consumption arena, issues like the local contexts of ‘womanhood’ and its self expression got forgotten in favor of more pertinent issues like terrorism, nature, immigration etc. Is there a memory of about ten years ago when there was a flood of curations and writings on ‘women’s art’? Just like an all encompassing tidal wave, it all vanished with the passage of time. The question is that what have been the sweeping changes in art education, production and consumption that have made ‘women’s art’ an (allegedly) irrelevant category today. Moreover before the discussions disappeared behind the veils did we even come to an understanding as to what constitutes this constellation of expressions that gets (got) framed as women’s art?
This issue seeks to revisit the framing and bring back to our memory concerns that ignited our engagement with art and gender in the first place. Art colleges in the country continue to be dominated by male students so does the Lalit Kala academy. Even the recent art market boom has given us largely phallic superstars. Thus the factors of production and consumption that influence the culture-scape of the art world and its industries remain largely unchanged. Walking across the halls of Jehangir Art Gallery, The Academy of Fine Arts, the Rabindra Bhavan there is no reason no reason to believe that there is a reason to make our disengagement permanent. There is an attempt to look at women practitioners outside the domains of feminist concerns. One hopes that this will open up avenues for opening up the discourse of feminism itself.
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and yes..you are fully implicated..the question is what do you do from that location.
1.'feminist artists' (persona)
ReplyDelete2.'feminist art' (work)
3.'women artists'
4.'art by women'
5.'women in art'(potrayal)a)by men b)by women
many distinctions can be made in trying to engage with art and gender...